The Course of Empires Chapter 5: Desolation

“It has been fifteen hundred years since the barbarian-rebel coalition sacked the city, and now the great city is nearly unrecognizable from what the historical texts describe.”

So began the young explorers’ newest journal entry. The man who wrote these words was fresh from the university and traveling the world with his father. Both were adventurous and hungry for knowledge. As of the time the explorer was writing this, the two travelers were on a mission to see all seven wonders of the ancient world as described by the historians of old. Their trip was delayed slightly when his father took ill with a fever, leaving them sidelined in a local village for a week. Luckily, his fever had broken that morning, and father and son would visit the ruins together first thing tomorrow morning. For now, though, he was alone with his notebook, his thoughts, and a pencil to record them.

“In the foreground of my vantage point,” he continued, “there stands a single orphaned column. It has no companions of its kind nor a building to support. Now its only companion is a nesting bird, of the species Phalacrocorax carbo, or great cormorant, if I’m not mistaken. Its mate appears to be hunting in the river's shallows at the foot of the column.” He paused and looked over the rest of the broken city.

“Mother Nature has taken much of this land back into her bosom. What is left of the gleaming marble used to construct the city is mostly swallowed up by vines and trees. Rows of columns and broken bridges line the riverbanks. The two lighthouses which once stood at the river delta are now as the stumps of trees which have been sawn through.”

Then another thought crossed the young explorer's mind. “It occurs to me that the destruction of this city may have been brought about by man’s hubris in thinking he can conquer nature. Instead of learning to live in harmony with Mother Gaia, as farmers, frontiersmen, and aboriginals worldwide have learned to do, these people sought to conquer nature to put her under their control. In the end, though, nature conquered them. For man is but one animal in a line of many that came before him and were wiped out of existence when Gaia decided that the time had come for them to perish and make way for a new species. Shall this be the fate of man as well? Shall the great civilizations we have built today be destroyed as surely as this one was? Or are we as a species clever enough to rediscover the balance we lost so long ago?”

The explorer closed his notebook and took one last look around the ruins before returning to the village. In between the broken lighthouses, the full moon was showing quite clearly in the waning sunlight of the evening. The lonely boulder sat on the high crag looking out to sea as it had for thousands of centuries and as it would for thousands of centuries afterward.

Author’s Commentary

And so we reach the conclusion of Thomas Cole’s allegorical saga. A young explorer explores the ruins of the empire as the dawn of the Industrial Revolution rapidly approaches. Is a new cycle creation of creation and destruction starting even as the explorer writes these words? Or will we learn the lessons of our forefathers in time to avoid a catastrophe even greater than the one that destroyed this empire?

Once more, compare with the original painting above to see how well my work stacks up against Cole’s.

Stay tuned for updates on where I’m heading next with this profile and what stories and essays of mine may appear next. Thank you, buh-bye!