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Workers with shovels demolish a large mound, the largest ancient hill in the city, and sell the land to the railroad. Human bones appear from under the mound, under the shovels. 32 burials. On the other bank of the river stands a hill, even larger. It is about 100 feet tall, with a base that rivals the Great Pyramid of Giza. For 100 years, America convinced itself, up until the time of Andrew Jackson, that these pyramids were built by a vanished people. Israelites, Vikings, Atlanteans, anyone, as long as they're not Indians. So who actually built them? And why did the huge city around them fall silent one day? In 1809, a group of French Trappist monks arrived on the plains opposite St. Louis. Strict
order, silence, prayers, work on the land. They needed a plot of land that wouldn't be flooded by the Mississippi. They found her. She just looked strange. In the middle of a perfectly flat floodplain, more than 2 miles from the nearest natural hill, rose a mountain with neat steps. Four terraces, one above the other. The slopes were so regular that it looked as if someone had leveled them with a ruler. The monks planted gardens on these terraces. Up there, their crops were safe from the floods. They only stayed for a few years and then left. All that's left of them is the name. To this day it is called Monks Mound. In 1811, a young traveler named Henry Breckenridge came to visit the monks. He climbed to the top, looked back, and wrote, "What a
grand pile of earth." He said he was deeply moved. And the first thing he compared it to were the pyramids of Egypt. This comparison was more accurate than he could have imagined. The monks' mound rises about 100 feet. Its base covers approximately 14-15 acres. That's about as big as the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and by some measurements, even bigger. Inside is about 22 million cubic feet of earth. No stone block. No cart, no pack animal, no wheel. Every bit of this land was carried on human backs in wicker baskets. You can count how many baskets that is. A cubic foot of compacted clay weighs about 100 pounds. If one person carries about 55
pounds at a time, then the Monks' Mound alone would require over 30 million walkers. This is a rough estimate, but you get the idea. And the mound didn't grow all at once. Archaeologists have counted about 10 separate construction phases. Each stage meant thousands of people digging, dragging, dumping, tamping the earth, and returning for a new load. And on top of the mound stood a building. Archaeologists found traces of it: approximately 105 feet long and 48 feet wide. If its roof were as high as the reconstructions suggest, it would rise another 50 feet. A person standing in the square below would look up, as if at a mountain. And on
the top of that mountain was a house that almost touched the sky. Monks Mound was only the largest of them. Today we know that there were about 120 flat platforms, cones, and long ridges. In total, about 55 million cubic feet of earth was moved here. Breckenridge asked himself the question that anyone would ask. Who built this? The answer was right in front of him. Native Americans lived in this region. In the 1500s, Spanish explorers traveling through what is now the southern United States saw local chiefs living in similar mounds. The French saw how indigenous peoples buried their dead in mounds. But 19th- century America chose a different response. And I chose it for a reason that had nothing to do with archaeology. There were many
earthen pyramids in America. From Ohio and Illinois to Missouri, thousands of earthen structures stretched along every river valley. Circles, squares, long walls, giant figures of snakes and birds that can only be seen in their entirety from a height. Settlers heading west constantly encountered them. And they kept asking, "Where did they come from? » The correct answer was known from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson, the future president, excavated a mound on his own land in Virginia. He carefully disassembled it, layer by layer, described the bones, and compared what he saw with the burial customs of the indigenous peoples of his time.
The similarity was obvious. Jefferson concluded that the mounds were built by the ancestors of the local peoples. Nobody was listening. In 1787, an American naturalist suggested that the mounds were built by the Danes, that is, Scandinavians who sailed here long before Columbus. After 10 years, he himself abandoned this idea and admitted that the builders were local peoples. But by that time the idea had already spread around the world. In 1830, the Book of Mormon was published. It suggested that ancient America was settled by people from the Middle East who arrived about 600 years before Christ, as well as even older people who came before them. The mounds fit perfectly into this picture. In 1833, a 400- page book called "American Antiquities" was published. Its
author went through all the candidates: Polynesians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Israelites, Scandinavians, Welsh, Scots, Chinese. He never stopped at any one. But of one thing he was absolutely sure. These were not Indians. Later, the Atlanteans were added to the list. By 1876, the American press was spreading the theory that the mounds were left by refugees from a sunken continent. The story was like this. Long ago, a great civilized race lived on this earth. She built pyramids, studied the stars, and buried her kings with honors. Then the savages came, destroyed it, and took its place. And the Indians whom
the Europeans encountered were the descendants of those savages. Now look at the dates. 1830s. This was the time when the United States was deciding what to do with the indigenous peoples who lived east of the Mississippi. In May 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. In December, he explained to Congress why this was fair. And in that address he mentioned the mounds. "In the monuments and fortifications of an unknown people," said Jackson, "we see memorials of a once mighty race that was exterminated or disappeared to make way," as he put it, " for the existing savage tribes." The logic was simple. If the Indians once came and destroyed the previous owners, their right to this land is no better than ours. So, they could be evicted.
