There are probably more neolithic sites in Portugal than anywhere else in Europe. While I was trying to locate a large neolithic site near Evora, Samantha guided me beneath a freeway. Highways like this in Portugal are great for long distance travelers—they automatically dock the toll out of a device in your car—but carry little traffic and are essentially public works projects that are highways to nowhere.

Staring up at the freeway silhouetted to infinity against the sky, I mused on how ephemeral it all is. The megalith shown below is from a neolithic installation that is perhaps 25,000 years old. No one knows what it really was for; maybe, like Stonehenge it was part of some kind of large astronomical measurement site. For neolithic man, moving these huge stones into position on a hillside surrounded by cork trees must have been a tremendous undertaking.

In years to come, freeways to nowhere may also decay, get covered with lichen, disconnect and become fragmentary. Then people from the future (if there are any) may wonder about who built these huge structure at such great effort, and to what end (does the gap stretching towards infinity between the lanes point at a specific star?)

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley put this best in Ozymandius (written in the early 1800s):

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”