POLLEN

"I found myself unable to connect [Fort Breendonk] with anything shaped by human civilization, or even with the silent relics of our prehistory and early history. And the longer I looked at it, the more often it forced me, I felt, to lower my eyes, the less comprehensible it seemed to become. Covered in places by open ulcers with the raw crushed stone erupting from them, encrusted by guano-like droppings and calciferous streaks, the fort was a monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence".
-- W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz