Nicholas Messenger - Diggings lyrics

How did the world at last die? One day the final excavation pulled up peg and pup-tent, loaded trowels and picnic tables onto the last land-rover and drove way; the last lost city mapped, its treasure troven and ransacked; final undigested artefact that turned up popped into a plastic bag; the last smudged glyph deciphered. All the diggings were deserted, last dives made, the final relic separated from the pediment; a sunken statuette, the very last one, salvaged from the slime; the last keel rotted away; the ultimate bottle washed ashore and its secret noted. Last stone, cut or uncut was uncovered by a river, clawed free of the rack; the final ingot was extracted and the last unstable element was cornered in a mine. The utmost fossil was hammered clean; or thawed out of the permafrost; The skulls of all ancestors disinterred and tapped by men with little hammers so their echoes could be placed on record; memories wrung out of the last surviving dithering inhabitant. The next day it had all been cla**ified; a label placed on each, and the last true statement penned and full-stopped to the final monograph. And there was that. The items sparkled in their cases set out as the best discernment could arrange. The people walked past reading numbers, nosing catalogues, and went back home again beneath the charted stars across an empty earth. The present, finally, was equal to the past.