Desolation

In the central portion of the great North American Continent there lies an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Sierra Nevada to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Colorado upon the south, is a region of desolation and silence.

Looking through family photographs at his home in Leeds, England, Gordon Bonner, 86, said he was lost in a “hinterland of despair and desolation.”

The countryside was bleak, inspiring in him the thought that there are two kinds of desolation; the one that precedes the coming of Man, and the one which he knows only too well how to create wherever he goes.

The sun was rising in all its splendid beauty; but the light only served to show the boy his own lonesomeness and desolation, as he sat, with bleeding feet and covered with dust, upon a door-step.

Oh, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand. Between their loved home and the war’s desolation: blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land Praise the Power that has made and preserved us a nation.

The Sahara is a sea of desolation.

A mizzling rain darkened the atmosphere, and the leafless trees presented a scene of external desolation, that in some degree corresponded with the mental gloom of the travellers.

The feeling of desolation entered my heart; I sorrowed in tears, and life almost became a weariness.

The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility.

The desolation left in his wake is staggering.