They found the strangest things in the most public places.
They found a broken down jeep in Ancient Rome
this shiny new thing that glinted on the horizon
and sat in park, so stubbornly out of place
like it ought to have been on a rested incline
as a feature in some game show
and they didn't know a thing about this car
they called it a commanded box of steel
they didn't know that Jeep meant general purpose vehicle
or that it was an SUV
and that people from our time bought them because they wanted to
be prepared for purposes most fuel efficient vehicles couldn't handle
purposes most of them would never really need
like off-road, skidding and four wheel driving and listening to music
travelling at the speed of
chariots on crack
The jeep made things pretty bad pretty early
they got the motor to run
and decoded basic English, finding it suspiciously redolent
of their own
in order to read the owner's manual in the glovebox
the part most of us ridicule for even having to explain
'Fill the gas tank (picture bellow) with petroleum'
but that great endevour met a great wall
and the greatest philosophers
politicians and alchemists looked embarassing trying to figure out
how to work the damned thing
And the man who finally suggested that the 'gas tank'
must be filled with a liquid fuel
went on to be proclaimed
a god among men
And the man who extracted the fabled fuel from the gas tank
without damaging the vehicle (there was one political faction
who wished to destroy and incinerate the machine without caring to preserve or study it, and yet another who wished to leave it in it's place without studying it,
saying that they themselves would not contemplate destroying the machine
fearing their legacy to be one of ignomitity if they did)
And the man who
and, by some miracle of inspiration,
replicated