Luminous and salty, it conveys the desolate, sea-battered mood, the cries of seabirds, the waves' roar, equally as tellingly as Britten in Peter Grimes, but in an entirely different musical voice: not North Sea but Atlantic edge.
Had the convoy followed his directions en route to Djanet, Steinmetz said, hundreds of miles into the Sahara, in the middle of a desolate sand sea, they would have run out of fuel.
Interestingly, it was not in the tropical jungles of Brazil, with their attendant diversity, that the cracks in Darwin's creationist view began to appear but rather on the relatively desolate plains and sea cliffs of Argentina.
But even those who actually read the book - Dickens's second work, serialized in monthly installments between 1837 and 1839 - maynot know about Oliver's desolate mother, her sea-captain husband and that other man, the boy's real father.
Played out in desolate cityscapes, on the sea and in the skies, Battlefield 4 is a dream of Armageddon without civilian suffering to make things messy.
"Whenever I look at the moon I am reminded of that precious moment, over four decades ago, when Neil and I stood on the desolate, barren, yet beautiful, Sea of Tranquillity," he said in a statement.
Thanks to Eliot, one line at least of High German may have crept into the consciousness of many an operatically resistant A-level English student: "Oed' und leer das Meer" – desolate and empty the sea – sung by the shepherd looking out for Isolde's ship in Act 3, as Tristan lies dying.
That name seemed to fit with the common perception that the young Earth was a hot, dry, desolate landscape interspersed with seas of magma and inhospitable for life.
I kept walking, took the shortcut to the right, came out in Kuholmsveien and walked up the gentle slope, from there I saw the sea widen out, so desolate and blue.
On North Korea's desolate eastern coast, 600 miles directly across the Sea of Japan from here, soldiers guard an abandoned construction site where two light-water nuclear reactors were to be built.
Somewhere in half-sleep, with the television on because I feel desolate with the wind blowing outside and the sea mist clotting the streets, I realize that the silent twins' story has upset all my expectations.
