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00:00Two and a half thousand years ago, a Greek scribe wrote out a dazzling list of wonders.
00:18And it's seen in the mind's eye, he said, can never be destroyed.
00:32To this day, that magic list still haunts the modern world.
00:48So powerful is the ancient dream
01:17that the classic list of seven wonders still encourages competition
01:21and brand new lists of wonders too.
01:25In opinion polls, the Sydney Opera House is regularly rated as the single greatest wonder of the modern world.
01:38You find that these modern lists of wonders are a real odd lot.
01:42They're not the biggest or the fastest or anything you might expect.
01:46They're really things like opera houses that are too small for grand opera,
01:51or very old high-rises that King Kong once fell off of,
01:56or the footprints of the first men on the moon.
01:59Strange things. Dams, bridges, rusty now most of them, obsolete airplanes,
02:05Disneyland, Vegas, things that people want to see before they die.
02:11Things that fill them with wonder.
02:15So what is wonderful?
02:17Well, our ideas of wonderful are the same as those defined by the ancient Greeks two and a half thousand years ago.
02:26They're things that seem filled with the idea of human imagination, of ambition and achievement.
02:32They're part of a new religion which fuels the modern world just as it fuelled the ancient Greeks.
02:38And so, you know, the story of the history of wonder,
02:43the story of how those ancient images of it went from Greece right up until today,
02:48are really the story of the modern imagination.
02:52And it's the most extraordinary tale.
03:08THE OPERA HOUSE
03:22Climbing up inside the opera house is a bit like climbing up inside the pyramids.
03:27You travel through the scenery of the human imagination,
03:31back to the most ancient ghosts of wonder.
03:38THE WANDERER
03:44This wonder was born in the mind of a Danish architect, Jørn Utzon.
03:50It took three years of computer processing to calculate the curves that he had quickly sketched upon a pad.
04:08TITANIUM
04:14Titanium and resin hold it all together.
04:17Loose drawings made concrete with sixties high tech.
04:27Like the ancient Greeks, though, Utzon was still in the business of making beautiful, wonderful shapes.
04:38Nowadays, though, the very nature of wonder is changing.
04:43It's not the hardware any more, it's not the buildings, it's the software that designs them.
04:48It's not great statues any more, it's the pill.
04:52It's the telephone, the thing that joins all the buildings in the world, not just one building.
04:57It's process.
04:59And that, you know, in a strange way takes us right back to the beginnings of modern civilisation,
05:05back to the beginnings of wonder at the pyramids of Egypt.
05:15Process is what you're looking at here.
05:18The Egyptian pyramids are not just amazing monuments,
05:21but the residue of a process that impoverished an entire nation.
05:26Thousands upon thousands of people labouring for decade after decade.
05:33They made the sole surviving ancient wonder, the oldest, too.
05:38Of all the ancient wonders, the pyramids are the only one on everybody's all-time list of wonders.
05:53This, then, is where it all started.
05:56This long journey of the human imagination that reaches till today.
06:03MUSIC FADES
06:21In the first century, Pliny, that most sensible Roman,
06:25called the pyramids idle and foolish exhibitions of royal wealth.
06:30By that time, they were already some 2,500 years old,
06:35and their true purposes had been lost.
06:43Clearly, the pyramids are the tombs of kings, but they're also something else as well.
06:48To the ancient Egyptians, they stood as friends.
06:53For as they built the pyramids, the Egyptians had invented the notion of the sacred state.
06:59The pyramids, therefore, were proof that their kingdom was in order and joined on to eternity.
07:08Just as we do today, the ancient Egyptians of later ages
07:12came to stand in the sand and marvel at the pyramids.
07:16What, then, were the processes by which these two things were made,
07:21the pyramids and the state together?
07:29MUSIC FADES
07:44The first thing you did when you started to build a pyramid
07:48was to dig a hole for the royal burial chamber.
07:52Egyptian kings had always been buried in the ground,
07:55and they were very traditional people.
07:58Actually, for its time, this burial chamber is rather old-fashioned,
08:04but it's the size here that impresses you.
08:07If this had ever been finished,
08:09it would have been the biggest tomb ever made inside a pyramid.
08:18This hole for the burial chamber had to be in good, strong stone,
08:22on a ridge overlooking the Nile, close to the royal city of Memphis.
