>See the 19th century dystopian novel, Caesar's Column.
Author: Ignatius Donnelly under the pseudonym of Edmund Boisgilbert.
Several fragments:
"Here I am, at last, in the great city. My eyes are weary with gazing, and my mouth speechless with admiration; but in my brain rings perpetually the thought: Wonderful! - wonderful! - most wonderful! [...] But our admiration may be here, and our hearts elsewhere. And so from all this glory and splendor I turn back to the old homestead, amid the high mountain valleys of Africa; to the primitive, simple shepherd-life; [...] But my dream is gone. The roar of the mighty city rises around me like the bellow of many cataracts . . ."
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"As we approached it in our air-ship, coming from the east, we could see, a hundred miles before we reached the continent, the radiance of its millions of magnetic lights, reflected on the sky, like the glare of a great conflagration"
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"The chief features in the expression of the men were incredulity, unbelief, cunning, observation, heartlessness. I did not see a good face in the whole room: powerful faces there were, I grant you; high noses, resolute mouths, fine brows; all the marks of shrewdness and energy; a forcible and capable race; but that was all. I did not see one, my dear brother of whom I could say, 'That man would sacrifice himself for another; that man loves his fellow man'. [...] I pitied them. I pitied mankind, caught in the grip of such widespreading tendencies. I said to myself: 'Where is it all to end? What are we to expect of a race without heart or honor."
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"I thought how thin a crust of earth separated all this splendor from that burning hell of misery beneath it. And if the molten mass of horror should break its limitations and overflow the earth! Already it seemed to me the planet trembled; flood of wrath and hunger pouring through these halls; cataracts of misery bursting through every door and window, and sweeping away all this splendour into never-ending blackness and ruin."
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"Now the fire pours through every door, and window and crevice; the roof crackles; the walls totter; the heat of hell rages within the edifice; it is doomed; there is no power on earth that can save it; it must go down into ashes. What can you do or I do? What will it avail the world if we rush into the flames and perish? No; we witness the working-out of great causes which we did not create. When man permits the establishment of self-generated evil he must submit to the effect. Our ancestors were blind, indifferent, heartless. We live in the culmination of their misdeeds. They have crawled into their graves and drawn the earth over them, and the flowers bloom on their last resting-places, and we are the inheritors of the hurricane which they invoked."
Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213