1 We knelt by the stream and we bent down to drink.
2 We could also rise, or run, or leap, or fall down again.
3 The two other Street Sweepers of our brigade were a hundred paces away down the road.
4 And then we saw iron rings as steps leading down a shaft into a darkness without bottom.
5 We stole through the dark passages, and through the dark streets, and down into our tunnel.
6 It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see.
7 They tore the clothes from our body, they threw us down upon our knees and they tied our hands to the iron post.
8 But we knew that they were alive, for a finger of the hand of the oldest rose, pointed to us, and fell down again.
9 It lay so still that we saw no water but only a cut in the earth, in which the trees grew down, upturned, and the sky lay at the bottom.
10 They saw us, and their hands closed into fists, and the fists pulled their arms down, as if they wished their arms to hold them, while their body swayed.
11 Stones rolled from under our feet, and we heard them striking the rocks below, farther and farther down, and the mountains rang with each stroke, and long after the strokes had died.
12 When men accepted that worship, the structure of centuries collapsed about them, the structure whose every beam had come from the thought of some one man, each in his day down the ages, from the depth of some one spirit, such spirit as existed but for its own sake.