Catchup Postage: Carthage
I'm in need of a few new words.
I am... wonderated!
Soaked in awe at the breadth of history beneath my feet.
I... olfactinate!
Did these flowers bloom upon this hillside those three thousand years ago? When Elyssa girt this mount with cowhide, did this scent of yellow/violet fill her senses also? Did her hands need part this riotous garden to lay the cunning strips that found her empire?
Wow! I didn't expect this. I'm unprepared for such an emotional response to this place. Yeah, sure, as a kid I'd been fascinated by the Phoenicians, my imagination had been fired by the tale of Hannibal's epic feats and who doesn't have at least some interest in the accomplishments of the Empire of Rome? I'd never had an intense desire to visit the ruins of Carthage, though - not like I'd longed to see the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Yet as I stand here amid the ruins of Roman villas on the flanks of the hill called Byrsa I'm overwhelmed by the same incredible depth of feeling I experienced in the Tibetan capital...
In addition to new vocabulary, some hyperbole is in order: It feels like I'm flying. It feels like I'm drowning. The sensation is a waveform that transmits the essence of mortality. A cycle of wondrous joy and awe that swoops to depths of sorrow and heartache. Wonder that such can be and sadness for its passing.
Below me now are the villas of this moment's rich and famous, their rooftops sprouting satellite dishes, their walls surmounted not with marble sculpture, but with the robot eyes of security cameras and antennae of automated entry systems. Just beneath their feet, underlying their patios and courtyards are the crumbled dreams of others who no doubt also thought their accomplishments everlasting.
I stand in a field of gold, my gaze reaching for the blue-washed prominence that rises toward heaven from the lake's far shore. The black maw of a broken tomb gapes amid the nodding flowers at my feet as the sunlight falls from a blue vault full of mare's tales. I'm frozen in the wonder of this moment. I feel somehow removed. As if my eyes are not my own, my vision a node in a web that stretches back across the ages to where someone else stands looking across the water from this hillside.
Here are... histechoes!
On the narrow plain squeezed between the hill and ocean is a place where the voice of the wind sings a moaned lament. The song reflects and echoes from stone to stone beneath the pines. the The decaying arches that open to the darkness underground reflect, amplify and embellish the refrain until my ears are filled with cries and whispers.
Baal, what did you do?
Rising above the darkness of this eerie crypt is a blindingly white, sunlit wall holding aloft yet another of the satellite dishes via which our age worships more prosaic gods.
I wonder if the inhabitants of that whitewashed vibrant villa ever feel the presence of the children entombed in the shadow beneath their feet. Do they too have an ear for the voices that murmur among the stones of Tophet?
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