The small town of Nanaimo, British Columbia, sits quietly on the edge of Vancouver Island, just a short ferry ride from the mainland. A trip to the local museum mostly shows off fun local events, like its annual bathtub boat races, and the town’s history of involvement in the coal and logging industries. But a small pedestal in the middle containing a handful of artifacts hints at one of the darkest stories in Nanaimo’s past, something that few residents are old enough to remember.

The tale of Brother XII and the cult he created just south of Nanaimo, the Aquarian Foundation, features conspiracy, fraud, adultery, and treasure. Lots of treasure. In fact, this treasure might still be hidden somewhere around this island.

Edward Arthur Wilson, later known as Brother XII, grew up in England in the late 19th century, and spent the first part of his adulthood traveling and sailing all over the world. Wilson met and married Margery Clark in New Zealand in 1902, and the couple had two children before moving to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1907. Some five years later, Wilson abandoned his family to become a sailor; his extensive sailing experience in the following years saw Wilson promoted to navigator and later captain. But at the same time, Wilson became obsessed with religious study, especially the occult.

In 1924, years of theosophy, occult studies, and travel came to a head for Wilson when he retired from seamanship and landed in a small town in the south of France. A series of visions came to Wilson during his stay in the village, and he concluded that he was communicating with one of the Masters of Wisdom—a group of deities that are also referred to by various New Age groups as the Great White Brotherhood. Wilson believed that one of these Brothers (the twelfth Brother, in fact) had taken him on as a disciple. In recognition of his new status, Wilson took on the name that would become the myth: Brother XII.

Over the next few years, Brother XII would create the Aquarian Foundation, publish his spiritual writings, and return to North America to gather followers. In April, 1927, the first group of Foundation members met in Vancouver, British Columbia, and sailed to Nanaimo, a small village on Vancouver Island. The Aquarian Foundation grew at a rapid pace, and Brother XII’s charismatic manner attracted rich and powerful men and women from all over North America. Mary Connally, a wealthy socialite from North Carolina, was particularly enthralled with Brother XII; her first donation to the Foundation was a $25,000 check. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the equivalent of nearly $350,000 in 2016.

The group later spread to nearby DeCourcy Island and Valdes Island, just across the Salish Sea from Cedar-by-the-Sea, the small town south of Nanaimo in which the Aquarian Foundation first settled. Despite all of this growth, some members began to distrust Brother XII and his leadership. Some thought that he was wasting money on construction projects all over the various settlements, and forcing members to do much of the work. Brother XII had also started an affair with a new member of the colony, Myrtle Baumgartner, and started changing his teachings to allow for such behavior.

All of this led some members of the Foundation to become restless with Brother XII’s antics, and a group of members attempted legal action against him, to varying degrees of success. Despite the rift among the Foundation’s members, Brother XII still had many loyal followers both in the colony and around the world. All members paid monthly membership fees, and those that moved to the colony were often required to hand over everything they had to Brother XII. Many members were then given various jobs around the islands, from working on ships to tending to animals on the farm on DeCourcy.  

Brother XII met and became enthralled with a mysterious woman named Mabel Skottowe, who later took the name Madame Z after joining the colony. The other members strongly disliked and feared Madame Z—she was notorious for using her riding crop on members of the colony that she deemed unsatisfactory. Madame Z eventually left her husband, a wealthy poultry farmer that had already given nearly $100,000 to the Foundation, for Brother XII.

As the colony grew and the money flowed in, Brother XII grew paranoid about using banks—one of his many prophecies predicted the downfall of the banking system. Brother XII then started to have members exchange paper money for gold coins, usually American gold eagle coins ($10 and $20 denominations) that were still in circulation at the time.

Brother XII devised a method with Madame Z that would allow him to store and transport his gold easily—to stop his enemies from stealing it, of course. They would fill mason jars to the brim with the gold eagle coins, then seal them up by pouring melted paraffin wax in with the coins to keep everything in place. Those jars were then placed in wooden boxes with rope handles, for easy transport. Brother XII would secretly move these boxes onto his tugboat Khuenaten in the dead of night, transporting his treasure and burying it in different locations around the islands.  

As Brother XII and Madame Z continued their tyrannical rule over the Foundation, members again started to grow weary, fearful, and angry towards their leader. As Brother XII became more and more paranoid, he turned Valdes Island into a fortress and forced members of the Foundation to take up arms in defense of it. Another group of scared and angry members fled the colony and filed a lawsuit against Brother XII in Nanaimo.

The legal proceedings that followed were quite dramatic, in true Brother XII fashion. One story said that an attorney that was suing Brother XII suddenly collapsed during a hearing, followed by an entire row of people behind him, like they had been “knocked out.” Many attributed this event to Brother XII and his the powers that he had been given by the Great White Lodge. In 1933, a judge eventually ruled in the ex-Foundation members’ favor. But the members were unable to collect the money awarded to them in the suit, as they found out that Brother XII and Madame Z had fled the colony.

The mysterious couple left a path of destruction in their wake, ransacking and breaking as much as they could before leaving. Not only did they destroy nearly the entire colony, Brother XII and Madame Z even used dynamite to sink their prized sailboat, the Lady Royal, into the lagoon outside of DeCourcy. They eventually returned to England, before emigrating to Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in August of 1934. According to a death certificate signed by a Swiss doctor (conveniently, a member of the Aquarian Foundation), Edward Arthur Wilson died on November 7, 1934, in his apartment in Neuchâtel.

But there were a number of post-mortem sightings of Brother XII, most notably by Donald Cunliffe, son of Foundation member Frank Cunliffe, who describes seeing Brother XII aboard a ship in San Francisco in 1936. A number of people, both Aquarian Foundation members and outsiders, who were familiar with the story at the time were quite skeptical about the circumstances surrounding Brother XII’s supposed death.

Whether or not he died in that apartment in Neuchâtel or at a later date in a faraway place, what happened to Brother XII’s treasure?

John Oliphant, author of Brother XII: The Strange Odyssey of a 20th-century Prophet, the definitive source on the subject, estimated Brother XII’s hoard of gold coins to be worth about $400,000. That’s just under $6 million in 2016. This number isn’t definitive, but Oliphant told me via Skype that it was corroborated by a handful of contemporary accounts.

The sheer weight of all that gold was surely difficult to transport, though Brother XII did often move it around the islands with the help of his most devoted followers. But to move so many heavy boxes of glass jars full of gold from the islands of British Columbia to Switzerland seems like a tough task for a handful of people.

An easy, boring answer is probably that Brother XII simply had a method of either transporting it all at once or little by little, with the help of some of his few remaining loyal followers. He could have deposited the money in banks around North America or England, or left it with family. Considering the circumstances, it sounds plausible that a secretive, greedy, egomaniac would have kept a tight hold on the money he swindled from his followers, and he did end up in a country notorious for anonymous and protective banking laws.

But treasure hunters have held out hope for years that Brother XII simply had to leave some gold behind. He had moved it around the islands so often, isn’t it possible that it could still be on one of them, hidden so well that it has still yet to be found? According to Oliphant, many people have gone searching for the treasure—exploring mysterious caves on the islands near the colony, or diving in the lagoon near DeCourcy where Brother XII sunk his sailboat while making his escape. But Oliphant only has anecdotes; none of his treasure-hunter sources relayed detailed stories.

In Oliphant’s book, he tells a story from a man named Dion Sepulveda, who had worked as a servant to Brother XII after his family joined the colony. Sepulveda had helped Brother XII build a cement block on an islet just off the coast of DeCourcy Island, and he told Oliphant about the ceremony that Brother XII held around this block. What is not mentioned in the book, Oliphant tells me, is that Sepulveda says Brother XII stored some of his gold in that cement. When Oliphant was researching his book, he eventually found the block—but it was cracked open, hollow but empty.

Much later, Oliphant’s friend related to him a story about a mysterious old sea captain known only to Nanaimo residents as “The Captain.” According to this friend, The Captain claimed to have found Brother XII’s treasure, and said he was keeping it in a safety deposit box in a bank near downtown Vancouver. Oliphant told me that he was never able to track down the man and confirm this, but according to the friend, The Captain had said that he had found the gold on or near Valdes Island—and it was encased in a block of cement.

Perhaps the definitive story, though, is one that suggests that no treasure is to be found. A caretaker for one of the DeCourcy colony’s few remaining residents discovered a trapdoor beneath a small building used as a chicken coop. The man ripped up the floorboards, remembering the many stories of Brother XII’s tendency to hide his treasure in such ways. But when he found the hiding place, he found no gold, just a rolled-up piece of paper.

“Scrawled in chalk on the dark surface was a final message from Brother XII, an angry shout from the past,” Oliphant’s book reports: “For fools and traitors—nothing!”

It’s considerate to cover your mouth and nose when you feel a sneeze coming along, especially with the cold and flu season lurking around the corner. And that's been the case since at least 1945, when the Ministry of Information for Ministry of Health in Britain warned of the dangers of sneezing in this jocular public health trailer.  

The department released a series of amusing health campaign films in the late 1940s to educate people on the spread of disease. In the clip above, titled “Coughs and Sneezes,” a man with a sizable nose sneezes loudly in crowded areas. The narrator explains how sneezers like him “are not a nuisance. They’re a real danger.” The menacing sneezer is pulled aside, gets doused with pepper, and is taught how to properly cover his nose and mouth with a hanky.

Between the Public Health Act of 1848 and the launch of the National Health Service in 1948, public health initiatives were at an all-time high. Posters emblazoned with the popular slogan “Coughs and Sneezes Spreads Diseases” could be seen everywhere around England. More films were made, titled "Modern Guide to Health" and "Jet Propelled Germs." While disease and infection are no laughing matter, the health film campaign succeeded in capturing the public with a touch of humor.

With the success of the “Coughs and Sneezes” trailer, the confused sneezing actor became the star of all the health propaganda films, including one in which learns how to clean his handkerchiefs in a bowl of disinfectant (after being admonished for trying to drink it):

He also demonstrates how to safely cross a busy street.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

After a second date in 1908 with a suitor named Ray Smith, Carol Pardee, the privileged granddaughter of Oakland mayor Enoch Pardee, took out her notebook and, with careless spelling, wrote her opinion about the boy: “To big a sport. Talks to much.”

Later in the year, she met Frank Haudel. Verdict: “[t]oo dirty. Teeth are green.” On January 16th, 1911, after a date with Wyman Smith from Sacramento, she wrote a one-word summary of the courter: “FOOL.”