Within a few years, tens of thousands of people were forcibly removed west across the Mississippi under this law. Thousands died along the way. And the myth about the creators of the mounds lived on for another half a century. While people were arguing about this, the mounds themselves were disappearing. In 1848, the Smithsonian Institution published its first book. It was about the ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley. The two researchers spent years walking through Ohio and neighboring states, measuring mounds and drawing plans of walls and figures. Archaeologists still use their drawings for a very simple reason.
Most of what is depicted there no longer exists. The fields were plowed, the walls were leveled, the mounds were taken out for bricks and backfill. In the early 1800s, St. Louis was called the " City of Mounds." The mounds stood right in the city, and topographers used them as landmarks. In 1819, two naturalists counted 25 mounds in the northern group near the river alone. In the 1830s, a street network appeared. The mounds were cut down under the streets, dug up to the ground, and built over with houses. By the 1850s, almost all of them had disappeared. The large mound lasted the longest. Even before the Civil War, a street was built through it. Its bowels were being torn to the ground, and
it was becoming lower and lower. In 1854, a local newspaper called for his rescue. Even earlier, in 1843, another newspaper explicitly stated that the mounds were not protected by any law. In 1869, the large mound was completely razed to the ground. The land was sold to the railroad for embankment. Along with him, 32 burials disappeared. Later, before the 1904 World's Fair, 16 more mounds were removed from the city park. It was not until 1894 that the Smithsonian Institution published a major report on the excavations of the mounds. 20 years of field research across the country. Conclusion: no extinct race existed. The mounds were built by the ancestors of the indigenous peoples of America. The question of who built them was closed. But something else
opened up. If these pyramids were built by Native Americans, then who were these people who were capable of building an entire city in the middle of a river floodplain? And why did this city appear almost within one generation? Until the middle of the 11th century, there was nothing special here. A village on the shore of the bay, with about a thousand inhabitants. Cornfields, fish from the lakes, game from the forests on the hills. Houses made of poles, covered with clay, roofs made of grass.
Hundreds of such settlements were scattered throughout the Mississippi Valley. Then, about half a century later, everything changed. Around 1050, the old settlement was demolished, and a planned city began to be built in its place. In the center, an area of about 50 acres was leveled. That's about 45 American football fields. The uneven floodplain with pits and hills was transformed into a perfectly flat surface. In some places, the soil was cut off. In others, they filled the lowlands with sand and clay. You can't build such an area in pieces, family by family. This was the only large-scale project. Someone conceived all this and then forced thousands of people to make it happen. A raised road, about half a mile long and
almost 60 feet wide, led from the south to the center. It crossed a marshy lowland, pointing almost exactly north. At its end stood a mound. The city was planned according to the cardinal points. Over those 50 years, according to one estimate, the center's population grew from 2,000 to 12 or 15,000 people. Taking into account the suburbs and surrounding settlements, there were even more people. Estimates vary considerably: from 6,000 to 40,000 people. But according to many of them, no city in the future United States was larger than Cahokia until the late 1700s. And the city was not limited to this bank of the river. Where East St. Louis stands today, there was a second center with its own dozens of mounds. And on the other side of the river, where
St. Louis is now, there is a third. Many researchers believe that all of these were parts of one large urban world, united by the river and canoes. That great mound, sold to the railroad in 1869, stood on the western edge of that world. Even houses change. Until the mid-1100s, people built their homes here by digging in individual pillars. Now the walls begin to be built in long dug trenches, row after row, following the same pattern. Houses line up along the squares and around the cardinal points. It looks as if someone was telling people not only where to work, but also how to live. Where did all these people come from? Part of the answer was found in neighboring settlements.
Some of them have houses built differently than the locals, and the ceramics are also different. It seems that people from far away were arriving in droves in the city. What attracted them? We don't know. Perhaps the promise of a good harvest. Maybe protection. Perhaps a new faith. There is one date that haunts researchers. In July 1054, a new star appeared in the sky. Chinese astronomers recorded that it was visible even during the day for more than three weeks. It could be observed at night for almost two years. Today, in its place is the Crab Nebula, the remnants of an exploded star. The flash was seen throughout the Northern Hemisphere, including over Mississippi. Was the birth of the city connected to this star? It is impossible to prove this
. This is just a hypothesis, nothing more. But the dates match up almost perfectly, and the people who built this city watched the sky with extreme attention. We know this for sure. The city thrived on trade on a scale this part of the world had never seen. The shells were brought from the Gulf of Mexico, over 600 miles away. Copper came from the Great Lakes. Mica, transparent as glass, was brought from the Appalachians. And from Cahokia, hoes made of a special flint, which was mined in what is now southern Illinois, spread in all directions. They are found hundreds of miles from their mining sites. And all this was transported without a wheel, without a horse, without an ox. On human shoulders and in canoes along rivers. We don't know what people
called their city. The name Cahokia comes from a small tribe of the Illinois Confederacy that the French encountered here in the 1600s, about 300 years after the city was emptied. The Ponca people call this place "Red Hill." The city did not leave behind any written sources. No name of the ruler, no inscription. Only earth, wood, and bones. And, as it turned out, it was the sky upon which this city was built. This was discovered by accident 900 years later. And this happened thanks to the highway. In the 1950s, America was building its interstate highways. One of them, Interstate 55/70, was supposed to go right through the old city.
The builders needed this land, so archaeologists were sent ahead to check what was there before they covered everything with asphalt. In the early 1960s, archaeologist Warren Whittrey was excavating about a half-mile west of Monks Mound, where a highway interchange was planned. He found holes in the ground. Large, deep, strangely shaped. The kind that remain from thick poles set vertically into the ground. The pits were arranged in an arc. When this arc was continued, it formed a circle. Later it turned out that there were five such circles. Each was larger than the previous one and had 12 more pillars than the previous one. 24 36 48 60 and possibly 72. The largest circle was nearly 500 feet in diameter.
The posts were made of red cedar, the only native evergreen tree in the region. It hardly rots, and many indigenous peoples consider it sacred. Traces of red ochre were found on the remains of the wood. It appears that the pillars were painted red. These circles did not all stand at the same time. They were built one after the other, demolished, and replaced with new ones, each time larger. The first and smallest was eventually completely dismantled, and a mound was filled in its place. The city grew, and with it its calendar. Archaeologists named it Woodhenge, after Stonehenge. And this comparison turned out to be apt. If you stand in the center of the third circle, the one with 48 pillars, on the morning of the spring or autumn equinox
, the sun rises precisely in the east, and rises directly over the front of Monk's Mound. It's as if a giant earthen pyramid is giving birth to the sun. During the winter solstice, the sun rises over another mound, about a third of a mile south of Monk's Mound. There was also a temple there. The city was built like a calendar that you can enter. About 15 miles to the east is another site called the Emerald Acropolis. Its mounds are aligned with the point where the moon rises in the extreme phase of its cycle. This cycle lasts 18 and a half years. To notice this, you need to observe the sky for decades and pass down observations from parents to children.
They had nothing to write with. So they remembered. Something else was happening on the Great Square at the foot of the mound. It was here that they played "chunky". One player rolled a stone disc across flat, compacted ground, while the others threw poles after him, trying to hit as close as possible to where the disc stopped. The stone discs were real treasures. They belonged to an entire city or clan and were preserved for generations. Huge bets were placed on the game. The players bet everything they had.
