After the Second Worldwide Demagnetization, all digital files were entirely lost and human knowledge and its history completely disappeared. Overnight, humankind was left to its own fate; the findings from thousands of years of human evolution were now only recorded on the minds of men. Ruling governments decided to undertake the colossal task of rewriting all knowledge from oral testimonies on backup files in material form, which from experience proved to be more stable. At this future time, after the Traumatic Wars, the Polar Government formed archaeological expeditions that entered the forbidden territory of extinct Asia. Their mission was to locate deserted cities along the rivers mentioned in old songs. In a nascent world constructed on the basis of these legends, proving the existence of one of these cities would help draw some conclusions in rewriting the history in which they found themselves immersed. The ECO expedition, with archaeologist Hannibal Hanko as its commander, discovered a city frozen in time, deserted mysteriously around the 30th parallel. Hanko was an advocate for pioneering photographic techniques, the images taken in former days made with primitive cameras recovered from museums; although they lack artistic interest for their descriptive simplicity, the images are an interesting reflection of a astonished mind seeing an empty city before the viewer. His diaries are highly influenced from having read the nineteenth-century English explorer John Lloyd Stephens; loaded with fantasies unchecked by the other expedition members, his conclusions were dismissed and went unused due to his writings’ excessive descriptions and imagery.
- “No one. From the air, we bear witness to human madness; a devastated city, abandoned in its entirety, towers below our feet. The ship circles around in reconnaissance, converging towards a torrential river that splits the city in two. From a porthole of the pilothouse I contemplate the city, tormented by a question that stands above all others: Why did they flee, leaving a city frozen at the most ardent moment of its civilization?”
- “Accustomed as we are to the simplicity of forms, to the austerity and efficiency of means as the fundamental characteristic of our cities, we are unsettled at pondering the density of all kinds of elements found in the streets and the diversity of its buildings’ forms. Any act that might record such a dense reality in archaeology proves to be a useless desire. We have traveled up to one of these buildings with great difficulty. At its peak, among fog and silence, the city shows itself as immense and mysterious.”
- “Upon landing I felt the necessity to photograph my footprint in the mud. The images were lost, but I remember that the first space pioneers felt the very same need to record in images their first act of being present in such a place. The difference from these worldly expeditions is that we were sure this place had been treaded upon a thousand times before us.”
- “We reached the highest point at a kind of circular tower of unknown use. From there one could contemplate the city buried by wild vegetation, a living mass that seemed to be in constant movement, perpetuating a feeling of eternal oblivion. In the background an agglomeration of different-sized structures stood out, pointing towards the sky. Some seemed to be launch pads while others looked like defensive armaments, and from their backlighting we were able to distinguish the zenith watchtowers that are mentioned in the songs. The density of the forest before us impeded the expedition from coming closer to this area and from describing in more detail these structures that undoubtedly conceal greater mysteries.”
- “All possible exits from the riverbank where we established our base led to a forested area, behind which the first buildings seemed to be. Without hesitating to conclude our exploration of the terrain, we set out for our departure, and within a few moments the somber silence of the centuries was interrupted by hatchet blows marking a steady rhythm and the crack of trees that then fell. “
- “Since we began our exploration of the ruins, we have not found anything more inexplicable than that vast perpendicular, isolated wall; and it seems that it was rather built explicitly to confuse posterity.”
- “We have perchance encountered nothing that moved us with greater enthusiasm than that of seeing these ruins, and they stirred in us feelings of great sorrow and pleasure; sorrow for not having discovered them before the condemnation of irreversible destruction befell us; and deep pleasure for we were allowed to see them—in their decaying state, nevertheless, but boasting proudly, even today, the memory of a mysterious people. Within a few years, what remains standing will have disappeared, just as many things that did indeed exist have been denied, in the same way that these buildings will have doubt cast upon them for if they ever really existed.”