These pithy reviews—others range from “dandy” to “tiresome” to the frequently used single-word dismissal of “mutt”—are still on display at The Pardee House museum in Oakland in Carol Pardee’s Chap Record, a small volume bound in green and gold with a dapper gentlemen doffing a hat on the cover.

The Chap Record was a mostly blank book with sections to be filled out by the “girl of the period”—things like Name, Date, Place, and Opinion. In the front was a section for the Twelve Most Notable Chaps. Published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company in 1898, it sold for a dollar. 

The title page of the Chap Record had this rhyme, which pretty perfectly sums up its role:

Behold herein, all nice and neat,
A record of the men I meet,
Among them all perhaps, there be,
Who knows, the “not impossible” He.

A few filled-out Chap Records are still hanging around in small museums and historical societies around the country. The Natick Historical Society in Massachusetts has one that was once owned by a woman named Marion Pooke that spans 20 years of dates. The archive of the Texarkana Museum has one by a woman named Aileen who called her suitors either “true blue” (positive) or “fickle” (negative). The one housed in the Harvey County Historical Museum and Archive in Kansas was filled out by 17-year-old Juliette Roff, and it focused more on the positive than negative of her suitors. “Cynical,” she writes for one, “but has lots of good traits.”

While these Chap Records are interesting glimpses into the minds of high-society women, they're also markers in the shifting dynamic in American society from courtship to the kind of dating we know today. Previous to this era, “courtship” involved one man and one woman from the same community being urged by their families to go on a series of dates in the hopes that they'd be comfortable enough with each other to get married. These get-to-know-yous were held in homes, with others keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings.

As Moira Weigel points out in her book Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, it wasn't until 1896 that the word “date” enters the lexicon to its current meaning. (It came from writer George Ade in a short story in The Chicago Record about a neglected boyfriend, worried about other guys “fillin' all my dates” with his gal.) This change in cultural norms was so great, in fact, that police were still arresting young men and women meeting together in public, who'd felt the only way to get any privacy was away from their prying family members at home.

Once this concept of “dating” became more accepted—as well as the idea that it was no longer forbidden for men and women to go on multiple dates with multiple people—the dating economy took off. As Weigel writes, “[f]or the first time in human history, dating made it necessary to buy things in order to get face time with a prospective partner.” The Chap Record was an early entry in the new business of courtship; the first ones sold for a buck just in time for Christmas shopping season.

Perhaps most telling about the Chap Records that survive on the dusty shelves of the small museums throughout the country are just how unexciting they are. The entries are always brief, seemingly rushed, the work of people who feel obligated to write something but can't quite muster up the enthusiasm. As such, they reveal only unimportant sliver of the writers. In Carol Pardee's case, before her death from influenza in 1920, she'd gotten engaged to Jerry Hadar, a prominent attorney in Oakland. He is not mentioned anywhere in her Chap Record.  As always, some things are best left away from prying eyes, even ones coming from a century into the future.

In Havana, Cuba, street art is relatively rare. The city is full of derelict, sometimes abandoned buildings that in other cities might have been used as canvases for graffiti, but tags or murals are found only infrequently in the Cuban capital. In some neighborhoods, though, haunting figures live on Havana's walls, the product of a young street art movement, led by just a handful of artists.

One of the most prolific and noted is Yulier Rodriguez, who signs his work Yulier P. His pieces feature alien-like creatures with bulbous heads, sometimes more than one, and large searching eyes. Rodriguez said they are akin to souls or fables. They suffer. They wonder. They might be in pain or in a moment of contemplation. They're rarely happy, though.

They peer out of their other-world into Havana but they rarely seem to see it, caught up instead in an internal melancholy.

Rodriguez first started adorning Havana's streets about three years ago. He had been creating art in the studio, looking for a way to express his own experiences, when he began making these expressionist forms. He had met another artist who was working on the street, and he started experimenting.

He has spoken of the “stage fright” that he encountered in his early public work, but now, just a few years later, his art is hidden in plain sight throughout the city, both in wealthier neighborhoods and in some of the poorest.

For his pieces, Rodriguez chooses buildings and walls that have fallen into disrepair: his intent is to add color and aesthetic qualities back to the city as it crumbles. He also looks for spots that are as visible as possible, in part to promote the idea of street art in Cuba.

The pieces don't start with the place, but with an idea: “My ideas or scenes are already drawn or preconceived in sketches,” he says. When he finds a wall with the right characteristics, he can “adapt the idea to the architectural aesthetics of the space,” he says, putting the personality of the destroyed wall and the piece’s design in dialogue.

From time to time, Rodriguez's work is painted over, sometimes by public authorities, sometimes by well-meaning private people, and sometimes by religious detractors who see his figures as devilish. But spend even a bit of time in Havana, and you'll be able to find them.

Rodriguez's art isn't political enough that he's been told to stop (although occasionally the police come by to check on what he's doing), but what he's doing is new enough in Cuba that, he says, like any activity that’s not officially sanctioned by the government, it's looked on with suspicion.

Rodriguez shares a studio on the Prado, a major boulevard that connects Old and Central Havana, where he also works with other self-taught artists to bring art to the community. These days, he sees little difference between the work he does in the studio and on the street. “I think my work has the same intention,” he says, no matter the venue. A viewer’s interpretation may vary, though, depending on the place where they encounter his work. Either way, the intention is the same: to spark conversation.

Mariana Zapata contributed reporting to this article.

Dr. Alois Pichler was almost always surrounded by books. In 1869, Pichler, originally from Bavaria, became the so-called “extraordinary librarian” of the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg, Russia, a prestigious position that gave him a salary three times higher than the average librarian: 3,000 rubles.

While many librarians have a deep appreciation for books, Pichler was afflicted with a specific irrepressible illness. A few months after Pichler took his position at the library, the staff discovered that an alarming number of books were disappearing from the collection. They suspected theft. Guards noticed that Pichler had been acting strangely—dropping books by the exit and hurriedly returning them to the shelves, refusing to remove his large overcoat, leaving the library several times within a day—and started paying close attention to him.

On March, 1871, over 4,500 stolen library books on everything from perfume making to theology were found in his possession, Pichler committing the largest known library theft on record.

Pichler was put on trial, where his lawyer alleged that the librarian was not in control of his behavior, explains Mary Stuart in the journal Libraries & Culture. He was influenced by a “peculiar mental condition, a mania not in the legal or medical sense, but in the ordinary sense of a violent, irresistible, unconquerable passion,” writes Stuart. This defense was designed to mitigate his punishment, but it didn’t work.  

Pichler, who was found guilty and exiled to Siberia, was a victim of “bibliomania,” a dark pseudo-psychological illness that swept through the upper classes in Europe and England during the 1800s. Symptoms included a frenzy for culling and hunting down first editions, rare copies, books of certain sizes or printed on specific paper.

“Any obsession can become real disease,” says David Fernández, rare book librarian at Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. “One of the aspects that can really be an issue is the financial aspect, even back then.”

The social elite and scholars did everything they could to obtain and collect books—no matter the price. Some collectors spent their entire fortunes to build their personal libraries. While it was never medically classified, people in the 1800s truly feared bibliomania. There are several written accounts, fictional and real, of bibliomania, but the most famous and bizarre documentation is by Reverend Thomas Frognell Dibdin, an English book lover and victim of the neurosis. In 1809 he published Bibliomania; or Book Madness, a series of strange, rambling fictional dialogues based on conversations and real collectors Dibdin had encountered.

“I think a very good word to describe the book is that it’s very bizarre,” says Fernández, who has studied his library’s preserved copy of the 1809 first edition. “It’s a product of the generation in which it appears.” On the title page of the book, an engraving depicts a "book fool," a character originally featured in the 1498 book, Ship of Fools, the first work of fiction to reference the discovery of the new world. That character is described as a vain book collector, the story touching on madness among scholars and collectors, explains Fernández.

According to Reverend Dibdin, the “book-plague” had reached its height in Paris and London in 1789. After the French Revolution in 1799, French aristocrats sold their estates to flee from the country and many private libraries emptied their shelves. Auction catalogs in the 18th century were teeming with French books, explains Fernández. Prices of fine antiquarian texts at least quadrupled in this period, wrote Philip Connell in the journal Representations.

Men and some women collectors purchased books to conserve and preserve Europe’s literary heritage, while others did so as a symbol of wealth and power. At this time, constructing books was a delicate and laborious art completed by hand—from cutting the paper to creating the binding—which added value.

Then as now, collectors desired certain books for highly specific reasons—like the typefaces they used. One favored calligraphic style was known as “black letter.” Scottish poet and writer Robert Pearse Gillies recorded in his 1851 memoir: “There had sprung up a kind of mania for purchasing black letter volumes, although the purchasers themselves, from year’s end to year’s end, did not read, far less write, fifty pages consecutively.”

Then, there was the group of collectors who wanted books for the mere lust of possession. In Bibliomania; or Book Madness, Dibdin describes the symptoms of bibliomania, dramatizing a rather convincing make-believe pathology. He even uses medical language as if it were an actual malady. Dibdin points out eight particular types of books that collectors obsessed over: first editions, true editions, black letter printed books, large paper copies; uncut books with edges that are not sheared by binder’s tools; illustrated copies; unique copies with morocco binding or silk lining; and copies printed on vellum.

In addition to his book collecting and writing, the Reverend founded the Roxburghe Club of book lovers, which became known for secondhand book trading that defined and propagated bibliomania. “Dibdin was the most notorious diagnostician—and indeed victim—of the bibliophilic neurosis afflicting the British upper classes in the Romantic period,” writes Connell.

While others wrote books about bibliomania, including Gustave Flaubert’s Bibliomanie, which dramatized the legendary Spanish monk biblio-criminal who murdered a rival bookseller, Dibdin’s remains the pivotal piece that provided commentary on the time period. “It is the seminal work in the history of book collecting,” says Fernández. “It’s satirical, but not to the point of being humorous. It’s more like a critical reading of the notion of collecting.”

Bibliomania; or Book Madness contains many characters, but primarily follows Lisardo, a wealthy, fatherless young man who frankly confesses to being “an arrant bibliomaniac.” When he is introduced to a particularly glorious library filled with rare, antique books, he succumbs to mania:

“Lisardo ran immediately to the book-case. He first eyed, with a greedy velocity, the backs of the folios and quartos; then the octavos; and, mounting an ingeniously-contrived mahogany rostrum, which moved with the utmost facility, he did not fail to pay due attention to the duodecimos; some of which were carefully preserved in Russia or morocco backs, with water-tabby silk linings, and other appropriate embellishments.”

