Morning all. Mid week has arrived. Less eager to wake up this morning and in much need of coffee. As that is more typical than yesterdays wide awake for no reason. I feel okay about it. So Shall we jump into the morning prompt while the coffee brews? I think we should. Timers at the ready and off we go.
I can’t lie, it took me a while to figure out where this was going. I floundered a bit but towards the end I felt the glimmer of an idea. I may jot down a few notes in a minute just so they don’t dart off again.
Wednesday, February 26th: It was a world shaped by water.
It was a world shaped by water. The stone had been worn away, sculped into curves and pillars. The layers of the different stones could be seen in the striation. Red, yellow, white and gray. Each type of rock built up or laid down at a different time, in a different era. Walking through the valley left behind, he could see that there wasn’t a single hard angle anywhere. Everything was softly worn. The edges smooth, corners rounded.
The water was gone now, but it’s presence could still be felt by those worn curves. As he walked, the sun reached a point in the sky where the angle of light was just right to make the read of the stone glow. The flecks of mica were picked up and occasionally sparkled, but the end result was that the world felt rosy.
‘Its as if the entire cavern blushed.’ He thought as he progressed slowly.
He was warned that during the rainy season the land here would still flood and so the process was on going, at least in season. But this deep canyon was once a riverbed year round before the weather and geography shifted.
As they were far from the rainy season the area was bone dry, the white bits of stone soft and crumbly. It was the best time to access it, and more importantly the hidden network of tunnels.
No one was entirely certain when the network of tunnels was created. He suspected it was sometime after the flooding of the area became seasonal. The tunnel mouth was low enough that it was covered during the rainy season, the water concealing the entrance and no doubt flooding the lower portions. The exterior of the tunnel looked as water worn as the rest of the canyon, nothing about it standing out. If walking past it was easy to think that perhaps a large boulder had been dislodged and left a dent in the canyon wall. All signs of tool marks were worn away.
‘If there were any,’ he thought as he walked. It was possible that the entrance was natural and it was later expanded. The fact that it was expanded was in no doubt. While the entrance flooded a good way in, there was, just around the first curve, a hole dug. The hole created a giant cistern under the tunnel system. The flood waters rushed in, filled the cistern and did not creep higher up the tunnel system, leaving the rest high and dry.
‘With quite a decent water supply.’
There were tool marks on the stone beyond the cistern’s mouth. With no water running over them, they had not been worn away. Who made them and when the last time they were used was not something that had been determined. It was something he found interesting, but not the primary reason for his visit either. He reached the entrance to the cavern. He attached a headlamp to his head by means of an elastic band. As he stepped into the tunnel mouth he turned it on.
The temperature dropped drastically once he was inside and out of the sun. The rosy tint to the world was lost and the world tuned into grayish white stone with reddish lines running through it. He proceeded into the tunnel cautiously, well aware the cistern opening was close.
Ten til Midnight 