Go, set the storm-winds free, / And sink their ships or scatter them astray, / And strew their corpses forth, to weltering waves a prey.

Rather than trying to understand the basis of guruhood, another means to grasp the phenomenon is to classify those who are recognized as gurus.

But it's often hard to discern the forest for the archaeological trees, partly because archaeology is now so specialized, and also because all of us suffer from information overload about the past dumped on us by the Web, newspapers, TV specials, and all the apparatus of modern global communications.

A thoughtful spirit drifting upon this tide in a large city like Paris cannot but often think of this, and shiver with the feeling that beneath and all around are scattered thickly, if invisibly, putrescent corpses and whitening skeletons. But sometimes strange things do come to the surface—featureless, formless, unrecognizable objects, upon which men gaze wonderingly, conjecturingly, but unknowingly; and which are in reality the disjecta membra of ghastly things over whose hideousness the unquiet billows once mercifully swept.