Although fictional, the characters in Dibdin’s book have uncanny resemblances to real-life bibliomaniacs of the time. “When this book was published in 1809, you know that the reader was someone from the upper class, and they knew people like that,” says Fernández.

For instance, English book collector Richard Heber had eight houses bursting with over 146,000 rare books, a collection he spent a fortune on—around 100,000 pounds—beginning in 1804. Meanwhile, the book collecting of Sir Thomas Phillipps eventually landed his family in debt. Phillipps was obsessed with vellum manuscripts, and stated that he was on the hot pursuit of obtaining one copy of every book.

One of his contemporaries noted that Phillipps’ house had become a dilapidated swamp of books: “The state of things is really inconceivable. Lady P. is absent, and were I in her place, I would never return to so wretched abode,” the man reported. “Every room is filled with heaps of papers, [manuscripts], books, charters, packages, and other things, lying in heaps under your feet, piled upon tables, beds, chairs, ladders.”

Today, behavior like this seems more like hoarding. Indeed, some contemporary scholars have linked bibliomania with obsessive compulsive disorder. “It is clear that what can be seen here is not ‘normal’ collection behavior but something more serious,” wrote Anna Knuttson in the Journal of Art Crime. “The pleasure that hoarders take in collecting can be so profound that it might define a person’s self-image and even give the individual a life purpose.”

Dibdin believed that the cure to bibliomania would come with the commercialization of books. His prediction came true. Over time, the desire to accumulate, catalog, and preserve became less intense with the advent of more efficient steam engine-powered printing press technologies in the 1820s. But Dibdin’s commentary remains a cautionary tale, relevant for today’s obsessives.

Ironically, Bibliomania; or Book Madness was widely popular among Dibdin’s fellow book lovers, with collectors getting in reckless bidding wars at auctions over a copy. The book is said to have spurred a 42-day auction at the 1817 Roxburghe sale.

 

A photo posted by The Wildlife Center Of Texas (@wildlifecenteroftexas) on Nov 30, 2016 at 1:54pm PST

Alligator snapping turtles might be the most mesmerizing and simultaneously ugly creature on this planet. These freshwater turtles are powerful, heavy, and very large: they look like creatures dreamed up by a nightmare factory.

They often hang out with their mouths spread wide in their triangular beaked heads. Sometimes they’ll linger with their disgusting pond mouths at the murky bottom of a river and let their wormy tongues attract prey into their death-trap mouths. Coming face to face with one is like looking at an alien, demon, and dinosaur wrapped up into one awesome reptile.

As fearsome as they look, alligator snapping turtles, which are native the southeastern United States, are listed as a vulnerable species, in need of protection. In Houston, one in particular needed to be rescued after getting himself stuck in a water pipe.

“The pipe was dented at the opening, preventing the turtle from passing through; he struggled to keep his head up as water rushed over his body,” Patch reports.

It’s not exactly clear how he got there to begin with, but a local fire department and Houston wildlife rescue team were able to dislodge him, which involved pulling him out with a sort of grappling hook:

When they freed him, though, they found that several other alligator snapping turtles had died trying to get through the blocked pipe. The 53-pound guy who caused the blockage, though, is being treated at the Wildlife Center of Texas.

By the time John Muir and his trusty mule Brownie splashed across the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River in the fall of 1875, the Scottish-born naturalist had already seen his fair share of California grandiosity: Yosemite Valley; the high Sierra; Mariposa Grove. Muir had a thirst for exploration and a talent for storytelling. He founded the Sierra Club and dubbed its synonymous mountains the “Range of Light.” When Muir sauntered upon a montane plateau in what is now known as Sequoia National Park on that autumn day, he found a very large stand of very large trees. Drawing his poetry from the obvious he named it, quite simply, the Giant Forest.

The dominant feature of the Giant Forest is the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), the biggest tree on Earth. Thousands of them grow in this 2,300-acre grove, including five of the ten largest specimens in the world. They reach heights of nearly 300 feet; their trunks can span more than 30 feet; and they’re nearly impossible to miss if you’re tromping beneath their canopy. “In every direction Sequoia ruled the woods…” Muir waxed in Our National Parks, “a magnificent growth of giants grouped in pure temple groves.” And yet, at 4:00 a.m. on a warm August morning, our hearty group of scientists and climbers is having a tough time finding the damn things.

“I feel like we’ve gone too far,” says forest ecologist Wendy Baxter, 36, stopping the group. The ivory glow of a full moon offers enough illumination to hike without fear of face-planting, but it makes for a poor navigational beacon.

It’s the fourth day of two weeks of fieldwork led by Baxter and fellow forest ecologist Anthony Ambrose. Scientists at UC Berkeley’s Dawson Research Lab, the two are part of Leaf to Landscape, a program in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey, the National Park Service, and the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, that is focused on studying and managing the health of the giant sequoias.

California, of course, is in the middle of a historically punishing drought at a time when there’s never been more demand for water. According to the United States Forest Service, 62 million trees have died in California this year alone. Since 2011, a total of 102 million trees have perished, with tens of millions more on death's doorstep. California’s forests generate fundamental ecosystem services by creating healthy watersheds, providing wildlife habitat, and sequestering atmospheric carbon, and they’re dying at unprecedented rates. Even the great giant sequoias are showing concerning signs of stress. It’s Ambrose and Baxter’s goal to collect and analyze tree samples to understand how the sequoias are faring under these rapidly changing conditions, and what might be done to protect them. But first we have to find them.

“Have we come to any intersections at all?” asks Ambrose, 48, whose attention has been focused on answering my questions instead of spotting landmarks.

“I remember this tree, for sure,” someone chirps, a sentiment that seems more appropriate as an epitaph on a lost hiker’s headstone than as a vote of directional confidence. After a brief parley, we correct our course up a gentle rise, down into a shallow basin, and past a pair of landmarks, unmistakable even at this dark hour.

The path splits twin sylvan towers standing inches apart and hundreds of feet tall. It’s still too dark to marvel at their height, but the base of each tree inspires awe enough, gnarled and bulbous and swelling with woody knuckles the size of a Toyota Prius. A few hundred yards farther, the trail continues through the hollowed-out center of another sequoia. Fire, the great creator and destroyer, Kali of the Giant Forest, raged here long ago, burning out the tree’s core. The wound is enormous, 40 feet tall or more and nearly the size of the tree’s entire 12-foot diameter. Yet the grand monarch survived the blaze, which also would have cooked off the thick layers of duff that choke seedling growth, offering tiny sequoias a chance to one day touch the sky and survive their own infernos.

The group splits apart at the meadow, each climber heading to the tree they’ll be sampling. The scientists have targeted 50 sequoias for study—“the biggest, gnarliest trees in the forest,” Ambrose says—and this morning he’ll climb a 241-footer. In most other forests a tree like this would be a star attraction with an honorific name and perhaps even a viewing area. Here, it’s simply known as “tree 271.” 

Ambrose has striking blue eyes and wears a woodsman’s beard with a chinstrap of white whiskers. He slides on his climbing harness and tugs the rope anchored to the crown some 24 stories above. He’s been studying trees for more than two decades, first with a focus on coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) as an undergraduate and master’s student at Humboldt State University, and then on giant sequoias for his doctoral and post-doc work at Berkeley. “From an aesthetic perspective to a biological one, these trees are some of the most spectacular organisms on the planet,” he says with the enthusiasm of a boxing promoter. “They are the pinnacle of what a plant can become. They force you to think about life and your own place in it.”

He clips on a pair of jumar ascenders—mechanical devices that attach to the rope and allow him to pull himself up. “You can’t really understand the true character of a tree from the ground,” he says. Ambrose turns off his headlamp, cranes his head toward the canopy, and begins the long, dark climb into a world of mystery.

The giant sequoia has dominated its landscape for millions of years and captivated global imagination since the mid-19^th century when rumors of trees the size of fairy-tale beanstalks came roaring out of the Sierras. One of four redwood species, the giant sequoia is not the world’s tallest tree; that crown belongs to its northern cousin, the coast redwood. But in terms of sheer volume of biomass, no living organism ever to walk, swim, fly, or stand on this planet comes close. They are of such stature that people struggle to describe them and so compare them to other very big things: blue whales, 747s, dinosaurs, the Statue of Liberty, elephant herds, space shuttles. Giant sequoias make mice of them all.

More than 100 million years ago, when the planet was warmer and wetter, the sequoia’s earliest relatives thrived across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Redwood fossils have been found everywhere from Northern Mexico and the Canadian Arctic to England. During the late Miocene, some 10 to 20 million years ago, the closest direct ancestor of the giant sequoia lived in what is now southern Idaho and western Nevada. As the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range continued its uplift and the climate became drier, the giants’ range shrank. Today, the last remaining sequoias are limited to 75 groves scattered along a narrow belt of the western Sierra Nevada, some 15 miles wide by 250 miles long.

Giant sequoias are among the longest-living organisms on Earth. Though no one knows the trees’ absolute expiry date, the oldest ever recorded is 3,200 years old. Muir claimed to have found a stump with 4,000 tree rings, one per year. During their early years the trees are subject to predation and the volatile whims of nature. Once they reach adolescence after a few centuries, however, sequoias become well-nigh indestructible. Their bark is soft and fibrous and contains very little pitch, qualities that make the trees extremely resistant to fire. The tannins that give their wood a rich cinnamon hue also repel insects and fungi.

When a mature sequoia does die, mortality is usually a function of its marvelous size. Root rot can deprive a tree of a solid anchor and fire can undermine its base, but rarely will either actually kill a 30-story monarch. Gravity is the ultimate culprit, for a giant sequoia with an uncertain foundation faces a violent and certain end. The persistent tug of gravity can pull an unbalanced tree to the forest floor with such a thunderous crash that the reverberation can be heard miles away. The sequoia’s fate is an Icarian allegory, met not by flying too close to the sun, but by stretching too far from its roots.

Thanks largely to their ability to withstand disease and drought, it’s extremely rare for a giant sequoia to die standing upright. “You don’t get to be 2,000 years old without surviving a few dry spells,” Ambrose tells me. Which is exactly why United States Geological Survey forest ecologist Nate Stephenson was so alarmed when, in September 2014, he went for a walk in the Giant Forest and saw something unexpected.

“I had been saying with confidence for decades that if you hit a big drought, the first signs of climatic changes would show up in seedlings,” recalls Stephenson, who has studied trees in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks since 1979. “I was completely wrong.”

