Once upon a time at the Mountain Meadows...

At the top of the deep gully overgrown with willows and tules, they parked the car and walked the rest of the way. The land stretched out. Once upon a time there was no time and it was then that . . . autumn stood, blue haze along the horizon, the dusty smell of dry grass and wheat stubble in the air. And they came, fixed, perpetuated in unchanging form, sometimes at night, sometimes by broad daylight. It happens like that in the vicinity of churchyards, marshes, great buildings, solitary places, or places notorious because of some murder or where a very dreadful crime has been committed. Ambulones, they move about at midnight on great heaths and desert places.

            The trail boss, he comes first, heading the procession of carts, white-tops, horsemen . . . silent as clouds. God, they have banged along. Drive a man crazy, gritty wheels, the iron clank of traces, neck yokes, clumped hooves, clump clump clump, buckets, rattling pans, a crying child, laughter, moos and bleats, yells and barking
dogs and squeaking brakes, men taking the name of the Lord in vain, the long whip’s crack when deadhead oxen drop back and let their mates do all the pulling. This causes, God damn ’em, the doubletrees to scrape the wheel and the ox doing the pulling gets nervous . . . and then . . .

            But all is noiseless as the still moon now, as pinnacles of aged snow, they plod behind thick glass, walk like treading water through soft sand with feet like leaden weights, stumble on rocks, climb and run downhill, bodies with their measure and their space but instantaneous pictures on the air, shadowgraphed like life there, eerily . . .

     --From Variation West (quoting from Robert Burton's 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy)