...the road is long

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The Temple of the Oracle of Amon-Ra . This is the oracle which revealed to Alexander the Great his fate as ruler of the known world. It sits atop a hill in the center of Siwa Oasis, deep in the Sahara in western Egypt, overlooking a neat sea of swaying date palms, itself enclosed by an eternity of sand.
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<br>Amon-Ra is represented as a falcon, and still today the ancient stones are home to the quick birds; at dusk they flit and dart around the tower.

Everyone was long asleep, and I was late into my shift at the helm, keeping the ship pointed due east, following the equator, two weeks out from Tanzania, heading to the Seychelles Islands. The night was completely still; the wind was down and we were drifting with the current. The silent plain of the strangely placid sea spread out to the horizon in all directions for miles around, and not a sound nor shape emerged from the gently-swelling vastness but the quiet lapping wash on the hull.
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<br> The moon was as full as the moon can be and the sky was completely clear. Compared to the normal darkness of the night sky when far out at sea, which despite being infinitely jeweled is as black between, even at the horizon, as the darkest midheaven on land, this night was so bright and this moon so radiant that I was reading by it. Homer; The Odyssey, I think. Every wave was capped in the moon's whiteness, in every direction, as far as I could see. Imagine my emotion when all of a sudden they all turned as red as blood.
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<br>Time stopped; in shock, I looked around. Every wave was painted red, the sea had turned to blood. I didn't immediately understand what was happening. The concepts of apocalypse, of colliding worlds, of prophecy and of chaos all flashed through my mind in a place that held no word nor thought. I looked up and saw the moon, but did not immediately understand. For a moment as a primal man I looked into the strangest sky, agape with utter wonder and awash with the truest fear I've known. So the end was not to be in fire, and neither was it ice.
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<br>We had been at sea for weeks, with no contact whatsoever, and I hadn't heard anything about an eclipse. It had been years since I'd seen one, and of course it had never been anything like this. I soon realized what was happening, but the wonder and the fear was not to be shook for many a moon.

The new Mohammed Al-Amine Mosque, Beirut, Lebanon, March 2006

High in the French Alps, Summer 2005

Mezel, Provence, Summer 2005

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Spring 2005

Spring, 2005

Detail from the painted wooden ceiling of an old Synagogue from Venice, Italy. 16th century.

Stunning cloud formation towers over Pecos, New Mexico.

On a wild beach, SE Alaska, Midsummer Midnight

Spring 2003

The complete inscription. The clean appearance of the carving is due to repeated scrubbings over the years. When it was first seen in recent times, there was a thick growth of lichen and moss over the inscription. The camera here is held at an approximately 50 degree angle to the ground. Over time, the huge stone has shifted down the hillside, and it now sits askew.

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