我漫步在1998年的Bonanza老街，目的是重新审视这片古老的土地。我不停地悲伤地想着命运的滑稽方式，还有那些曾经和我一起玩游戏的小伙子们。可怜的孩子们，他们都是些穷困潦倒的人，今天几乎没有一个人能显出十二种颜色来;而我，我还在勘探，又老又衰，又憔悴又灰白，我在找一根蛴螬桩，我破产了。我漫步在Bonanza老街。还是那一轮古老的月亮俯视着我们;我似乎渴望着那些古老的地标;但所有的小木屋都静悄悄的，而这片曾经像城镇一样的公寓，却显得无比的寂静和孤寂。在我们用镐和平底锅辛勤劳作的地方，有一堆又一堆的尾矿，转过一个弯，我听到一声轰鸣，那里有一艘最新计划的巨大的金船正在从海岸上扯下大块大块的尾矿。它在水床上打滚; it burrowed, heaved and swung; It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs; Its bill of fare was rock and sand; the tailings were its dung; It glared around with fierce electric eyes. Full fifty buckets crammed its maw; it bellowed out for more; It looked like some great monster in the gloom. With two to feed its sateless greed, it worked for seven score, And I sighed: "Ah, old-time miner, here's your doom!" The idle windlass turns to rust; the sagging sluice-box falls; The holes you digged are water to the brim; Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls Are deathly now and mouldering and dim. The battle-field is silent where of old you fought it out; The claims you fiercely won are lost and sold; But there's a little army that they'll never put to rout-- The men who simply live to seek the gold. The men who can't remember when they learned to swing a pack, Or in what lawless land the quest began; The solitary seeker with his grub-stake on his back, The restless buccaneer of pick and pan. On the mesas of the Southland, on the tundras of the North, You will find us, changed in face but still the same; And it isn't need, it isn't greed that sends us faring forth-- It's the fever, it's the glory of the game. For once you've panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust, Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell; It's little else you care about; you go because you must, And you feel that you could follow it to hell. You'd follow it in hunger, and you'd follow it in cold; You'd follow it in solitude and pain; And when you're stiff and battened down let someone whisper "Gold", You're lief to rise and follow it again. Yet look you, if I find the stuff it's just like so much dirt; I fling it to the four winds like a child. It's wine and painted women and the things that do me hurt, Till I crawl back, beggared, broken, to the Wild. Till I crawl back, sapped and sodden, to my grub-stake and my tent-- There's a city, there's an army (hear them shout). There's the gold in millions, millions, but I haven't got a cent; And oh, it's me, it's me that found it out. It was my dream that made it good, my dream that made me go To lands of dread and death disprized of man; But oh, I've known a glory that their hearts will never know, When I picked the first big nugget from my pan. It's still my dream, my dauntless dream, that drives me forth once more To seek and starve and suffer in the Vast; That heaps my heart with eager hope, that glimmers on before-- My dream that will uplift me to the last. Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there's none of you too sane; It's just a little matter of degree. My hobby is to hunt out gold; it's fortressed in my brain; It's life and love and wife and home to me. And I'll strike it, yes, I'll strike it; I've a hunch I cannot fail; I've a vision, I've a prompting, I've a call; I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail, To the last, the greatest gold camp of them all. Beyond the shark-tooth ranges sawing savage at the sky There's a lowering land no white man ever struck; There's gold, there's gold in millions, and I'll find it if I die, And I'm going there once more to try my luck. Maybe I'll fail--what matter? It's a mandate, it's a vow; And when in lands of dreariness and dread You seek the last lone frontier, far beyond your frontiers now, You will find the old prospector, silent, dead. You will find a tattered tent-pole with a ragged robe below it; You will find a rusted gold-pan on the sod; You will find the claim I'm seeking, with my bones as stakes to show it; But I've sought the last Recorder, and He's--God.