World spec'mode

The Basalt Forest

In the year 2075, for the forty-first consecutive year, a monument was erected in the middle of the Egyptian desert, near Al-Alamayn. This was the forty-first such monument. It was a gift to the Egyptian government from Ethiopia and commemorates the budding friendship between the two peoples of the Nile. It is a 30-meter-tall obelisk, whose shape evokes both the timeless Egyptian monuments and those of the city of Aksum, the heart of the ancient Ethiopian kingdom. Unlike the other obelisks, this one is uniquely adorned and features several inscriptions in some twenty official languages of the African continent. Until now, the stelae were simple, unadorned monuments, most of them built by the Egyptian government itself, with the goal of completing this forest of black basalt stelae by 2135. But in recent years, other countries have joined the effort and decided to offer their own stelae to Egypt as diplomatic gifts. Furthermore, instead of building the stelae one by one (one per year), it was decided to get a head start and quickly construct the majority of the missing stelae, storing them in Cairo until they can be erected on site. The project has grown so significant that its main founders have decided to increase the final number of stelae to 366 instead of the 101 originally planned. The monument will therefore be completed in 2400. A few hundred meters from the main entrance, a trench has been dug, in which engraved tablets, bas-reliefs, and so-called Rosetta stones are stored, to be buried there eventually. These artifacts contain inscriptions of all kinds, including equations, mathematical theorems, scientific laws, messages of goodwill, and excerpts from literary works from around the world. Everything is written simultaneously in the six official languages of the UN (English, French, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and Mandarin), as well as in Hindi, Japanese, Javanese, and Kiswahili. A replica of the famous Rosetta Stone, provided by the British Museum, has even been stored alongside the rest. The basalt forest is thus one of Egypt’s most ambitious recent projects, built both to commemorate the exceptional longevity of its structures and to leave a lasting mark of contemporary civilization, involving several successive generations of builders—much like cathedrals, the Great Wall of China, and, of course, the Great Pyramids.