From Image to Image; From Stone to Stone

Days of Future Past

This image is evokes two memories: the Statue of Liberty scene from Planet of the Apes, and the Portal Stones from Robert Jordan’s The Great Hunt, Book Two of his Wheel of Time series. In both of these, they conjure up a setting — one remarkable, the other quite ordinary — in which something from our present has lasted through an epoch of time to be discovered by latter-day humans. In particular, the Portal Stones of Jordan’s The Great Hunt seem a bit closer to the description of this fire hydrant. The writing on it, 540-58, and the oddness of its shape — the rusted bolt on the top — might leave any future humans who would stumble upon this contraption, at a lost to explain its existence or function in how Rand, the protagonist of the Wheel of Time series, equally befuddled. I can imagine some intrepid future Muslims encountering this in a distant future and upon stumbling across this artifact, would recite the verse from Sūrah al-Baqarah, 

“That was a community which has long since passed away. It has what it earned. You have what you have earned. You will not be questioned about what they did.” — al-Baqarah v. 141