He surveyed an area that had burned a few years prior, where seedlings had taken root. Crawling around on his hands and knees, Stephenson was surprised to see that the seedlings were rigid and full of water, their leaves a vibrant blue-green. This was the third year of drought in California, and the summer of 2014 was particularly brutal. There should be some evidence of drought stress, he thought. Sitting on the ground, he leaned back, craned his head toward the heavens to ponder the mystery, and found his answer.

Above him stood a grand old monarch. The crown of the tree was almost entirely brown, a scale of dieback he’d never seen. He searched for other trees displaying similar stress and when he found one with branches close to the ground, he touched it. The foliage crumbled off. In more than 30 years of studying these trees Stephenson had only seen two die on their feet. Five years into the current drought, he’s now seen dozens of standing dead.  

Stephenson quickly assembled a team to survey the 2014 dieback before autumn storms could blow away the evidence. The National Park Service (NPS) enlisted Ambrose and Baxter to begin their fieldwork in 2015. While the NPS and scientists working in Montana’s Glacier National Park might already be resigned to a glacier-free future as the climate changes, no one is ready to consider the possibility of Sequoia without its namesake trees.   

“HEADACHE!!!” AMBROSE YELLS.

His warning, the tree-climbing vernacular for plummeting deadfall, fills the forest moments before a branch whooshes passed, inches from my head. It happens so quickly, the broken limb has already hit the ground before I have a chance to move.

“And that’s why we wear helmets when we work around trees,” he explains to the small group of us standing at the base of the sequoia.

The lessons come quickly on our first day of fieldwork. We set up on a steep hillside and Baxter demonstrates how to prepare the rigging for a climb. Tall and lean with a strong jawline and a soft voice, she’s as comfortable doing stable isotope analysis in the lab as she is setting a 600-foot static line in a tree. “I love the combination of physical exertion and intellectual stimulation,” she tells me. “It’s a struggle to get to the top of the tree. You’re sweating and huffing and puffing, but that’s when you start collecting your samples and the science begins.”

In 2015, Baxter and Ambrose did much of the work themselves, identifying and rigging 50 trees, making six climbs a day, and collecting samples and measurements from each one. Their days began at 2:30 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m.—if they were lucky. “That was brutal,” Baxter recalls.

They have more help this time around. Over the course of two weeks, more than a dozen volunteers—students, professional arborists, climbing junkies—will rotate in and out. The schedule, while not nearly as frantic as the previous year, is aggressive. We wake up at 3 a.m. and begin our hike from the Crescent Meadow parking lot into the Giant Forest an hour later. After climbing trees and taking and analyzing samples all day, we head back to our campground for some R&R before collapsing into bed. 

The immediate goal is to understand the severity of water stress the trees are facing, the water content in the leaves, and the amount of the stable carbon-13 (¹³C) isotope the tree uses during photosynthesis, which offers additional insight into how the trees are coping with drought. With that information, scientists and park officials can assess the trees’ health and begin to think about ways to protect giant sequoias through practices like controlled burns, which clear the ground for seedlings and eliminate less fire-resistant trees that compete for water.   

Ambrose’s first exposure to forest management came as a wildland firefighter following his senior year of high school in Chico, California. The experience, he recalls, involved “hours of boredom followed by long stretches of terror,” and gave him a first-hand look at how a policy of aggressive fire suppression can have an adverse effect on forest ecosystems. 

For more than a century, the government’s approach toward forest fire has been one of suppression. But indiscriminately stamping out frequent, less intense, naturally occurring fires disrupts the natural process of consumption and rejuvenation that species like giant sequoias need to thrive. It also allows dangerous levels of fuels to pile up—until one explosive holocaust vaporizes everything. “You get these large landscape conversions, conifer forests turning into brush,” Ambrose says.

In 2013, the Rim Fire swept through the Sierras, consuming more than 257,000 acres. It was the third largest fire in California’s recorded history and burned for 15 months. It never reached Sequoia National Park, but it did sweep through parts of Yosemite some 100 miles north. As a precautionary measure, officials even set sprinklers around of some of Yosemite’s giant sequoias in case the fire got too close.

Giant sequoias, like all trees, play a central role in the hydrologic cycle. Storms drop rain and snow, which giant sequoias can chug to the tune of 800 gallons per day—more than any other tree. As the trees draw water out of the ground, the air surrounding the leaves draws water through the trees and, eventually, back into the atmosphere. That process, called transpiration, creates tension within the tree’s water columns. The drier the atmosphere and the less groundwater available, the higher the tension. Under extreme drought conditions, when that tension grows too high, those columns of water can snap like a rubber band. Gas bubbles form, creating an embolism that prevents the flow of water up the trunk. If this happens enough, a tree will shed its leaves and can, eventually, die.

To measure water tension and other biological processes, climbers sample each tree twice a day, once under cool pre-dawn conditions when the tree is least stressed, and once under the heat of the midday sun. The scientists clip foliage from the lower and upper canopies, which allows them to assess conditions at different parts of the tree.

After the safety talk and rigging demonstration, Ambrose grabs a laminated map from his pack and assigns the climbers to their trees. Pulling on a forest-green arborist harness, he clips a pouch onto each hip to carry his samples. Then he steps into the foot straps attached to the ascenders and begins the climb.

His arms, legs, and core work in an assembly line of movement. Hanging on the rope in a crouch, he slides his right arm up, follows with his left, pulls his knees to his chest, and stands up straight in the stirrups, at which point he repeats the routine—scores of times on his way to the top. Climbers call it “jugging,” a process as onomatopoeically laborious as it sounds.

About 100 feet up, Ambrose stops at the lower canopy, marked by the first significant limbs, which can grow up to six feet in diameter. He clips a handful of tiny branches, puts them into a plastic bag, shoves the bag into his hip pouch, and continues climbing. The tree’s leaves regulate gas exchange through tiny pores called stomata. The stomata take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen and water vapor. When a tree becomes too water-stressed it closes its stomata. This stops water loss through transpiration but also prevents the tree from absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide and using it for photosynthesis. Sequoias have vast carbon stores to help them weather these lean times, but if the stomata stay closed for too long, the trees will eventually starve to death.

As Ambrose works in the tree, I take a short hike up to the top of a hill just above the study site, where the cost of California’s drought reveals itself in spectacular panorama. The Middle Fork of the Kaweah River plummets from the high Sierra into the agricultural empire of the San Joaquin Valley. Polished granite swells and the jagged sawtooth mountains of the Great Western Divide dominate the horizon; pine, fir, and cedar trees blanket the river basin. The colors are rich and electric, but they don’t all sit right. In a sea of green, huge islands of red metastasize across the landscape. These ochre forests are not sequoia. They are thousands and thousands and thousands of dead trees. 

Numerically speaking, giant sequoias constitute a small portion of California’s forest. A few weeks before my foray with Ambrose and Baxter, I hopped on a survey flight with Greg Asner, principal investigator at the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), to get a better understanding of what’s happening to trees across the entire state and what that might indicate for the future of the sequoias.

Asner, 48, runs a flying laboratory called the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System, a Dornier 228 airplane tricked out with $12 million of custom-built equipment that allows the CAO to measure the composition, chemistry, and structure of a forest in detail and efficiency that, not long ago, was relegated to the realm of science fiction. “In California,” said Asner, “we have exact numbers on 888 million trees.”

We met at 7:30 a.m. at Sacramento’s McClellan Air Park. Dressed in snappy black flight suits, Asner and his four-man team were going through last-minute checks and waiting for the sun to climb higher in the sky, which would allow for more accurate measurements. The goal for the day: map a 3,600-square-mile section of northern California forest.

Collecting such voluminous amounts of detailed data requires a unique toolbox. The plane itself is geared toward special mission work with its high-payload capacity and short takeoff and landing capabilities. An imaging spectrometer, resting atop a hole cut in the belly of the plane, absorbs light across the spectrum, from ultraviolet to short-wave infrared. It allows the CAO to measure 23 different chemicals in the trees, including water, nitrogen, and sugar content. To work properly, internal sensors within the imaging spectrometer are kept at -132 Celsius, atomically cold temperatures.

A laser system next to the imaging spectrometer fires a pair of lasers from the bottom of the plane 500,000 times per second, creating a three-dimensional image of the terrain below, and every tree on it. A second spectrometer, this one with an enhanced zoom capacity, allows the team to take measurements of individual branches on a tree—from 12,000 feet up. Finally, a piece of equipment known as an Internal Measurement Unit records the X,Y, and Z axes as well as pitch, roll, and yaw of the plane to ensure that its positioning in the air doesn’t compromise the accuracy of the data it collects from the ground. “This unit is the same technology as what's in the nose of a cruise missile,” Asner explained. “Because of that, the State Department has a say in what countries we visit.” The CAO studies forests all over the world—Peru, Malaysia, Panama, South Africa, Hawaii.

Once airborne, we dismissed the sprawl of the Central Valley for the coastal mountains. To the naked eye, the Shasta-Trinity National Forest looked splendorous, 2.2 million acres of rivers and mountains. Mount Shasta, a 14,179-foot active volcano, was still holding on to a handsome cap of snow and the landscape was vibrant and green. Asner’s spectrometer shared a different story. “Visual assessment doesn’t tell you much,” he said. On his computer screen, the green trees below were all reading red. They were dead. We just couldn’t see it yet. “A lot of this was not here last year,” he said with the clinical efficiency of a doctor diagnosing a cancer patient. CAO's statewide findings suggest tens of millions of trees might not survive another dry winter.

Sugar pine (Pinus lambertiana), a species that grows in large, contiguous groves and can live 500 years, has been hit the hardest, accounting for some 70 percent of the mortality, but cedar, fir, and oak are all suffering as well. It’s not just the lack of precipitation that’s killing these trees; it’s the cascading effect of climate change. Water-stressed trees make easier targets for mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae), which lay their eggs in the trunk and eat the trees.

Asner shared a map of the Giant Forest. The sequoias were a cool, comforting shade of blue, demonstrating high water content. Water seeks its low point, Asner explained, and the Giant Forest sits in a plateau cup. “It’s an oasis, a refugio. Right now, those trees are of least concern.” It was bittersweet news, like celebrating the last house standing after a tornado.

“Drought is a cumulative process,” Asner explained as the plane made a long bank off the western slope of Shasta. “Forests have biological inertia. We don’t know where the physiological tipping point is. Currently, we’re losing carbon from the forest.”

