Like a surfacing whale, a vast decrepit hulk emerges from the earth, reassembling itself, lying, like a whale, along the ridge of the crest, gathering bulk and strength. The building grows younger very gradually as the two materials, concrete and steel, protect and reinforce each other. It rises sheer out of the surrounding forest, the lowest stories a part of the forest and inhabited by animals, a few more floors harboring birds and insects, but in its enormous height it is unlike anything around it. For many centuries, no humans approach it, and it plays no part in the rapid recycling of materials in the surrounding vegetation, since it was built, well built, to resist decay. We are nearing its period of habitation.
Small communities appear nearby along the coast line, and occasionally the site is visited.
A linear city, creeping across the continent, pauses for a couple of years when it reaches the sea to strip all remaining valuables from the tower, and winds its way back inland. Smaller buildings, grouped around the larger, spring out of the ground, and pathways of roads and a highway leading far inland become visible. Fragments of the surface cladding of glass reappear on the massive frame, its brilliant color clashing harshly with the forest. Small groups of huts speckle the countryside as the desperate nomadic refugees from the old cities track subsistence from spot to spot, avoiding the building except to explore and deface it. The sea, which throughout our backward observation has been reversing its slow cleansing processes, is now heavily defiled, changing color and brightness as pollutants thicken on its surface.