The antique traveller is still making his rounds. ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,’ he recites. 

The lines have made him mad. 

That statue, I tell him, was fashioned, as we all are, from two harmonising syntaxes. The language of the Earth, and the language of the self. 

Nothing besides the self remains. 

The Earth’s utterances return to the welcoming depths of the desert, each selfless grain of sand its own enduring miracle. 

He has not heard me.

‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty,’ he implores, and I despair.