08:29Here, then, you can see how a pyramid was built,
08:33because this one was never finished.
08:36The king, Jedefro, only lived for a few years
08:40between the builders of the two great pyramids, Cheops and Khefren.
08:44This is an unfinished pyramid
08:47from the era of the greatest pyramids of them all.
08:59When they'd finished making the hole for the burial chamber,
09:03the pyramid makers then mobilised the entire available population of Egypt
09:08to move blocks the size of this one up to the pyramid.
09:12But how on earth did these ancient people move these huge stones?
09:17Well, for 3,000 years, nobody asked the question,
09:20because the ancient Egyptians were happily trundling these big blocks around.
09:25Everybody knew how it was done.
09:27But then they went and the Christians came,
09:29and they thought the ancient stones had been moved by the power of God.
09:33They thought that if you got a little piece of papyrus and wrote a prayer on it,
09:36stuffed it under the stones, that you could shoot an arrow
09:39and the power of the prayer would send the stone up to the pyramid plateau behind the arrow.
09:44In medieval times, rabbis taught that Moses had done it
09:47with the slave gangs of ancient Israel.
09:50In the 19th century, British archaeologists,
09:52who, after all, were working in a colonial situation,
09:55saw that it was done by millions of coolies with firm governance,
09:59just like the British had provided.
10:01Today, of course, we've got a lot of ecologically ingenious situations
10:05with, you know, bearded professors who come along with bits of wood
10:08and suggest that if you wet this and dry that out, it all zooms up in the air.
10:12In fact, the truth is a lot simpler.
10:14A few years ago, there was a congress of retired archaeologists
10:18in a village in France,
10:20and these elderly gentlemen, without too much physical effort,
10:23pushed huge blocks of stone down the high street in a test,
10:26using mud and water.
10:28These blocks move like they're on ice, if you get it going right.
10:31And these people were very skilful.
10:33These were the guys that had just made the Great Pyramid itself.
10:37It was a very simple technology and a very complex organisation,
10:41the reverse, the absolute reverse of the modern world.
10:44That's why we find it so mysterious.
10:56The pyramids of this first great age of pyramid building
10:59are not just the first large stone structures in the world,
11:03not just the largest either, but also the most accurate.
11:07Egyptian pyramids are far more than just a nation structure.
11:11Egyptian pyramids are far more than just a nation
11:14shoving around blocks of stone.
11:16They are set precisely on the points of the compass.
11:19Their corners are near perfect right angles,
11:22and the length of their four sides is virtually the same.
11:31With dimensions of 600 and 700 feet and more,
11:34the maximum error in them is a matter of a few inches.
11:42The pyramids of this first great age of pyramid building
11:45are not just the first large stone structures in the world,
11:48but also the most accurate.
12:00To later ages, such magical geometry,
12:03such extraordinary accuracy, was supernatural.
12:08Eminent European mathematicians and astronomers
12:11searched for links between the Great Pyramid
12:14and the universal order.
12:20Such theories were often based
12:22on the internal chambers of the Great Pyramid,
12:25whose corridors and chambers were made with deadly accuracy.
12:29There were three burial chambers.
12:32The first was cut into the rock
12:34under the centre of the pyramid in the traditional way.
12:37Later on, a second corridor was cut
12:40and a second burial chamber built at its end.
12:43But this, too, was never finished,
12:45and once again another corridor,
12:47the huge, unique Grand Gallery of Wonder in itself,
12:51was extended into the high heart of the pyramid
12:54and a third burial chamber set at its ending.
13:08To many Westerners of the past 100 years or so,
13:12such fearful symmetries betrayed the hand of God
13:16just as did the Holy Bible.
13:18If this was so, the measurements of these ancient stones
13:22held the history of the future in them
13:24just as did the Book of Revelations.
13:27Counting out the years from the Bible's story of creation,
13:31they measured out the corridors.
13:33They measured out the corridors
13:35through the ages of Adam and the patriarchs,
13:39through the prophets and the kings,
13:42the life of Jesus,
13:44and up to the doorway of the highest burial chamber,
13:47which, they claimed, marked the year 1914,
13:52the same year that, according to these Westerners of the 1920s,
13:56had seen the beginning of the greatest calamity
13:59the world had ever known.