Huge, flat fields were prepared for the game. Some of them were estimated to be almost as large as the main plaza of Cahokia. Spectators came from everywhere. It was sports, religion, and politics all at the same time. And it seems that Cahokia was the first to turn this game into a spectacle of this scale. The game seems to have originated here and from there spread throughout the Southeast and the Great Plains. Indigenous peoples were still playing it when Europeans arrived on the continent. Perhaps this was one of the ways the city maintained peace across a vast territory. Neighbors gathered in the square and demonstrated
scale, power, and sacred play. And they returned home, carrying with them the image of Cahokia. A city that builds stadium- sized solar calendars and holds sacred games on a 50-acre square seems a peaceful, almost luminous place. In 1967, another archaeologist, Melvin Fowler, was looking at a map of the area and noticed something strange. The small mound south of Monks Mound stood differently from the others. It was drawn at an angle, and this angle coincided with the lines of the sun's circle. Fowler suggested that there must be a signal pole buried beneath it. He started digging. And what he found changed our understanding of Cahokia forever.
Today it's easy to walk past it without noticing-it's a long grassy ridge, one of dozens here. Fowler excavated it for several seasons, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. He really found the pillar. But there were people lying around the pillar. The pillar itself rotted, but the hole from it was preserved. Nearby were cedar poles from funeral biers. Radiocarbon analysis dated them to approximately 1030. These are the very first decades of the city, the time of the "Big Bang." The people buried here saw the birth of Cahokia. In total, the mound contained about 270 people. They were buried in six stages over a period of approximately
one hundred years. The mound was completed, connected to neighboring ones, and filled in on top until several small mounds merged into one. In the center was the main burial place. The body was placed on a platform lined with thousands of beads carved from shells. The shells were brought from the coast, which is over 600 miles away. Different reports give different figures: from 10,000 to 20,000 beads. They were laid out in the shape of a bird. Head, wings, tail. The man lay on this bird, as if on a cloak. Nearby lay hundreds of arrowheads, gathered in bundles, as if in quivers. Copper.
Mica sheets. Massive stone discs. All the most precious things this world has ever known. Fowler concluded that he was dealing with a ruler. A warrior leader associated with the image of a falcon. Perhaps a person who was revered as an earthly embodiment of a heavenly power. This interpretation prevailed for almost half a century. Cahokia began to be imagined as a state of warrior men with a divine leader at their head. In 2016, the bones from this burial were examined again using modern methods.
It turned out that there were 12 bodies in the beaded burial, although previously there were six. And the two central bodies belonged to a man and a woman. Around them lay other couples: a man and a woman, a man and a woman. And also the remains of a child. The picture has changed. At the center of the mound lies a noble family for whom pairings, alliances, and inheritance were important. Symbols of fertility, renewal, harvest. The most important thing here was origin. A noblewoman lay next to the nobleman on the same platform of shells. But the mound contained more than just the elite.
A little way off, Fowler found a hole. In it, in two layers separated by woven mats, lay 53 women. Aged 15 to 30 years. Arranged evenly, carefully, in rows. The analysis revealed several facts. Their teeth are different from those of the local population. It seems these women were not born here. The chemical composition of their bones indicates that they ate a lot of corn and very little meat. Their health was worse than that of the elite. And, by all indications, they did not die a natural death. In a nearby pit, archaeologists found what they called a cache of shell beads.
35,361 shell beads, and next to them are the remains of probably 19 women. In another vault were seven women along with rare imported items. And that hole wasn't the only one. The other had 24 women. In another one there were 39 men and women, and above them, on cedar stretchers, rested 15 representatives of the elite. According to researchers, about 60% of all those buried in Mound 72 were sacrificed. Captives from distant villages? The tribute that the city demanded from the lands under its control? Servants sent after their masters? There is no answer. There is only this fact. The city that built solar calendars and gathered neighbors for holiday
games did this too. And it did it publicly, in the very heart, next to a large square. This power had two faces. One was watching the sunrise over the pyramid. The other looked down into the pit. And a little over a century after Mound 72 was filled in, the people of Cahokia began to do something they had never done before. They started building a wall. palisade was built around the city center. Almost 2 miles of wooden wall. 10 to 15 feet tall. The logs were dug into trenches 4-5 feet deep. According to estimates, one wall took from 15 to 20 thousand tree trunks. A bastion protruded from the wall approximately every 85 feet. From such bastions, it is easy
to fire along the wall at anyone who comes close. This is how they build when they expect an attack. Inside were the Monks' Mound, the Great Square, and 17 other mounds. Almost 200 acres. A sacred center, separated from the rest of the city. The wall was rebuilt four times. And each time it got smaller. The city was shrinking. For a long time, no one knew about the existence of this wall. The tree has rotted. The trenches were filled with soil. It was discovered thanks to an aerial photograph from 1922: dark lines appeared in the fields. Excavations along these lines only began in 1966. And they found four trenches, one inside the other.
