Sublime

the sea was the world, and everything else—the city, the towering crag of limestone, the very ships that floated upon it and the fish that swam in it—was only exceptional,

The construction of Nan Madol

The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which

meteoric

accretion

But a katabasis is never a wasted journey: it always offers a dose of the phenomenal. According to the news article that caught my eye, this one was no exception. The maps revealed that the Southern Indian Ocean seafloor was spectacularly, eerily beautiful. It was a symphony of extremes, a playlist of geology’s greatest hits. It was as if we had di