Forests are supposed to absorb carbon, so I wasn’t sure if I’d heard Asner correctly over the communication system. I tapped my headphones to make sure they were still working. “I’m sorry, did you just say the forests are releasing carbon into the atmosphere?” Automobiles, coal-fired power plants, cattle production—those are all carbon sources. But the mighty forests of California?

“That’s my guess,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine the forests are still carbon sinks.” 

Of the hundreds of feet it takes to climb to the top of a giant sequoia, the first six are invariably the most difficult.

After two days on the ground watching the rest of the team sliding up and down the sequoias, I ask Ambrose for a tutorial. Over the years, I’ve spent enough time on rock and rope to scratch my way up a 5.10, but tree climbing—beyond the scampering variety, anyway—is new territory.      

It looks easy enough. Ambrose has been powering into the canopy in minutes, and Baxter has a fancy one-legged technique that looks like she’s hopping on air. I, meanwhile, can barely get 12 inches off the ground. Those charming fire caves that serve as a window to ancient battles? They’re actually hazardous overhangs that cause a climber to pendulum into a cavern of charred pith. The two feet of duff piled up on the root system? That makes it just hard enough to get the clearance from the tree trunk needed to begin a comfortable climb. I’ve never done the splits, but with my feet strapped into the stirrups I find myself spinning, spread-eagled in endless, dizzying circles. Then I sprain my knee.

If Ambrose and Baxter climb their ropes like graceful inchworms, I look like a marionette having a seizure. Eventually I reach the lower canopy but my knee feels like a water balloon in a pressure cooker and I’m a long way from mastering Baxter’s hop-along trick. I descend in the interest of doing more climbing later in the week.

Back on the ground, I limp over to Ambrose and tell him of my failed attempt. “It’s tricky the first time. You want to avoid gripping the ascenders too tightly. And really, you shouldn’t be using your upper body very much at all. You mostly want to use knees and core.” Translation: The exact opposite of what I was doing. 

A few days later I get my chance on another pre-dawn climb. The tree is one of the largest individuals in the world—220 feet tall and 20 feet in diameter at the base—all the more impressive considering it’s growing in shallow soil atop a plate of granite. Underground, the tree’s been waging war with its rocky substrate for millennia, its roots probing every crack and fracture in a tireless search for water. I clear the first few feet without issue and begin the long journey to the top.

The sequoia is shaped like a giant barrel, tall and fat with hardly a taper. For the first ten stories, the trunk is a sheer wall of wood with an uninterrupted profile. I pass the crown of a neighboring 90-foot pine before even reaching the first branch of the sequoia. As I enter the sprawling branch network of lower canopy, the climb shifts from a smooth glide to a bruising slugfest. I work my way over, around, and between branches, each the size of a normal tree. About half way up, a pair of branches five feet thick shoots out from opposite sides of the trunk and up in an L-shape, like two arms flexing in a proclamation of strength.

Finally, the top. After 40 minutes of climbing, I take a seat to catch my breath. The crown is gargantuan. On one side a half dozen branches converge to create a bench wide enough for a square dance. It’s easy to get lost in the scale, but as my heart slows and the morning brightens, the subtleties stand out. Thousands of green cones the size of ping-pong balls hang from the branches like chandeliers. Unlike the lower sections of the tree, the bark here is smooth and seamless with a purple tint, and etched with fine lines like topographic contours. A menorah of knobby vertical branches, called reiterated trunks, sprouts out of the crown. I scamper up the last 10 feet and perch on the stumpy tip of one of the spires.

The crowns of sequoias punctuate the tree line like bushy, green exclamation points. Surrounded only by a warm breeze and empty space, I find myself completely exposed and suffering through an emotional paradox. There’s freedom up here with the birds, a glorious release from anything familiar. But it’s a narrow liberty. The laws of gravity and my seismic discomfort of heights dissuade me from any spread-eagle “I’m King of The World” moments. A western tanager (Piranga ludoviciana) lands on a branch and swivels its bright red head toward me, confused by the interloper in its realm. On the forest floor, a black bear (Ursus americanus) lumbers about for breakfast. More people have summited Everest—more people have probably walked on the moon—than have stood atop this noble tree.

“There is absolutely no limit to its existence,” John Muir wrote of the sequoia in Our National Parks. “Nothing hurts the big tree.” The sunrise, however, reveals an unsettling future. Even here, in the country’s second-oldest national park, the horizon is the sickly yellow of a cigarette butt, a vaporous mixture of Central Valley smog and forest fire smoke from the myriad infernos burning across the state. 

Muir’s hyperbole is understandable. The tree I’m sitting atop probably took root before Athenian democracy sprouted in ancient Greece. It has lived through the rise and fall of many of the world’s great civilizations, from Romans to Mayans to the British Empire. Its long shadow has fallen over this forest for three millennia, but that can’t obscure the exhaust of human progress. As I clip my climbing descender onto the rope and begin the journey to the forest floor, I can’t help but wonder: Will this tree stand long enough to witness our own fall? Or will it fall first?

A version of this story originally appeared on bioGraphic.com.

Marie's Dictionary from Go Project Films on Vimeo.

As a direct result of colonization, many indigenous languages throughout the Americas have disappeared or are in danger of doing so. In the US alone, there are 130 endangered Native American languages. Among them is the Wukchumni language, spoken by the Yokuts of California. There is just one remaining fluent speaker: Marie Wilcox, who is fighting to keep Wukchumni alive.

This short film, directed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee for Go Project Films, is dedicated to her. In the film, Wilcox says that she stopped speaking Wukchumni when her grandmother died. However, when she heard her sisters trying to teach their daughters, she started to go back to it word for word. Over the course of seven years, she and her daughter, Jennifer, worked on making a Wukchumni dictionary.

Though the language isn’t traditionally written, Wilcox saw this as a way to preserve Wukchumni for future generations. This task is made even more pressing by the fact that Wukchumni is the only surviving dialect of the Tule-Kaweah language.

Once the dictionary was finished, Wilcox set about on an equally important task: recording the sound of her language. Now, she works with her grandson, who in the video is shown speaking freely with her in Wukchumni, to record the sound of each word in the dictionary, as well as the tribe’s mythology. Wilcox and her daughter also offer weekly language classes so that tribe members can regain the language and achieve fluency.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Shigeta Miura really hated Boy Scouts. Now 40 years old, the Tokyo resident was bullied by his fellow troop members. But Miura has had his revenge—for over a year, he's been sending anonymous boxes to his former tormenters, packed full of smelly, soggy retribution.

According to Japan Today, over the course of 14 months, Miura "sent more than 500 garbage items by mail." These included such classics as rotten tea leaves, dirt, and old underwear.

In order to escape detection, Miura would package the garbage, write a random destination on the box, and put his target's info as the return address. Then he would fail to apply a stamp, ensuring that the package would be returned to the "sender." In a way, it was almost as though the recipients had shipped the garbage to themselves.

Police have arrested Miura, who admitted to the charges, cementing his status as 2016's premiere garbage person. Former bullies, watch your backs and your mailboxes this holiday season.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Few things have inspired more poetry and flowery philosophizing than the passage of time. It’s no wonder that the sundial, one of our most ancient and widely used timekeepers, would be the perfect place to inscribe maxims about the transience of life.

Sundials have been around since at least 1500 BCE, but it wasn't until around the 16th century that it became customary in Europe to inscribe them with poems and codas to life, death, and the lessons of time. This helped the sundial evolve from functional timepiece into symbols of our fleeting mortality.

While not the only collection of sundial quotes, one which exemplifies the meaning and importance of sundial codas is a guide called, fittingly, The Book of Sun-Dials. The book was written and compiled by Margaret Gatty, a Victorian children’s book author who also had a passion for collecting seaweed. Gatty was afflicted with illnesses all of her life, likely related to an unidentified case of Multiple Sclerosis, and so during her many instances of convalescence, Gatty was able to indulge in a handful of interesting hobbies, some of which led to published works. The Book of Sun-Dials, originally published in 1872, was her final book, released less than a year before her death.  

According to the preface in a later edition of the book, Gatty was inspired to begin cataloguing sundials around 1835 when she began to notice them scattered around the villages of Yorkshire. One 18th-century dial in a local church bore the motto Fugit hora, ora—Latin for “Time flies, pray.” Another church a few miles away held a dial with the inscription “Man fleeth as a shadow.” 

As Gatty’s health declined, her collection of mottoes grew. It began to incorporate sundials from all over Europe, thanks to her daughter and a friend who continued to collect sundials they would find in their travels. Even after Gatty passed away in 1873, expanded editions of the book continued to be released as there didn’t seem to be an end to the sundials and mottoes to be found. The fourth edition of the book, released in 1900, featured the locations of over 1,600 sundials and their mottoes.

Many sundial mottoes found in the guide fall into similar themes, with references to time, the sun, shade, death, and light being extremely common. Sometimes the mottoes feature a well-worn saying like “A stitch in time saves nine” or “Sic vita transit,” Latin for “So passes life.” Since many sundials can be found as decorative elements in churches, a great deal of them are written in poetic Latin, giving them an air of august antiquity.

Humorous ruminations on mortality are also popular inscriptions. A dial from 1851 found in France’s Abriès commune features the simple line, “Il est plus tard que vous ne croyez”—“It is later than you think.” A dial found in Surrey reads ”Tenere non potes, potes non perdere diem” (“You can avoid wasting a day, although you cannot hold it.”) At a church in the city of Durham is a dial that states,“The last hour to many, possibly to you.” Another oft-used double entendre is some variation of “Only mark the bright hours,” referring both to an outlook on life, and how a sundial works. Clever.

Some mottoes focus on rhyme, like a dial that was found in Leicestershire that reads, “How we go, shadow show.” Some lean into their poetic inspirations, such as a dial found near Florence that reads, “Della vita il cammin l'astro maggiore, Segna veloce al giusto e al peccatore,” (“The glorious orb of day with breathless speed, To good and bad alike the way of life doth read”). Still others are just depressing, like a Yorkshire dial that reads Disce mori mundo—“Learn to die to the world.”

But to truly understand the art of the sundial inscription one need look no further than the words found on a sundial in Courmayeur, Italy, which reads, “Cette ombre solaire est a la fois, La mesure du temps, et l’image de la vie,” translated from the French, “This solar shadow is at once the measure of time and the symbol of life.”

