"There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it."
-- the character named Jim Burden recalls what it was like when, still a boy, he moved from Virginia to the plains of Nebraska in Willa Sibert Cather's novel
My Antonia. How great is that?
Source: Willa Sibert Cather, My Antonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918), 8.
