Almost bisected by a gully and busily dotted with trees, a neat dark row of them on the horizon, the rectangle is surrounded on three sides by blandly bleak open fields.
More than five million United States patents have been issued since 1790, when the first one went to Samuel Hopkins, of Pittsford, Vermont, for a new way of making potash, and they are all stored here, in paper form, stacked face up in an immense lattice of metal cubbyholes — about a hundred bright ideas to each cubby, and thousands of inspirations to each long, dark row.
The most famous celebration of the power of winter movement in all the world's literature is in the last paragraphs of Gogol's "Dead Souls," where the novelist celebrates Russia itself as a troika racing through the snow: The forest flies on both sides of the road with its dark rows of firs and pines, echoing with the ring of axes and the cawing of crows.
The bottom row shows a dark area with a faint tail of activity compared with top row, which shows an evenly distributed area of uptake.
He wore a dark-gray Savile Row suit and a handmade silk shirt and John Lobb brogues.
And there he was again Friday in San Francisco, the tall bald man wearing a dark suit in the front row of the courtroom, while Kirk Radomski, the confessed steroids dealer to dozens of major league ballplayers, was sentenced to probation in a plea bargain.
A state psychiatrist in one deposition described death row as a "dark, dingy, noisy place" with naked men huddled in the back of their cells, and "psychotic patients yelling, hollering, screaming".
Preserved in rows in a dark wood display cabinet in her current London show, they look like relics worn down by devotional fingers.
My roommate, who rocks the dance floor harder than anyone I know, is tirelessly working to have lights installed on a dark dirt path behind our fraternity row where young women and men alike feel unsafe walking alone at night.
It dominated the road, a dark, sober facade intersected by three rows of darkened windows.