This poetic tradition of sundial mottoes has fallen a bit out of use as modern dials become both more detailed and more abstract since they are little more than decorative flourishes in the modern age. That said, some people are still cataloguing their locations in places like the British Sundial Society’s fixed dial list, which has brought the spirit of Gatty’s project into the age of crowdsourcing. 

It's always nice to come across a bluebell. With their dainty dangling heads and curved petals, they're a welcome pop up in gardens, brighten highway verges, and form purple carpets over otherwise monochrome fields.

But when you spot a bluebell in Britain, it's not always just a pretty diversion. Sometimes, they’re the only visible sign that you’re treading through the middle of a ghost forest.

Once upon a time, Britain was covered in woods—and those woods were full of people. "For millennia, the woods were at the centre of society and economy in ways which today we can barely conceive," writes Ian Rotherham, an environmental studies professor at Sheffield Hallam University. Thanks to the ways in which these people managed the land—and the ways in which the trees and plants, over centuries, have managed themselves—we can spot the traces the woods left behind, in contemporary parks, fields, and even cities. That is, if we know what to look for.

Rotherham has spent about 30 years squinting at barren fields and roadside verges, trying to discern the distant past by looking closely at the present. As he details in a recent paper in Arboricultural Journal, he divides the multilayered landscapes he seeks into two categories: "shadows" and "ghosts." Each term denotes a particular land use history, and comes with its own set of telltale signs.

In 1086, King William commissioned the creation of the so-called Domesday Book, which inventoried all of his kingdom's assets, including wooded commons and pastures, where workers would go to graze livestock, harvest firewood, and burn charcoal. Signs of these early natural-cultural spots, where particular types of human activity intersected with particular types of wilderness, can be seen today. Rotherham calls these traces "shadow woods."

Ghost woods underwent a more deliberate change. By the turn of the second millennium, large swaths of England were known as "manor waste"—land that couldn't be easily grazed or farmed, and which was left available for recreational use by pretty much anyone. But in 1235 AD, after much haranguing by the local barons, King Henry III passed the "Statute of Merton," which allowed lords to enclose parts of this land for their own gain, keeping the plebeians out. "Ghost woods," Rotterham explains, are the remains of these essentially privatized lands, which the lords often tried to turn into pasture.

So how do you spot a ghost wood? Some clues are on paper—old maps and estate records can let you know whether the space you were standing was once someone's private stand of trees. Court rolls might reveal conflict over a space, or paintings of the area may feature a tantalizing woodland in the background. The Domesday Book itself is full of hints (you can even search within it at the National Archives website).   

Others require a different kind of detective work. Keep an eye out for "indicator species," shade-friendly plants that tend to crop up during and after long periods of woodland cover. Which plants count as indicators varies by region—in Rotherham's most common place of study, upland England's Peak District, he and his teams look for holly, honeysuckle, and common cow-wheat, a yellow-flowered, high-stalked plant. (Cow-weed is pollinated by ants, so its seeds seldom stray far from their origin point.)

It's also worth taking a second look at any trees around. Individual trees often live for hundreds of years, and bear signs of past use. Keep an eye out for coppices—trees that were once cut near ground level to encourage the regrowth of smaller sticks, which were then harvested for firewood. What once were skinny stems are often now full-grown trees, arranged in a ring around their former base. Trees with corkscrewed trunks or thin branches that stick straight out may have once been grazing trees.

On their own, none of those things make a smoking gun—Rotherham piles up archaeological, ecological, geological and historical evidence before he'll make a case for a spot as a genuine ghost or shadow wood. But with an educated eye, what was once just a weird lumpy tree will whisper clues about its past relationships. And although Rotherham has focused his studies in England and Scotland, he's quick to point out that all landscapes have history that can be divined from careful examination. 

If you'd like to see good examples of ghosts and shadows, the Peak District, at the southern end of the Pennines, is a good bet. At Birchwood, in the Derbyshire Hills, you can spot 800-year-old trees, gnarled by human use. Around Matlock, there are remnants of old white charcoal pits. Other researchers have been looking there for evidence of a specific shadow wood, called Deadshaw, that supposedly had "hardy trees" and lasted into the 19th century. So far, they haven't found quite enough evidence to pinpoint it—but Rotherham hasn't lost hope.

"The ghosts are there," he writes. "You only have to look."

If asked to give an example of a great adventure, how many of us would immediately think of Everest? Without question, this tallest of mountains holds a special place in the explorer's psyche. For Tenzing Norgay, the man who with Sir Edmund Hillary would be the first to summit its peak, Everest had been more than an enduring dream—it had also been a constant presence. 

In each episode of Horizon Line, Atlas Obscura co-founder Dylan Thuras and associate editor Ella Morton tell the story of a person who pushed the limits of what was believed to be possible. Few people exemplify this better than Norgay, whose immense skill and determination allowed him to stand on top of the world.

Listen to the tale of Norgay's many adventures  here, and be sure to subscribe to Horizon Line in iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts from. We would also love your feedback, so be sure to leave a comment and a rating!

It is a truth universally acknowledged (by adults) that youth is irrevocably lost and in need of guidance. Auguste-Jacques Lemiere-d’Ary, an 18th-century French writer and translator, was no exception to this. He was indeed so worried about the lost ways of youth that he took it upon himself to draw a map to guide them along to happiness.

Published in 1802, the Allegorical Map of Youth’s Journey to the Country of Happiness shows the route that any young person who wants to achieve peace must take. The map is so precise that it not only includes a dotted line specifying all the steps, but also gives each step a letter.

Athena, the Greek goddess of reason, stands at the bottom left-hand corner of the map, wrapping a child in her arms as she shows him how to use a compass to navigate the globe. The message is clear: reason is what will guide youths to success in their endeavors.

We begin at Dark Bay (A), from where all youth is thrown clueless and unprepared into the Ocean of Experience (if this is bringing back unpleasant memories of post-graduation life, know that you are not alone). We are then forced to face the Rocks of Obstination and Dissipation (D), two traits that, allegedly, plague all young people.

Things go further downhill at the Mountains of Snow and Ice (E). From there, we journey onto Dissipation Island where we only find misery and bad times (F and G). But the worst is yet to come, as we leave misery behind only to topple onto the Country of Remorse (K), where there’s ennui, thoughtlessness, the Valley of Tears, and the Cape of Pain. So far, nothing but terrible things have happened.

And so we leave the country from the Cape of Repentment and stumble onto Penitence Island (L). Following the Catholic ideal of confession, this is where Lemiere-d’Ary claims the sun starts to smile.

After repenting, we can head over to the of Archipelago of Promises (M), whose two largest islands are those of Docility and Good Will (do we see a pattern here?).  We are now ready for the Isle of Efforts (N), because clearly overcoming all the pain and confusion previously encountered in the journey doesn’t really count. Finally, we arrive at the Island of Success (O), where we find satisfaction and reward.

Don’t kick back and throw yourself on a couch just yet! Because the journey isn’t over with success. Oh, no. We must now conquer the large Sands of Patience (P) and try to get through the triangle formed by the three beacons of happiness: Passion, Reason (B), and Religion (W). The triangle is quite perilous, as it is dotted with the Rocks and Chasm of Presumption (V), which can lead you astray—translation: don’t be a self-absorbed fopdoodle.

If we make it through and get to where the Country of Science (S) and the Firm Land of Happiness (T) converge, we will stumble unto the Torrent of Passions (U). Once there, we have access to the many rewards that experience and old age apparently offer, which include gold and diamond mines, Honey Mountain, and an entire forest filled with golden apples.

While it might now seem contradictory to place science and religion in such close ties, especially as it pertains to the happiness of future generations, the map corresponds with the attitude of the time. During the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, Catholicism and other religions were abolished and heavily persecuted. Robespierre, whose excessive love of the guillotine locked his own fate under its sharp blade, wanted to replace Catholicism with the Cult of Reason.

However, Napoleon Bonaparte, who championed many causes of the revolution (except, you know, freedom from an authoritarian leader), stopped the persecution of the church and restored some of its civil status a year before the map was published. Though Catholicism would never regain the power it held under the Ancien Regime, the map is evidence of how it affected morals and social attitudes during the First Empire.

Lemiere-d’Ary made this map in an attempt to educate youth and guide them to a life of hard work and morality. If we are to take his word for it, then the happy conclusion is that getting old is wonderful. If ever the passage of time throws you into existential angst, just let this map console you.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

In the Wadi Faynan region of southern Jordan, thousands of years ago, people were starting to play with metal. In this area, there’s one of the earliest documented centers of metal extraction in the world, which dates back to the fourth millennium B.C. A team of researchers wondered, though, what happened before that—before they were purposefully extracting it from the earth, how did humans explore the possibilities of metal?

In their exploration, they found an unusual site, a place on the banks of a now-dry waterway that showed evidence of copper contamination. Approximately 7,000 years ago, the researchers hypothesize in their paper, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, a group of people gathered copper ores, brought them a few kilometers to the banks of a stream, and put those metals into very hot fires.

They did this often enough that they created unusually high concentrations of copper in this one spot —which the research suggest could be considered “the first polluted river.”

Why were people throwing copper ore into the fire? It’s not clear, of course, at this distance in time. It’s likely that they weren’t yet purposefully smelting the copper into shapes, but they might have been using it for “fun, enquiry, ritual and/or spiritual reasons,” the researchers write. As they point out, the combination of metal and fire would have created “multi-colored flames,” and it’s easy to imagine the pull of a dancing rainbow fire on the banks of a small stream.

Eventually, this sort of ritual and flame might have led to the creation of metallurgy. What we know most clearly is the in this one spot, there’s a strange concentration of copper, and it can’t be attributed to natural causes. Humans did this, and it’s one of the earliest examples we have of the permanent waste our activities leave behind.

Since he began his campaign in 2015, President-Elect Donald Trump has drawn scrutiny for his many ties with international developers. In recent days, as his attempts at diplomacy begin, concerns have ramped up: Was his effusive praise of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, connected to the murky questions that still hover around the financing of Trump SoHo? Did his call to Taiwan, a break with decades of political tradition, have anything to do with his potential interest in opening a hotel chain there?

It's unclear what, if anything, Trump will do to extricate himself from this web of connections. But if he simply wants his brand to proliferate, he shouldn't worry about staying tied up in them—other people are glad to do that for him.

Exhibit A: "Trump Fish," a seafood spot in Duhok, Kurdistan. According to the Duhok Post, the restaurant is a brand new venture. Photos show a cafe-sized space, covered in photos of fish—along with a logo by David Rappoccio, ripped from an UPROXX post imagining what different NFL mascots would look like if teams rebranded for the new administration. (The fish store's image is from the Trumpified San Diego Chargers.)

