Joe1207’s Reviews > The Best American Travel Writing 2002 > Status Update

Come very close, lay your hand on the stone, and you sense telltale signs of past lives: quarry marks, sharp chisel scores and careful graffiti, neatly laid lines of mortar. You stand just where the nameless builder once stood, your hands where his hands were, as he shaped each stone and set it in place. The stones still stand for the people who built them...They are the weatherworn bodies of our myths.