14:02Suddenly, then, the future lay in here,
14:06in King Cheop's great burial chamber.
14:11Can you imagine, then, these modern mystics,
14:15the secrets of history, the future and their ruler?
14:19They slowly approach the ending of the world.
14:231928.
14:26Hmm. Clearly crazy. It doesn't work.
14:30In some strange way,
14:32these people had hit on something of the ancient mentality,
14:36something of that grasping for eternity.
14:39These air shafts go straight up to major stars,
14:43right to the outside of the pyramid.
14:45This building is locked into heaven.
14:48The floor, if you extend it out from here,
14:51180 feet, the pyramid above
14:54is exactly half the size of the Great Pyramid in its entirety.
14:58There's a magical geometry going on here.
15:01These walls are so accurately constructed,
15:04north, south, east and west,
15:06that they're hundreds of a degree out.
15:08The sarcophagus, before the tourists got at it,
15:12was so perfect that only the most modern measuring instruments
15:16can find out discrepancies in its size.
15:20So the ancients, too, were interested in a sort of eternal perfection.
15:25The pyramid was placed in the heart of Egypt, in the heart of heaven.
15:28The Nile, after all, flows from south to north.
15:31The sun crosses it from east to west.
15:33They were grasping for eternity
15:35and made this room as hard as a diamond and as perfect as they could.
15:39So the king and Egypt would last for all eternity.
15:56After the Egyptians came the Greeks and Romans,
16:00who said that geometry itself had come from Egypt
16:03and made a list of seven wonders.
16:06Then came the Christians, who shunned such pagan things.
16:10Not even the pyramids are mentioned in the Bible.
16:13To them, all real wonders were the works of God.
16:17For a while, the Greeks and the Romans
16:20For them, all real wonders were the works of God.
16:24For a while, the seven ancient wonders seemed to disappear.
16:29But these astonishing stones in the desert endured,
16:33and pilgrims still walked through the sand to see them.
16:42So memories of the ancient wonders flickered in the West's imagination.
16:48And then the ancient lists were rediscovered, printed, published,
16:52read again, and far away in Christian Rome,
16:55the ghosts of wonder rose.
16:59So a giant statue of an emperor
17:01that had stood here beside Rome's largest amphitheatre
17:05was identified as the colossus that had stood upon the Isle of Rhodes.
17:10And the Colosseum took its name
17:13from one of the seven wonders of the world.
17:18Slowly, the city filled with ancient wonders.
17:23The tombs of the ancient emperors of Rome seemed like hanging gardens,
17:28and there were obelisks and pyramids.
17:30No wonder the difference now.
17:32And temples, too, and giant statues.
17:36Now Rome, not Babylon, was filled with stars and zodiacs.
17:41It became a magic city,
17:43surrounded with a wall of iron enclosing seven hills,
17:47one for each day of the creation and one for the creator's rest.
17:55And there were 365 squares in Rome.
17:58365 squares!
18:01And there were 365 squares in Rome.
18:04365 streets.
18:06365 palaces for the popes.
18:09And each palace had 365 steps.
18:12And each step was covered with bread enough to feed the world.
18:18It was a dream of poor people,
18:20imagining a legendary past,
18:22a past of endless wealth and wonder.
18:26Slowly, though,
18:28the ancient ghosts of wonder found a place again
18:31in humankind's imagination and ambition.
18:34And then it was
18:36that the finest images of all the seven wonders were created,
18:40at that magic moment when scientific study had begun.
18:44Yet all those ancient memories and myths were still alive.
18:49About 1520,
18:51a Dutch artist, Martin van Heemskerk,
18:54travelled down to Rome and was completely fascinated.
18:58Years later, he produced a set of drawings of the seven wonders
19:02that brought them back to life again.
19:05Heemskerk set his seven wonders
19:07on a stage which everybody knew and could enjoy.
19:11They were published as a set of prints and were very popular.
19:15And still a century later,
19:17tapestry weavers were using his designs
19:20in sets of noble hangings
19:22that portrayed the seven ancient wonders of the world.
19:29That's perhaps the most famous of Heemskerk's seven wonders,
19:33the great colossus of Rhodes astride the harbour.
19:37Actually, it wasn't Heemskerk's idea, that figure.
19:40It never really stood like that, of course.
