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Nevertheless, someone -we'll probably never know who - went to the trouble of dragging thousands of granite bricks to the top of a hill deep in the African jungle twelve hundred years age and building an elaborate fortress-temple filled with labyrinths and passageways whose only apparent purpose is to drive archaeologists mad, The city of Timbuktu wae little more than a legend until the closing years of the nineteenth century, when French adventurers crossed two thousand miles of the Sahara wasteland and found it on the banks of the Niger River in what is now the country of Mali. It was settled in AJO. 1087 and was once a large, thriving trade centre. Today it has a population of about eighty-five hundred.! The architecture of Timbuktu is not particularly Impressive, and the city is most noted coo rn er | 1 oat Since a prominent city Uke Timbuktu could become lost In modem timesj it is not surprising that even larger and more impressive cities,’ such as Angkor Wat could get lost altogether. Angkor was pnly a myth until explorers stumbled on to it in Cambodia in 1857. It contains enormous temples and pyramid-like structures apparently related to the mysterious structures of the Pacific islands. The walls are covered with statues and bas-relief, and the origins of the city are lost in a welter of half-remembered legends. Local natives still speak of the great godlike beings who built the place. Hard facts are rare, One story popular soon after Angkor's discovery is that the city was abandoned suddenly (probably around A.D. 1300} in the same way that the Easter Islanders threw down their tools in their quarries and fled. At least it is obvious that Angkor was the product of an advanced culture of engineers and stonemasons and that their culture vanished rather suddenly< History demostrates that men have often built imposing, elaborate cities, flourished in them for hundreds or even thousands of years, then deserted them to live in simple grass huts on their perimeters. Wars and natural calamities often played a part in this pattern, of course. Great cultures have risen and then died out. Men returned to simpler ways of life. It is a natural order of things. A thousand years from now people may be living in thatched shacks in New Jersey and on Long Island within full view of the decaying towers of Manhattan. They may tell the children about the peculiar ancients who built the towers as part of the strange reEgion which worshipped the great god Money. ' Population figures for most parts of tie world are debatable. The figures used in this book ate up-to-date estimates from the official statistics of the United Nations and sources such as the Hammond World Attas. ruins predating the Christian era. A large Roman theatre with a seating capacity of four thousand can be found near Amman. There are great temples and triumphal arches and countless stone columns lining dead streets paved with large stone blocks. Far to the south of Amman, in the midst of the unfriendly desert, the traveller enters a narrow, gorge which leads through the cliffs to an ancient city right out of the Arabian nights. This is for the hundreds of storks who reside there, In the Middle East the little country of Jordan is filled with Roman