01-01-00 by R. J. Pineiro

Author:R. J. Pineiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765386069
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Chapter Eleven

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December 15, 1999

Natural wonders always have a way of making people feel small, meek, insignificant. The Grand Canyon, the Himalayas, Niagara Falls, the Amazon rain forest, Mount Everest, Yosemite National Park, the Great Barrier Reef, Mount Fuji, natural marvels that for centuries have dazzled the human race with their grandness, their splendor, their vastness.

These magnificent sights, unfolded as the surface of the Earth changed over hundreds of millions of years, captivated the imagination of the civilizations of the ancient world, sparking their ideas, feeding their dreams, fueling their determination to leave their marks on the world. It was these natural wonders that inspired the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Romans to create marvels of their own, monuments to the will, the passion, the skill, and the strength of their cultures. This man-driven desire to leave his legacy on an ever-changing world created such magnificent sights as the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, all of them now a memory, save for the Great Pyramid of Giza. But the human race continued to build, continued to create beyond those ancient architectural marvels. Civilizations sought to leave behind silent testimonies of their existence, of their legacy. Across the globe, beyond the lands of Homer, Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar, other societies converted their dreams into edifices of stone. Wonders such as the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal in Agra, and the Temple of Angkor in Cambodia changed the landscape of the Old World forever.

But while those architects, artists, and skilled laborers transformed stone into legacies, across the ocean, in what was to become the New World, other civilizations carried out their own immortal works of architecture. The Incas built the city of Machu Picchu high among the clouds in the Peruvian mountains. The Aztecs erected their monumental temple in Tenochtitlán, which later became Mexico City. The Maya created their vast cities across Mesoamerica, filled with monumental structures, like the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, the Pyramid of the Giant Jaguar at Tikal, and the Kukulcan Pyramid at Chichén Itzá. And man continued this monument-building legacy across the millennia, erecting larger and taller structures, shadowing the works of their ancestors, pushing the envelope and the laws of physics to create breathtaking masterpieces like the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Cristo Redentor overlooking Rio de Janeiro, and the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, the world’s tallest buildings. Other structures challenged the imagination, like the epic sculpture at Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota’s Black Hills, one of the world’s greatest mountain carvings, testament to the ingenuity, dedication, and God-given talent of its creator. Great works of engineering combined the elements of beauty, ingenuity, and man’s ability to transform the landscape in the name of progress, to improve the quality of life, to serve his own needs, like the Panama Canal, the English Channel tunnel, the Suez Canal, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Hoover Dam.

New marvels. Old marvels. Silent affirmations of man’s relentless desire to leave behind symbols of times to be remembered, to be admired, to set a standard for future generations to challenge.

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