It's official! New restaurant in #Duhok@realDonaldTrumppic.twitter.com/q9hPFSFT1C

— Duhok Post (@Duhokpost) December 5, 2016

Questions about Trump Fish remain: Is Fish Delight on the menu? Are there pufferfish in the tanks? How long before they get sued by the President of the United States? In this brave new world, anything can happen.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

With Black Friday past us, this is about the time of year when gift lists start being written by kids who are still fairly new to writing.

Over the years, toys like Teddy Ruxpin and the Super Nintendo floated up to the top of many of these lists. But those toys have faded away, for the most part. Power Wheels, on the other hand?

The battery-driven cars are very much still with us, still in stores, and still likely to be on many kids' lists this year.

But to those who didn’t own one of these glorified go-carts when growing up, here’s the thing: Power Wheels are tiny. They barely even fit two little kids. The problem is, kids constantly grow, as any parent who buys clothes will tell you, and kids quickly outgrow their Power Wheels.

So what do you do with them after you’re done? (Hint: the answer involves either hacking or mud.) Let’s ponder the coolest gift that a six-year-old can ever hope for.

As ideas for toys go, a miniature version of the 20th century’s greatest product, designed for kids, was obvious.

But it did not happen overnight. And while Power Wheels appeared to come out in the late ‘80s as a fully-formed branding machine, it was actually a product formed from quite a bit of evolution. At the center of this evolution was an Italian company named Peg-Pérego. The firm, which got its start in 1949 by selling baby carriages, slowly moved into the business of selling toys built for riding.

At first, this meant car-shaped toys with wheels and pedals, but Peg-Pérego eventually had the idea to shove a gel cell battery into these wheeled machines, and suddenly, the product line was off to the races. The firm launched a subsidiary called Pines of America, which started selling these rechargeable machines in toy stores around the U.S. under brand names like Traffic Patrol and Trail Blazer.

In the early ‘80s, the Italian firm sold off Pines of America to a firm called Kransco, which took Peg-Pérego’s great idea and properly branded it.

(Peg-Pérego, by the way, is still around, and is essentially Power Wheels’ biggest competitor, with the Italian company deciding to compete with its old subsidiary after it noticed the growth they were having. Its biggest claim to battery-powered fame is its line of miniature John Deere tractors.)

By 1985, Pines of America was selling three kinds of Power Wheels (a retro-looking “classic convertible,” an ATV-style vehicle, and a miniature monster truck) to the public.

Pines of America and Kransco put much of the work in towards patenting much of the functionality used in the vehicles, including the dynamic braking in the all-terrain vehicle, the assembly method for Power Wheels, and the design of the controls and pedals embedded in the vehicles. Power Wheels weren’t cars, but they were sure patented like they were headed on the highway.

And like actual cars, they had their design flaws. If you’ve owned a Power Wheels device, you know that they’ve experienced a number of recalls over the years, and that trend started really early—before they even took on the Power Wheels name. As the first Power Wheels even hit the market, the Consumer Product Safety Commission was recalling its predecessor due to overheating caused by a short circuit.

But those risks couldn’t stop the interest in these extremely expensive toys. In 1986, Pines introduced its first Jeep to the scene, and from there, numerous other models slowly began to appear—more than 100 in all over the years.

The vehicles were never incredibly powerful—their speeds, generally a slow putter, top out around five miles an hour due to the limited voltage of the devices (6 volts for smaller devices, 12 volts for larger ones). But on television, they looked a lot faster, and that was enough to get kids hooked.

(If you want a faster one for your kids, by the way, look to Peg-Pérego, which sells its devices at higher voltages than commonly seen on Power Wheels.)

Despite the slow speeds, the power of Power Wheels couldn’t be ignored. Mattel purchased Kransco in 1994, a $254.6 million purchase (according to the toy giant’s 1995 10-K annual report) that made Mattel the largest American toymaker. It was largely driven by Power Wheels’ success.

Despite the fact that Kransco had the venerable Wham-O brand under its wing, Power Wheels vehicles made up as much as 80 percent of Kransco’s sales in 1994, according to the Los Angeles Times. And 80 percent of $170 million is no joke.

Considering that miniature motorized vehicles probably cost a lot more per unit than a hula hoop, the high revenue total makes sense to a degree, but it also points to the success of the brand, which soon found a home with Fisher-Price, another Mattel acquisition. It’s been there ever since. 

The success of Power Wheels means that sometimes, the battery-powered cars are associated with the kinds of actions that actual full-sized vehicles are.

That includes theft. In 1997, for example, four parents were forced to pay $254 each to the family of a Maine child whose Power Wheels jeep was stolen, according to Mental Floss.

The jeep was stolen by a trio of adolescent girls who repainted the vehicle black and removed the decals. When word surfaced that the vehicle had been stolen, the parents broke the car into pieces in an effort to hide the evidence—a cover-up that led to the fine. The best crimes are the ones that involve enabling your young children.

More commonly, Power Wheels have been associated with the kind of mass recalls that their larger cousins are known for. In 2001, Mattel was fined $1.1 million over a series of flaws in its Power Wheels products, a record fine at the time for a toymaker, later outdone by Mattel itself.

The problem was less about the misdeed itself (Power Wheels had a bunch of defects) and more about the cover-up (they knew about the problems with the cars for 14 years before doing anything).

“When a company hides problems, it means dangerous products continued to be sold and people can be hurt,” noted Ann Brown, the chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission at the time. “If they reported, we might have prevented some of these fires and injuries.”

Since then, the company has doubled down on safety in regards to Power Wheels, with a page on the Fisher-Price website talking about the tiny cars like you’re buying a freaking F-150.

Power Wheels is obviously still a big deal today, but the concept has been around long enough that there’s a degree of nostalgia attached to the devices.

A lot of objects that came to prominence in the ‘80s—think Casio keyboards and retro video games—have gained some modern cultural currency as hacked-apart artifacts with their full colors exposed. (And yes, in case you’re wondering: Teddy Ruxpin hacking is a thing.)

Power Wheels, with its multiple recalls, tiny sizes, and branded designs, also lend themselves to such hacking, complete with a community to boot. Most commonly, Power Wheels modders will rev up the voltage on the vehicles so that they go a little faster (and freak out spouses in the process), though some might add headlights, or add radio control to the vehicles. One modder recently featured on Hackadayadded a speedometer and high-intensity LEDs, among other things, to an old Peg-Pérego.

Heck, some folks even add sound systems to these things, so that babies can jam out to Lady Gaga just like everyone else.

But perhaps the true place where Power Wheels shine in the modern day is a tad bit more, uh, deconstructive. It’s a sport of sorts called Extreme Barbie Jeep Racing, a variation on offroading that involves taking used Power Wheels machines and racing them down a hill in dramatic fashion, taking all the bumps that come with. You might start with the mini-Hummer, but you likely won’t end with it in one piece.

The twice-yearly Rednecks With Paychecks offroad event in Texas has its own entertaining twist on this phenomenon called the Redneck Downhill, which turns this messy sport into something of Olympic proportions, complete with cash prizes.

Wait until the Consumer Product Safety Commission hears about this.

All this modding and destruction is great, obviously, and you have to wonder whether Mattel is taking some inspiration from it in building out newer Power Wheels models.

To put it simply, they are—and they’re not alone. Earlier this year, Radio Flyer made some waves when they launched a miniature version of the Tesla Model S—another, slightly more powerful vehicle that also happens to rely on battery power. The device is totally decked out, and comes with working headlights and a built-in audio system. You can get it in four different coats of paint and with two kinds of wheels. Like its parent car, it’s incredibly expensive—to Power Wheels what a Tesla is to GM.

But not to be outdone, Power Wheels last month announced a Ford Mustang that has built-in traction and stability control—two things that you might have to explain to your kids.

Perhaps it’s absurd to think that decked-out toy cars with power lock brakes and MP3 player hookups are a thing. But on the other hand, today’s kids are all going to be riding in self-driving cars when they grow up, so this may be the only experience they get behind the wheel.

Might as well emulate the experience as best as possible. 

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

For a certain type of bookish kid (or, let’s be honest, adult), living in the library sounds like a dream. But when the Clark family moved into the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library in the late 1940s, their teenage son Ronald Clark was skeptical.

“Kids are strange,” he says. “We always want to be normal. So at first I was a little ashamed that I lived in a library.” His family had moved from a small town in Maryland, where everyone knew each other, for his father, Raymond, to take a job as the library’s custodian.

When New York City’s branch libraries were first built, each one had an apartment on the third floor for a live-in caretaker, who would keep the library clean and its coal furnaces burning.

Soon enough, though, Clark realized the advantages of his new home. “I thought—wait a minute, I’ve got a building to myself with every book in the world,” he says. He decided he liked it. “After a few years, my friends would introduce me and say, ‘This guy lives in the library. Literally—he lives in the library!’”

Today, only a small number of these hidden library apartments are left in New York City. They’re empty and neglected now, and are slowly being converted into modern areas for technology and language programs since the library system needs more space.

Just this year, the apartment that Clark grew up in was renovated so that the space could be used for library programming. Clark and his daughter, Jamilah, who spent the first years of her life living in the same apartment, came back for the first time in decades for a ribbon-cutting ceremony of the converted rooms.

Back in his former home, Clark said that living the library had been a life-changing experience. Before moving there, he had not been a bookish kid, and no one in his family had graduated from high school. But while residing in the library, he started paying attention to books. Every time he read something new, he was amazed. He found himself walking past stacks of books and picking out titles to take to a library table, or going downstairs at all hours of the night to read.

One of the defining moments of his life, he says, is a night that he was lying in bed, thinking about the contradictions between the scientific concept of evolution and the biblical concept of creation. He got up at 2 a.m., went down the stairs, turned on the light, and went to the religion section to pick out a Bible. He laid it side by side with an encyclopedia that detailed evolution and started reading.

“I read each section, and found out—the world was underwater, then fish, then reptiles, then mammals, and lastly humans. I realized, it was exactly the same thing,” in both books, he says. “When I realized that, that changed the way I view the world.”

Living in the library gave him a desire for knowledge, he says, which led him to became the first person in his family to graduate high school and go on to college. During the ceremony, he spoke about passing that desire on to his daughter, who lived in the apartment until she was about five.