19:42What happened was that a traveller went to Rhodes,
19:45heard a local story, put a drawing of it in a geography book.
19:49Heemskerk's pinched the drawing, which was just of this figure,
19:52but he set it in this wonderful, magical landscape
19:55and he's telling the story of the colossus.
19:57See, what's going on? There's an Arab raid.
20:00See those little boats going and all the Christian galley slaves pulling away?
20:04There's the local people praying to the colossus for help
20:08and here's the Arab workmen demolishing the great face of the statue.
20:12So he's really bringing the seven wonders alive, you might say.
20:17This one, well, this brings it alive in a different sort of way.
20:21It tells another story.
20:23Not the destruction of one of the wonders, but actually it's building.
20:27You see, there's the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus,
20:30there's the goddess suitably clothed in northern style
20:33and there's the master masons all chipping away and making the columns.
20:38Now, this is where this one gets a bit interesting
20:41because this column here actually fits beside the doorway
20:45and this guy here is said by some to be King Solomon
20:49and this is the building of Solomon's temple.
20:52See, what happened in medieval times was that the seven wonders were pagan,
20:56were taken over by another set of wonders,
20:59so the pyramid becomes Noah's Ark,
21:01the temple of Artemis becomes the temple of Solomon.
21:04Look, there's something else very interesting in this tapestry here.
21:09These poor workers that made these things in Brussels
21:12really had to follow these grand designs,
21:14but in the borders they were allowed to do their own thing.
21:18And these guys in their little dark workshops
21:20were thinking about the seven wonders of the world,
21:23not the grand vision, but the little common, ordinary visions.
21:27And so you get up there another of the Gothic seven wonders,
21:31the magic bird, the phoenix, that builds its funeral pyre
21:35and is lit by the sun and as it burns to death it rises in resurrection.
21:39It's an image of Jesus Christ.
21:41There's another very local wonder here too.
21:44That's a little hot spring by the French town of Grenoble.
21:47Very wonderful to have warm water without having to heat it.
21:59There were other visions of the seven wonders,
22:02visions less benign and far more frightening.
22:05And these too haunt our modern cities.
22:09Dreams that started in a Roman wood.
22:12Dreams of pain and love and death.
22:38This weird building is a sort of Renaissance time lock,
22:43the entrance to a dream of the seven wonders of the world.
22:50The entrance too to a garden made in the 16th century by Vicino Orsini,
22:55a retired soldier, a clever, cynical man amusing his friends.
23:02Here the seven wonders have become a set of riddles in a sacred grove,
23:07a little wood filled with footnotes, paradox and sheer terror.
23:37Orsini turns the colossus of the seven wonders into a wrestling madman
23:41tearing his opponent right in half.
23:45The old soldier who conducted massacres on behalf of the Pope
23:49shows us the darker side of valour and presents us with a tortured paradox.
23:55Orsini himself nudges you as you walk around his nightmare.
23:59If Rhodes took pride from its colossus, he says,
24:02so this one in my wood is glorious too.
24:08An old Venetian woodcut in a dream book
24:11showed Orsini this vision of the ancient mausoleum.
24:15His sculptors copied the wind vane trumpeting victory at the top
24:20and stood it on a tortoise.
24:23It's a slow, cynical victory, this, then,
24:27one moving into the jaws of hell.
24:31And on the very mouth of hell itself,
24:34Orsini wrote Dante's famous words,
24:37Abandon all thought, ye who enter here.
24:44Another of these woodcuts showed a monk's erotic dream,
24:48two lovers looking at the ruins of an ancient city in a forest.
24:53Orsini, too, made a brand-new vision.
24:57These, then, are the very first examples
25:00of Westerners taking pleasure in ruins,
25:03a pleasure now that drives a worldwide media industry
25:07and a multi-billion-dollar tourist trade as well.
25:12Here, at last, is hope.
25:16And here, at last, is hope.
25:20Here, at last, is hope.
25:23Here, at last, is hope.
25:26The light of the world, the Pharos of Alexandria,
25:29one of the seven wonders drawn for Orsini by a friend.
25:33But the world is barely balanced on a monster's head
25:36and is surrounded by a grove of four-faced gods.
25:42It's a very modern dream, then,
25:44a dream that takes the seven wonders
25:46and uses them to make a grand new statement.
