Sand? Beaten rock, detritus, stonedust. It's practically zen how the final shroud of Tutankhamen is found ground beneath both the hooves of the camel and the spray of the ocean. Sand perpetuates itself - shifting sands, saltatory conduction, traction - but when it is drawn amidst the turbulence of a desert storm, uplifted by a chance confluence of earth and air, it remembers when it was once a mountain.

For even mountains crumble, under the incessant coaxing of time and the elements, under the clean sweep of a longshore drift, under a wind that breathes one breath, another, another. For it is in the nature of all things to decay.

That is why we use decay to mark time. Two cojoined flasks - one from which the sand carreens and ebbs away like the vital force of a moribund warrior; and the second, the Great Collecter, the Omega, where the grains cover and consume themselves, like a serpent that swallows its own tail, like the veiling of erstwhile Eden under the deserts of Mestapotamia.

Ashes? Memories, life extinguished, words unspoken and deeds undone. They are the only tokens of our existence, beyond human remembrance and lethe. They are our only legacy in a world racked with infirmity and impermanence.

That is why we lock the ashes of our dead in urns, that is why we scatter them over halcyon waves, launch them beyond space. For we seek Prospero's "we are such stuff as dreams are made of", the sands of a primeval sandman who doles his dust to Creators. And when the urns are unlocked, when the oceans are dried, when the stars have twinkled into nothingness, the ashes remember when they were once, too, a man.