"Monotonously weary seemed the way,
While light declining faded slowly away.
Some haze obscured a gradual westering sun,
And all the oppressive firmament was wan.
In it voluminous appears to form
From the horizon a continent of storm,
A ponderous bulk of gathering indigo,
Tinged in its formidable overflow
With hues of livid purple poison-flowers.
In ghastlier whiteness for the night that lowers,
Strewing forlorn the desolate desert pale,
Some grinning skeletons of men assail
My vision; while a monstrous bird of prey
From a putrescent corpse rends fierce away
The clinging flesh with horrid sound of tearing.
Its beak abruptly plunging, pulling, baring;
Bald-headed, hideous neck low crouched betwixt
The pressure of strong talons curved, infixed:
Now the proud brain, like fearful Madness, mangling,
Like Sin now with the reeking bosom wrangling;
Like ignorance, disease, war, tyranny, starvation,
Eating the vitals of a noble fallen nation!
This creature, as they pass, a moment glaring
Voracious-eyed, with vasty vans that cover--
A little further on obscene doth hover
A grey hyena, and he laughs a peal
Of beastly laughter from forth the sand: there is a howl
Dolefully borne from where the lean woles prowl!
Then silence falls upon the deepening gloom,
And sultry air forebodes the smothering simoom."

--Roden Noel, from "A Vision of the Desert"