- “After half a day of walking with great difficulty, with the mud at times reaching up to our waist, we moved closer to an area with large columns distributed in four rows, which must be a temple of disproportionate dimensions. There are no remains of its roof around the site, which indicates that the roof was built with a perishable material or that the building never reached completion. Efforts by ancient peoples to please their gods brushed with madness, at times seeming that they wished to place them across distances and cover the entire surface of the earth with them.”
- “At dawn on the third day, when we raised camp, we saw ourselves confined within a metallic netting that held portholes toward the wide sky and which could not be seen when night fell upon us. At first we believed the city had awoken, trying to trap us, to have us become fossilized within it. A most thorough scouting of the terrain led us to identify the place where we had entered, though this did not relieve the mystery of this immense net because, from where we could observe the netting’s design, it appears to infinite. An event filled us with great excitement to continue our expedition: we witnessed an enormous dinosaur that we believed to be extinct, fly over our position, petrifying us until it was lost from sight where the net faded into the final limit of the horizon.”
- “In previous explorations to deserted civilizations, archaeologists describe situations from another time that are represented in reality through mirages. Without having discovered the origins of these formations, they have only been able to give them the ambiguous name of ‘spatio-temporal interferences.’ In the city’s largest lake, situated in the eastern direction, we were witness to one of these interferences; a ship from an era well before the city was frozen, sailed across the calm surface of the lake while a series of futuristic buildings appeared and disappeared among the fog. “
- “The water of the great river has a dense appearance with a yellowish color. It accelerates violently towards the river’s mouth making it seem like all life lost from this place was swallowed by its current. While airborne, I was able to take in some views of linear structures that traverse the river in a perpendicular fashion to its stream. On some of them we thought we saw moving beings, but we proved they were objects of transport that remained motionless, which we concluded were used to cross the river in a conventional manner. “
- “At the dome of some of these explored buildings there is a series of symbols that very well could have formed part of a language. They are repeated on occasion, as if they contained messages or political propaganda to influence citizens from their very heights.”
- “The chief of botany, Professor Lun, has extracted samples of an exemplary arboreal found at the lake’s edge. The tree in question seems to have cleaved the earth in a perfect square with the aim of projecting itself perpendicularly towards the sky, as if it were an underwater creature opening a hole in the ice for it to surface. ‘Discovering this form of intelligent vegetation alone,’ concluded Dr. Lun, ‘gives our expedition a purpose, and we ought to conclude it at this moment.’ However, some others of us thought we should continue, despite the risk of forgetting this discovery, at least until we visited the buildings pictured in the background among fog.”
- “Mr. Catherwood is surprised by a metallic structure that crowns one of the inspected buildings, affirming that is a reproduction of an ancient monument that, in its day, was one of the marvels of technology. We do not know the name of the monument or its original location, but to be sure, the fact that it was placed close to the sky in this position seems to be in man’s defiance of their gods, as if to tell them that ‘someday we will hold your place in heaven.”
- “Of all the situations we have lived throughout these days (perhaps not the most surprising, but the most beautiful and illuminating, above all for those of us who believe archaeology to be the most valuable of the sciences), the discovery of this archaeological site is the one that has captivated us the most. A multitude of terracotta statues (Mr. Catherwood counted more than four hundred of them) ordered in rows and from the position of their forward-looking gaze, they seemed to be guarding a kind of technological relic in the form of a prism situated in front of them. The realism of these idol guardians was such that we began to question if they were alive, but a dissection of a hand from one of them confirms for us their mineral origin. “
- “For a relatively long time, I could not discern precisely if the clocks we carried with us remained stopped; everything visible to us—behind and before us, to our right and left—turned into sea. We stepped onto an island of mud, the only visible piece of anything that constituted the world for us at that moment. Just as it came, it disappeared, and as it did not destroy the landscape or leave any significant damage to our bodies, we did not give it excessive importance. Even though similar events are common in these remote lands of ancient Asia, the uniqueness of what befell us, I believe, deserves to be cited at least in this diary with my hope that it be of great usefulness to the Polar Government in its unremitting struggle.”
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Diseñado y desarrollado por Julio César González
Diseñado y desarrollado por Julio César González