Karel Čapek

“ For miles and miles neither dwelling nor man; and when a cottage does fly past it is as grey and stony as the rocks, and all by itself, nothing else for miles around. A lake without a fisherman, streams without a miller, pastures without a shepherd, road without a wayfarer. ”

“ Blue and dark mountains above green domes; valleys of russet cows, light and dark green, I glistening lakelets and Nordic beauty of birch-trees; endless the bare and trim roundness of hills and valleys, wooded glens and slopes russet with heather, northern beauty of meadows, birch-coppices in the north, in the north the surface of the sea gleams like a steel layer. ”

“ And now the place is so deserted that there is neither flock nor property, only a ruined cottage and a tumbledown mound on the brown undulation of the mossy slope. The end of life, here nothing has changed for at least ten thousand years; people have only made roads and built railways, but the earth has not changed ”