25:49A little later on, this same device
25:52would place the ghosts of wonder
25:54into almost every modern city in the world.
25:59One man alone,
26:01the man who made the drawing of Orsini's lighthouse for him,
26:04the artist and aquarian Piero Ligurio,
26:07had started the seven wonders
26:09on their journey from this lonely wood.
26:12There you are.
26:13Volume 34 of The Antiquities of Rome
26:16by Piero Ligurio.
26:18There were once hundreds of these.
26:20There's only a few of them left now.
26:22This one's kept in Piero's hometown of Naples.
26:26Piero,
26:27do you know what this is?
26:29I don't.
26:30I don't.
26:31I don't.
26:32I don't.
26:33I don't.
26:34I don't.
26:35I don't.
26:36I don't.
26:37I don't.
26:38I don't.
26:39I don't.
26:40Piero is not much known today.
26:43In fact, he's best known
26:45for mucking around with Michelangelo's designs
26:47and getting the sack.
26:49He really didn't like Michelangelo.
26:51Michelangelo wasn't a scholar.
26:53Piero Ligurio was.
26:55And he was a new and different sort of scholar.
26:57Older people, really,
26:59had just looked at the books
27:00and conjured up the past from that.
27:02They'd ended up with a past
27:04which was full of dragons and alchemists
27:05as well as wise men,
27:07but a very distant thing.
27:08But Pyrrho saw the past as a great machine that had sort of distracted
27:13and strewn its bits across the landscape.
27:15And he studied the bits and put them together with the ancient texts.
27:20So, here's a book then that describes all the monuments of Rome,
27:23written by hand. These were never printed, that's why they're so precious.
27:27Most of these monuments have gone today.
27:29Look, here's a section on the King of the Gods.
27:32Altar, altar, coin, drainpipe, statues.
27:36Slowly, Pyrrho's putting together that ancient world,
27:39putting it back with the texts.
27:41See, earlier on, in Bomazzo, the ancient world had been sort of a place
27:46of fairies and dragons and alchemists.
27:49But here, Pyrrho's really starting to get down to it.
27:52He sees the past's world as a machine.
27:55And in this machine, the Seven Wonders plays a very special role.
28:01Just look what he has to say about some of his gods.
28:05Here's the goddess Artemis, for example,
28:07whose greatest temple was Ephesus, as Pyrrho well knew.
28:10Pyrrho knew almost as much about Artemis as we do today.
28:13This is his beautiful drawing of her.
28:16He saw her, really, as the mother of the universe.
28:20A bit like the Virgin Mary, really.
28:22He saw her, as he saw that ancient universe,
28:25as an age in which all of humankind was symbolised
28:28and portrayed in the most amazing way,
28:31as it opened up the past as it had never been done before.
28:40The climax of Pyrrho's work on antiquity is this extraordinary map,
28:45which he had printed in 1561.
28:48It shows the city of Rome.
28:50For most Westerners, it was always thought of
28:52as really the climax of pagan civilisation.
28:56For Pyrrho, of course, that meant it had to be filled with wonder.
29:00One of these wonders somehow symbolising
29:02the necessary bits of the great machine.
29:05So if we look across his map, it's not only a wonderful map of Rome,
29:08but it is filled with the wonders of the world.
29:11There, for example, is a hanging gardens.
29:14To Pyrrho, this meant the beautiful balance of man and nature.
29:18There's some pyramids.
29:19They were not only granaries, like the Bible said,
29:22but held the wealth of the human soul.
29:24Lighthouses, too, to guide people through the streets and down the rivers.
29:29But, you know, it wasn't just the map of Rome
29:32that really Pyrrho achieved this wonderful fusion of myth and archaeology.
29:37He did another map of the port of Rome that ran off the side.
29:41There, it's all put together.
29:43So many of the wonders.
29:44There's a colossus standing to tell you
29:47that you are coming to the centre of civilisation.
29:50There's a lighthouse, too, to guide your boat into the harbour
29:53and your soul towards civilisation, too.
29:56And there's a great arcade embracing not only sailors, but the soul itself.
30:06Was all of this an inspiration for the squares of Rome?
30:10Or was Pyrrho simply ahead of his time?
30:13At St Peter's, Bernini's great arcade seemed to echo
30:17Pyrrho's famous drawing of the ancient port of Rome.
