"This mineral, standing or fallen, ...to what order does it belong?" "...to what disorder?" "To one for which there is no precise name in any language, ...nor a proper history." "Nowhere." "Whenever." "Still beneath this sky infused with a faint splash of purple ink trying to convince us that it is Mediterranean." "But it's in vain that I search, ...that I pause, ...that I go near." "I only multiply the viewpoints as I try to unveil the face of the hidden god in whose name was erected one day this charnel house." "Let us not speak of ruins." "Let us not accuse time, as if these stones had been crushed by the years." "These petrified trees, how could one fail to see how they mimick in the classic form of a temple only the space of a yawn?" "Those who set them up wouldn't provide them with this aspect... unless, through a sort of dawning awareness, they'd become convinced completely and profoundly, that as soon as they should be piled up, one on top of the other," "as soon as they were planted squarely within the plumb-lines, these pieces of formless matter torn from matter would begin with great subtlety, like the masts of a ghost ship, their slow passage back to the mineral realm" "which not for an instant should ever cease to be somewhere else." "All shall return thus to the ooze." "To the ashes." "Nothing is able to defy time." "However boldy it may try." "The cruel god is vain." "So tonight will involve being reconciled to his good grace." "In this vale of stunted trees," "Having been systematically aligned, the trunks were fossilized in advance." "What use are remains and offerings?" "He needs nothing:" "No more of prayer than of worship." "only bloodletting." "If it remains uncertain whether he's received the cries of the willing victims and their blood smouldering on the altar, the thick fog which smothers these hills will draw them very near to him:" "the scents and the cries." "It's the old god, Time." "With his flowing beard." "The god of the times when there weren't any men much less time." "This chaos was made for him." "This devastation." "This universal junkyard." "He is at ease here." "He feels safe here." "Unkempt, caked in mud." "He fell asleep here at the creation of the world." "In a heavy slumber without dreams in the profusion of the nothing, of the not-yet, of the perpetual..." "in which he is mired." "Don't awaken him as he slumbers." "He will slumber here until the end of the world." "He holds dominion over this wasteland of stones." "And when he contemplates it in his slumber, he groans with satisfaction because there's nothing in this mineral cemetery that would recall the possibility of an accident favorable to human life." "We're still on the first day before it all began in this garden of horrors" "I've still baptized" "Temple." "Mine, once and for all time." "For I am the Word." "Even once the mark of the human hand has been effaced from the stone forever." "subtitles: depositio"