A long time ago someone unknown to me rested their length on a hot stone gradually cooling in the evening air where they could see the sky and sense more than see the great herds of oryx, antelope, ibex and phalarope moving through the bush. The tension in the air grew as dusk settled and the torpid predators pricked up their ears in their trees and lairs, waiting for the plain to be immersed in their medium, the dusk. Nearby a lion stretched her long spine on a hill overlooking a white beach and the sea, a defensible spot, a good place for a city.
A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life--kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction.
These strangers used and will use their wits to understand the world as far as they are able, though that was and will not be very far, and they did not and will not know where they come from nor who they are. Their ignorance, I infer, also encompasses the true names of the stars, the language of birds, and the key to the circuitous and ever-present defences of Troy. And how can it be that I, enjoying the greatest advantage, the only advantage, of living in the present, am just as ignorant?