30:27And all those wonders are still here, too,
30:30now exorcised by Christian popes.
30:34The Egyptian obelisk, which Pyrrho called a pyramid,
30:38is crowned now with a golden cross.
30:41And Pyrrho's pagan port is now a haven for the faithful,
30:45ringed by colossal statues of the saints.
30:57And the Pharos lighthouse?
30:59Well, that's St Peter's.
31:01The lantern on the church,
31:03sending out the light of faith into the darkness of the world.
31:27Street by street, square by square,
31:31all Rome was filling with dreams of wonder.
31:35A theatre full of brand-new wonders,
31:38echoing the ancient ghosts.
31:57Haunting visions of antiquity,
32:00of Alexander, elephants and Pharos.
32:11Of pyramids and mausoleums,
32:13of magic kings and queens and vast, vaulting temples.
32:18Huge ambitions and astounding images
32:21spilling out across the Western world.
32:24The ancient ghosts of wonder.
32:33And now it's time to leave Rome,
32:36to go back to the city of Rome.
32:39The ancient ghosts of wonder.
33:10It was an Austrian architect
33:12that finally brought the Seven Wonders down to earth.
33:15Johann Fischer von Erlach took time off from redesigning Vienna
33:20to produce really the first work of art history in the world.
33:23And the Seven Wonders are right at the front.
33:25It's a title page, magnificent black-letter script.
33:28And here, immediately, are the Seven Wonders.
33:31This is the Seven Wonders as process.
33:33This is not the Seven Wonders as a process.
33:37This is not the Seven Wonders as marvels and miracles.
33:41Here we've got a picture of Babylonia
33:43and he's working out how the gardens are irrigated.
33:46He also points out that this is the biggest brick building ever made.
33:49Very important.
33:51Same at the pyramids.
33:53He points out this is the biggest stone building ever made.
33:55How did people do that?
33:57We're into logistics.
33:59So when we get to Zeus,
34:01this is not only the biggest ivory statue ever made,
34:03but he's also worrying about how you accommodate it in a temple.
34:06Here we're really looking at the beginning of the modern world.
34:09Mausoleum.
34:12Great temples, Artemis.
34:14He describes it as the perfect mixture of marble and stone.
34:18You see, he's very involved in numbers.
34:20Not entirely involved in numbers.
34:22He's still got the wonderful old Colossus of Rhodes
34:25striding across the harbour wall.
34:27This is still the age when Louis XV's courtiers
34:30were killing children in black masses, after all.
34:33Nonetheless, this is a modern man thinking about the modern wonders.
34:37Here's the lighthouse.
34:39The description underneath tells you how it was made.
35:00In the 18th century, though,
35:02the same century as von Erle,
35:04wonder itself was slowly transforming,
35:07changing to span the world.
35:10A brand-new sense of wonder was starting to emerge.
35:18On Sunday 12th August, in the year of our Lord, 1770,
35:23two rather anxious men puffed their way up this hill.
35:27Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy
35:30and the botanist Joseph Banks.
35:39This is the hill of Lizard Island.
35:44Cook was exploring the entire east coast of Australia.
35:47Now, of course, he wasn't the first man to come here.
35:51The Aborigines had been here so long,
35:53they'd seen the sea come into the land
35:55and the corals grow in the warm water.
35:57There'd been Javanese here too, and Chinese.
36:00But Cook's party were the first people
36:03with a real modern vision to come here,
36:06people with a modern sense of property and ownership.
36:09And they were prepared to back that with guns.
36:13At that time, men like Cook were mapping the entire world,
36:18marking out, taking control.
36:22In the century that followed, railways, airstrips, roads,
36:26cables of a dozen descriptions went right around the planet,
36:30encompassing the whole world in a net.
36:33And that grand, uncontrolled, unexplored nature,
36:37the world in which man had lived since the beginning of time,
36:40the world in which he'd built the Seven Wonders,
36:42would all but disappear.
36:47As they climbed, though,
36:50in burning heat and very high humidity,
36:53thinking of all that,
36:55they were actually looking for a way out of a most deadly trap.
37:03The trap was made of living coral.
37:06As Captain Cook sailed north up the Australian coast,
37:10the solid wall of the Great Barrier Reef
37:13had pushed him ever closer to the shore.