Four walls. Four attempts to hold on to what was slipping away. Who were they protecting themselves from? From an external enemy? From rival centers that grew up on the Cahokia model and now wanted to be first? Or from their own subjects, people who lived outside the sacred center and would never have found themselves on the shell platform? There is no answer. There are only traces. Around 1160-1170, a large walled settlement burned down in what is now East St. Louis. Whether it was a raid, an uprising, or a ritual-no one knows. But the fire was severe, and the building was never rebuilt. A whole forest is needed for such a wall. 20,000 trunks for one construction, and they did it four times. Plus poles for thousands of homes. Plus
firewood for thousands of fires every day, all year round. The forests on the slopes around the floodplain continued to disappear, and people had to go further and further for wood. There is another detail that seems insignificant, but may turn out to be important. The people of Mexico have long prepared corn in a special way. They boiled the grains in a solution of ash or lime. There is a reason for this. Without such processing, corn provides the body with almost no vitamin B3, niacin. A person who eats mostly corn is at risk of developing pellagra. It affects the skin, stomach, and nerves. And without treatment, it slowly kills. In Cahokia, judging by the finds, corn was prepared in this way from about 1050, from the very
birth of the city. And around 1200 they stopped. Why they stopped-no one knows. Perhaps they didn't have enough fuel for this method of cooking. Maybe the people who knew this method left. Maybe it's just a coincidence. But remember the women of Mound 72, who ate a lot of corn and very little meat. Ordinary city dwellers lived on corn. And it was in the late 1100s that people started leaving. While the city dwindled behind its walls, its images spread across the continent. On copper plates from Oklahoma and Georgia, on carved shells
from Tennessee, the same figure appears over and over again. A man in a mask with a bird's beak. Wings or feather cloak behind the back. Falcon pattern around the eyes. Archaeologists call him the "birdman. " Perhaps this is a mythical hero associated with the morning star. Several peoples who are considered descendants of the inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley preserve legends about a celestial hero who fought against the forces of the underworld.
It is difficult to directly link these stories to specific finds. But the birdman looks pretty much the same everywhere, and his earliest versions seem to have appeared here. In 1971, a small stone tablet was found on the eastern side of the Monks' Mound. 4 inches long. On one side is carved a man in a bird mask with round earrings in his ears and a feather on his arm. On the other side is a crisscross pattern that looks like snakeskin. Heaven, earth, and the underworld on one stone that fits in the palm of your hand. Charcoal found nearby was dated to around 1310. This means that someone was holding this tablet when the city was almost empty. Someone climbed Monks Mound when all that remained around were abandoned fields and an overgrown square. And
left the bird there. A copper processing workshop was found near one of the mounds in the 1950s. Then her location was lost. And for 60 years, no one could find her again. It was finally excavated in the 2000s. Here, from copper brought from the Great Lakes, they forged thin plates with the same images. Birds, falcon eyes, wings. The city was weakening, but its symbol lived on. Hundreds of miles from Cahokia, generations after its heyday, leaders of other peoples still wore the copper falcon. Cahokia taught half a continent what power looks like. But she couldn't hold her own.
No one conquered Cahokia overnight. It didn't burn to the ground instantly. No single catastrophe destroyed it. People began leaving in the late 1100s. By the mid-1200s, the population had halved, perhaps more. Around 1350, or by 1400 according to other sources, the city became completely empty. Almost 200 years have passed since the first departures to the last Why? The first explanation was this. People cut down forests on the hills above the floodplain for walls, houses, and firewood. Without the forest, the rains washed the soil down. The rivers overflowed their banks more strongly, and the fields in the lowlands were underwater. The city flooded itself. This theory was proposed in 1993, and for a long time it
was accepted almost as fact. Convenient instruction. Civilization destroyed its environment and perished. In 2021, researchers tested the soils beneath the city itself. They found no traces of those floods during the city's existence. There This sophisticated theory was not confirmed. So they looked at the bottom of the nearest lake, Horseshoe Lake. Layers of silt at its bottom preserve records of floods. Two periods of severe flooding are visible there: from approximately 1100 to 1260 and from 1340 to 1460. And the years from 1100 to 1250 also brought droughts. Then a study came out that
almost sounds like a joke. Scientists took sediment samples from the same lake and looked for molecules that only arise from human waste. The more people live on the coast, the more such molecules end up in the mud. Thanks to them, it was possible to track population changes over hundreds of years. And this curve coincided with changes in precipitation levels. The climate was changing, and people were leaving. A picture emerges where there is no one specific reason. Droughts destroy crops.