One of her favorite memories is going down to the library’s second floor—the children’s floor—with her grandfather when he was cleaning it. “I would have full run of the floor, and the books, and the puzzles, and everything that was down there,” she said. On Sundays, too, after the library closed, she would go downstairs to hang out, read books, and lay on the children’s mats with the puzzle pieces.

“It didn’t feel weird that we lived in a library because it was all I knew,” she says. “This was our home. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that everybody does not have a lot of books in their house. I didn’t even have the concept of library, just that I lived in a place with tons of books, everywhere, and I could read them and play with them.”

Living in a library, she says, was as great as any book lover would imagine. “It’s magical,” she says. On Sunday, after the library closed, the whole place belonged to the family. Ronald Clark remembers quiet Sunday afternoon dinners, and looking out the windows to see the city resting before them.

Today, after a $4.4 million renovation, the soaring storage room where Jamilah Clark put on puppet shows and learned to ride a bike has become a bright and open programming area for teenagers. The apartment where the family lived has become a series of modern rooms intended for language classes and technology programs.

But it still feels familiar, in some ways, to the Clarks. “The inside is totally different, but the space is still the same and the windows are still the same, so it has both the old and the new,” says Ronald Clark. “I feel nostalgic about the old but I really truly am excited about the new.”

If you think about silent-film era sex symbols, you probably conjure up a mental picture of Rudolph Valentino—even if you don’t know his name. Valentino has become synonymous with sex appeal in early films. But he wasn’t the first male star of American movies to make millions of American women go weak at the knees. That distinction goes to Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese star of Cecil B. DeMille’s cinematic rape drama, The Cheat.

This 1915 film was a huge hit in spite of (or more likely because of) the fact that it lasciviously hinted at a taboo subject: interracial sex. The titular “cheat” (Fannie Ward) depicted in the film is a materialistic, dishonest tease. Hayakawa, who plays her neighbor, starts out as one kind of Asian stereotype (a polite gentleman), but turns out to be an entirely different one (a swarthy predator).

The possibility that an Asian man might be a more appealing sex partner for a white Long Island matron than her middle-aged Caucasian husband was too transgressive a notion for DeMille to fully commit to; he has Hayakawa, after spending much of the film chastely escorting Ward’s vapid socialite around, metamorphose rather abruptly into a sadistic rapist.

The Cheat made Hayakawa an international star. America’s teenage girls and swooning housewives fell for his charms, but French intellectuals like the novelist Colette and Polish-born filmmaker Jean Epstein sang his praises too. Film historian Daisuke Miyao begins his 2007 study of Hayakawa with the words of Miyatake Toyo, a Japanese photographer working in America in the early 20th century, who called Hayakawa “the greatest movie star in this century” and described a scene of female fans throwing their fur coats at the star’s feet to prevent him from stepping in a puddle. If People magazine had existed during the late 1910s, Hayakawa would have undoubtedly been declared the “Sexiest Man Alive.”

Hayakawa was born in 1890 to a wealthy family in Japan, and was expected to eventually work in the family fishing business. In his late teens, Hayakawa was sent to the University of Chicago to study political economy. Several years later, he drifted to Los Angeles where he began working in local theatre and abandoned his given name, Kintarō, in favor of the stage name Sessue (which was pronounced and occasionally even spelled Sesshū).

There, he met influential producer Thomas H. Ince, as well as a Japanese actress named Tsuru Aoki. Ince cast both Hayakawa and Aoki in his Japan-themed films, and in 1914, the two young actors married. The following year, The Cheat made Hayakawa a major star, and the Hayakawas became one of Hollywood’s golden couples.

Hayakawa remained popular for the second half of the 1910s, although he was often relegated to stereotyped non-white roles like "Chinese gangster" or "Indian doctor. In 1918, he formed his own production company, Haworth Pictures, in large part because of his dissatisfaction with the material he was being offered. He told a fan magazine the year after the release of The Cheat that the roles he had been playing “are not true to our Japanese nature….They are false and give people a wrong idea of us.”

The 1919 Haworth film The Dragon Painter, a kind of fairy tale about a mad Japanese artist searching for his manic pixie dream girl, is not devoid of stereotyping, but it at least tried to do something other than exploit the fear that Asian men constitute a threat to the purity of white women. 

Around 1920, Hayakawa’s career started to falter. Miyao suggests that Hayakawa fell victim to a growing tide of anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of the more-militant Japan that emerged after World War I. Hayakawa worked in Europe for a while, and then eventually returned to Hollywood a decade later. In 1931, he starred opposite Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong in the silly Fu Manchu talkie, Daughter of the Dragon. Although now in early middle age, Hayakawa was just as handsome as ever. Still, his heavy accent and his Japanese nationality made him a tough sell to the movie-going public. 

Furthermore, Hollywood’s preference for white actors in all sorts of roles—including explicitly Asian ones—had a devastating impact on the careers of Asian actors. For example, Hayakawa’s sultry co-star Anna May Wong was an American-born native speaker who should have thrived in talkies. Nevertheless, she kept losing plum “Asian” roles to non-Asian actors, a common casting practice of the time that came to be called “yellowface.”

Indeed, when considering actresses for the film version of Pearl S. Buck’s prize-winning novel The Good Earth, MGM rejected Wong for the lead in favor of German actress Luise Rainer, who’d been unconvincingly made up in faux-Asian makeup. To add insult to Wong’s injury, Rainer went on to win the 1938 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as a Chinese peasant in the film.

Yellowface lives on, albeit without the garish greasepaint. This year, the makers of Doctor Strange stirred up controversy by replacing a character depicted as Asian in the comic-book source with the white actress Tilda Swinton. Something similar happened with the upcoming Ghost in the Shell, in which Scarlett Johansson will play a Japanese character—with a yellowface supporting cast.

It’s hard not to wonder: Wouldn’t it make more sense just to cast Asian actors?  “It’s not that Hollywood can’t find talented people,” says Karla Rae Fuller, a film scholar and author of Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film. Citing American audiences’ enthusiasm for the Asian actors in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—it was the highest-grossing foreign language film ever in the U.S.—she says that the Hollywood establishment may simply have a hard time imagining the appeal of minority actors. “On the level of logic, it makes no sense. But film is such a powerful medium, and the idea of giving minority groups starring roles, leadership roles—I think people shy away from that.”

San Francisco State University ethnic studies scholar Amy Sueyoshi notes that the Asian stereotypes of the past, including those that catapulted Hayakawa to stardom, have shifted in such a way that Asian men have been marginalized and even “emasculated.” While Asian women continue to be stereotyped as sexually available and desirable, Asian men have been desexualized, she notes. In the 1980s, Japan became an economic powerhouse, which made white Americans anxious about their country’s diminishing dominance, she says. In response, Asian men were stereotyped in pop culture as unmanly and unattractive—that is, not leading man material. (Think of the dorky foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong who crushes on Molly Ringwald in 1984’s Sixteen Candles.) 

By the late 1940s, Hayakawa was nearing his sixties, but his age didn’t prevent him from enjoying a late-career renaissance in Hollywood. In 1949, he made Tokyo Joe with Humphrey Bogart and in 1950, Three Came Home with Claudette Colbert. Around that time Hollywood started to take a new interest in Japan—and Asian-Caucasian romance—leading to the release of films such as 1955’s House of Bamboo, directed by Samuel Fuller, and 1957’s Sayonara, about an Air Force fighter pilot, played by Marlon Brando, who falls in love with a Japanese woman.

Hayakawa appeared as a Tokyo detective in Fuller’s film, and shortly afterwards British director David Lean gave him the role he’s now best remembered for: Colonel Saito in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai. While Hayakawa was again asked to embody a racial stereotype—he played a cruel, inscrutable Japanese prison camp commandant—his performance is skillful and nuanced. Indeed, he was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, although he lost to Red Buttons, a white actor in Sayonara, for his role as a doomed American soldier married to a Japanese woman.

Miyoshi Umeki, the actress playing Buttons’ Japanese wife, won Best Supporting Actress that year for her role in the same film. Those two nominations for Asian actors in one year was a fluke; since then, starring roles and film-acting awards for Asians haven’t been plentiful. In fact there have only been nine more Asian actors nominated for acting Oscars since Umeki’s win. The only Asian actors to have won acting Oscars are Ben Kingsley (Best Actor in 1982’s Gandhi) and Haing S. Ngor (Best Supporting Actor in 1984’s The Killing Fields).

The fact that Kingsley, who is of Indian descent, was already a successful actor in the U.K. before Gandhi suggests that Asian actors need to establish themselves abroad before getting a shot at mainstream American success. That’s certainly true of 2016’s honorary Oscar winner Jackie Chan, a Hong Kong action star who managed to parlay his homegrown popularity into a U.S. career. (Ngor’s case is one-of-a-kind; a non-professional when he landed the role in The Killing Fields, it was his real-life experiences as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge that led to his casting.)

While attesting to the youthful Hayakawa’s electrifying presence at the height of his fame, photographer Miyatake Toyo wrote: “Never again will there be a star like Sessue.” It’s true that no Asian actor working in American film in the past century has been able to attain a similar level of stardom—and for that, Hollywood casting agents should be ashamed.

Ancient Roman tombstone found buried in New York https://t.co/6B3U5gPKYXpic.twitter.com/mNCBkRVc1M

— Fox5NY (@fox5ny) December 6, 2016

While working on a new housing development in wealthy Westchester County, New York, just a short distance from New York City, construction crews uncovered a massive, mysterious stone, reports Fox5. Hollow on top, the rectangular pillar was carved with ornamentations and, on one side, a clear inscription in Latin.

It is, according to a Roman art expert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a tombstone from 54 A.D. It came from Rome and belonged to “a tax collector named Tiberius Claudius Saturninus.”

What is a 2,000-year-old Roman tombstone doing in Westchester? This discovery makes a little bit more sense when you know that the new development is being built on a spot that was once the home of some of America’s wealthiest families. This part of New York was once called Millionaires Row because of the lavish mansions built here by the Rockefellers, Astors, and other Gilded Age tycoons.

The new development is called “Greystone on Hudson,” after Greystone Castle, the home of Josiah Macy, a partner in Standard Oil. The Macy mansion burned down in the 1970s and, says the property’s developer, the debris was buried in the old house’s foundation.

That’s where the crew was digging when they found the tombstone. According to Fox5, it originally came from Villa Borghese in Rome, where Macy’s wife obtained it and brought it back to New York. It’s unclear whether she knew she had bought a tax collector’s grave, but there is something beautifully grim about a very rich woman putting a taxman’s grave in her home.