Here we lie, guarding.
We guarded in our youth as the temple flourished, a proud monument to our patroness, Serapis, after the painstaking excavation from our stony womb. Though the wash of seas separated us from the land of our conception, a humming vitality fortified us, imbuing us with a glimmering awareness of our significance, stoic protectors of a testament to the glory of our civilisation.
Warfare? A mere momentary lapse in our reign, as the temple behind was restored to its formidable majesty. But perhaps that was the germ of our demise. Perhaps we should have shattered our nonchalant dormancy, and sprung off those plinths, and cleaved a gory path through the throngs with the swipe of a claw. Our cousins, perhaps, would have woven a sticky web of logic about their subjects. How many feet in the morning, noon, evening? Man, after all, is an eternally fluctuating kind, the only inevitability a shared death. We, on the other hand? Constant, perpetual, unchanging. Carved in stone.
As the centuries inhaled and exhaled around us, our splendour faded. No longer did the temple denote a stronghold of the traditional faith, but a revolting concomitant of lawless paganism. Our disciples protested, filled with righteous indignation, yet met fiercer opposition. The blows fell; our temple was defiled. Outwardly, it was the destruction of statues, the destruction of a sanctified space. But the anger was yet more impure – it clogged a place once as clean as a harmonious cataract tumbling over itself. Still we lay, helpless to quell the tumult behind us.
It was this same clash, between the new ideas and the old, that soaked our foundations in blood and horror through the flickering revolutions of days and years. Eventually, as we stared impassively out, it all came tumbling down. Whether toppled or eroded by the relentless whip of baking air, it was all raised to the ground. Rubble. Why not us, then?
Why, when a civilisation has returned to the soil it grew from, are its guards spared? Why are the great walls, monuments, relics, left to struggle through modernity alone, burdened by the desperate knowledge that our single purpose was thwarted?
Who could understand the torment of staring always forwards, staring into the future, unable to turn to mourn the decay of the stones we were conceived to defend? The sound of fragments of rock showering down, the ugly smell of smouldering wreckage, the arid taste of dust-choked air, the scraping embrace of time; all point at a gradual and permanent dereliction that we can never witness.
Today, a steady trickle of visitors gaze impassively at us, and at what lies behind us, or rather what no longer does. Each day, as more grains of our bodies disintegrate, the yearning to join the dust beneath deepens, as we draw closer to a final reunion with our fallen charge.
If we were to look back, breaking the bondage of our rock-hewn confines, what would we see? A single column, towering alone above uneven ground, a foreign interloper resting on the foundations of our temple? We do not guard it.
We guard what is now nothing more than a shadow of a memory.
This is what we believe. But we have never seen the temple. We never will.
Another man walked from the depths into the future, willing himself to always look forwards. But in the end, he failed. He looked back.
Nothing was there.
