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Things would be made very difficult for the translators in anno 7000. The facts about a world war in the twentieth century that they would discover from fragmentary texts would sound quite incredible. But when the speeches of Marx and Lenin fell into their hands, they would at last be able to make two high priests of this incomprehensible age the centre of a religion. What a piece of luck! People would be able to explain a great deal, provided sufficient clues were still in existence. Five thousand years is a long time. It is a pure caprice on nature's part that she allows dressed blocks of stone to survive for 5,000 years. She does not deal so carefully with the thickest iron girders. In the courtyard of a temple in Delhi there exists, as I have already mentioned, a column made of welded iron parts that has been exposed to weathering for more than 4,000 years without showing a trace of rust for it contains neither sulphur nor phosphorus. Here we have an unknown alloy from antiquity staring us in the face. Perhaps the column was cast by a group of far-sighted engineers who did not have the resources for colossal building, but wanted to bequeath to posterity a visible, time- It is an embarrassing story: in advanced cultures of the past we find buildings that we cannot copy today with the most modern technical means. These stone masses are there, they cannot be argued away. Because that which ought not to exist cannot exist, there is a frantic search for ‘rational’ explanations. Let us take off our blinkers and join the search .... spitting ships could not have existed. defying monument to their culture?