Corn that has not been cooked properly provides fewer nutrients. Floods destroy fields in floodplains. The opposing centers are getting stronger. The tension is growing behind the wall. The government, which demanded so much labor, so much wood, and so many lives, ceases to deliver what it promised: harvest, protection, order. And people do what they've always known how to do. They are leaving. And now the most important part. A more recent study of the same sediments showed something different.
The population in this area reached its lowest point around 1400. And then it started to grow again. It reached its peak around 1650. When the French arrived in the Mississippi Valley in the 17th century, they encountered indigenous peoples there. One of the tribes of the Illinois Confederacy was called Cahokia. The city bears their name. The Osage, Ponca, Omaha, Quapaw, and other peoples preserve traditions that researchers associate with the world of building mounds. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muskogee continued to build mounds even after the arrival of Europeans. Stop for a moment on one of these names.
Cherokee. The Cherokee became the most famous people removed under the 1830 Act. Thousands of people under armed guard were deported west in the winter. The Cherokee themselves called that path the Trail of Tears Thousands of people died on it. The law was justified by the claim that the Indians had once destroyed a great race of mound builders. And the Cherokee belonged to the peoples whose tradition of building mounds was preserved even in historical times. People were evicted for the crime of building pyramids, even though the pyramids themselves were built by their own ancestors.
No extinct race ever existed. No Israelites, no Vikings, no Atlanteans. The builders of Cahokia abandoned their city, scattered across the valleys, and mixed with their neighbors. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren became the same Indians that Europeans would call the savages who destroyed their original masters centuries later. In 1830, while Jackson was telling Congress about the great race that had been exterminated, the descendants of that race were already being prepared for eviction. Even after the myth of the extinct race was debunked, no one was in a hurry to protect the mounds. In 1923, Illinois legislators approved the purchase of land around
Monks Mound to create a park. The park was opened. In winter, children would sled down In the summer, people pitched tents here. In the 1950s, the interstate came Highway 55/70 passed right through the northern part of the ancient city. Today, a few hundred meters from the pyramid, which took 200 years to build, trucks drive around the clock. The nine pillars of the Sun Circle disappeared under the wheels of dump trucks carrying soil for the road. And yet it was the highway that saved the memory of the city. Federal road program funds paid for the first systematic excavations here. Without them, Woodhenge would likely never have been found. Mound 72 would never have been excavated. The road that cut the city in half forced
people to study it. In 1964, Cahokia became a National Historic Landmark. UNESCO World Heritage List. On the same list as the pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China. In 1985, the Solar Circle was rebuilt. Archaeologists found every pit of the third circle and returned the pillars to their exact place. Half red cedar, half robinia. Now, on the days of the equinox and solstice, people come here to meet the sunrise. No ceremonies are held out of respect for the peoples for whom this place is still sacred. A museum has been operating here since 1989. In its best years, it
receives up to a million visitors. And in St. Louis itself, the former "city of mounds," one mound survives. Sugarloaf Mound. It stood on a high cliff far from the center, which is why it was preserved. In 1928, a nearby quarry cut into its slope. In 2008, the owners of the house, an elderly couple, put the property up for sale. The mound was purchased by the Osage Nation. One of those peoples whose ancestors in the 19th century were called savages who destroyed the builders of the pyramids. The last mound of the "city of mounds" has returned to the descendants of the people who built it. Imagine the morning of the vernal equinox at Woodhenge. A circle of 48 pillars has been rebuilt. You are standing near the central pillar. To the east,
half a mile away, the dark silhouette of the Monastery Mound is visible. The sky is getting lighter. And the sun rises exactly from behind the facade of the pyramid, just like 900 years ago. Highway 55/70 hums along somewhere behind you. Who built the American pyramids? People who for 200 years were called strangers in their own land. Why was their city empty? Because its inhabitants did what people have always done. They went where they could live. And then they came back. The lost race has been living nearby all this time. First, they took her name away. Then - her land.