37:17For 1,000 miles or more, Cook successfully avoided it,
37:22inching behind small boats sent out to spot underwater hazards.
37:28On June 11th, though, the Endeavour hit a reef and stuck fast.
37:34As the waves rocked her back and forth,
37:36the sharp corals soared through the Endeavour's hull.
37:41The sailor saw some of the planks of the keel floating to the surface,
37:45they threw everything they could lay their hands on overboard
37:48and managed to refloat her.
37:50After a desperate week of gales,
37:53they found a crocodile-infested inlet
37:55where they beached the Endeavour and started to repair her.
38:06Five weeks later, they were back at sea,
38:08still inching through the world's most dangerous stretch of water,
38:12still threatened by the coral
38:14and finding the reef moving ever closer to the land,
38:18feeling, as Cook says,
38:20entirely trapped on this most alien shore.
38:30They had climbed the hill of Lizard Island, highest on the reef,
38:34to look for a way out of the coral barrier into the open sea.
38:38From the top of the hill, Cook saw a way out,
38:41a narrow passage through the reef
38:43and took the necessary compass bearing.
38:46The very next day, the Endeavour sailed triumphantly
38:49through the perilous little channel,
38:51through the Great Barrier and out into the high, wide sea.
38:56These days, Cook's labyrinthine trap
38:59is counted as one of the wonders of the world.
39:02The Great Barrier Reef
39:04as large as the state of California,
39:06the world's largest living organism
39:08and the only one that you can see from space.
39:12What Cook saw as a terrifying hazard
39:15is something most modern people want to see before they die.
39:19Dive here and it's incredible.
39:21400 different corals, 1,500 species of fish,
39:25400 molluscs and wonderful animals like whales and turtles.
39:29Fly over it and it looks like a chain of opals lying in the sea.
39:33But only a microscope can show you the details
39:36of the coral polyps that made it all.
39:44To see the wonder of this place,
39:46to see it in the way we see today,
39:49you need the sort of equipment that Captain Cook never knew.
39:53Actually, he never knew.
39:55You need the sort of equipment that Captain Cook never knew.
39:59Aqualungs, cameras, aeroplanes, space capsules and microscopes.
40:03All this has made a very different world for us.
40:12Though Cook would never know it,
40:14his maps and plans of unknown seashores
40:17have become part of a basic grid of this brand-new universe
40:22where there are wonders of a very different type,
40:25wonders of nature, manipulated and observed.
40:43Spanning a canyon on the Colorado River,
40:46the Boulder Dam is the world's largest concrete structure
40:50and one of the world's pyramids of cash.
40:54Its waters irrigate California.
40:59Its turbines light Las Vegas,
41:01and nature is manipulated on a scale not seen before.
41:11Now, the great grand natural world is trapped
41:15and newly linked to humankind.
41:20Coming from powerful basic forces, using natural laws,
41:24we make electricity and all the other modern energies.
41:29We have made a brand-new world with very modern wonders.
41:51Like most modern buildings,
41:53the Las Vegas Pyramid and Sphinx are only temporary.
41:57They have built-in obsolescence.
42:03Ancient wonders, though,
42:05were built for ever and for courtiers and kings.
42:11The pyramids were built in the late 19th century
42:15were built for ever and for courtiers and kings.
42:20This, though, is the democratisation of wonder.
42:24People play in modern pyramids.
42:27They are called and warned and entertained by them.
42:32Here, though, the world's largest beam of light,
42:35which I'm told you can clearly see from space,
42:38may be turned off in ten years' time.
42:46The Las Vegas Pyramid
43:04Clearly, the real wonder is somewhere else.
43:09Now, perhaps, the cities with their wiry nerves
43:13have themselves become a wonder.
43:16They're not the kind of thing traditionally called wonderful,
43:20yet they are wonderful, as wonderful as a landscape,
43:23and like a landscape,
43:25they are shaped continuously by natural force.
43:38Ancient people also thought that they were linked with nature,
43:42that the prisms of the pyramids
43:44refracted the divine order of the universe
43:47onto the ancient state of Egypt.
43:51Our true beginnings, then,
43:53where wonder and the modern mind were made,
43:56are here at Pharaoh's Magic Mountains.
44:12Pharaoh's Magic Mountains
44:42The Las Vegas Pyramid