Caves

Petra is full of caves, some man-made, some natural. They may have been tombs, for the peasants who couldn't afford a fancy façade, or they may have been dwellings. There's very little in the way of artifacts so it's impossible to tell -- the only story here is written in stone.

Caves

There are caves -- some natural, most man-made -- in the rock walls throughout Petra. Many of them are tombs, but some were probably dwellings.

Because so many of the remaining structures in Petra are tombs, it's easy to think of it as a necropolis, but it was a thriving city where people lived and worked.

That niche by the cave entrance is also something that you see a lot along the Siq. The primary god worshipped by the Nabataeans was Dushara, Lord of the Mountain. And it was almost literally the mountains themselves that they reverenced. The statues of Dushara are cubes of stone, sometimes with crude circles for eyes, but usually featureless. Sometimes they actually carved away the entire top of a hill or mountain, leaving a cube-shaped “god block” behind.

Later, under Greek influence, they anthropomorphized the gods and started to add human features. But Petra makes so much more sense when you understand how the Nabataeans felt about these mountains, and why they would create their city by carving rather than building.

Stalactites

A claustrophobe walks into a cave...

There was plenty of opportunity to opt out of the cave visit and I was sorely tempted -- I am so claustrophobic that I would only take the New York subway in a matter of life and death, and metaphorical use of that phrase wouldn't count. And after the first time we had to duck to get through a passage where the ceiling was too low to stand straight, I was sorry I hadn't.

It didn't help that the only way out was to go back the way I'd come - short passages, narrow passages, and a long, long spiral ramp at the entrance. I don't have a problem with small spaces in general; it's only small spaces I can't get out of.

But I was mostly okay. It was beautiful: cones and curves and odd sheets that hung like curtains. Mix a little water with a little calcium carbonate and add a lot of time, and the results are quite magical. I took a lot of pictures, even though I knew they wouldn't come out because I had to focus manually (a less expensive camera would probably have done much better) but focusing on the light and the shapes kept me from thinking too much about where I was and deciding that I'd forgotten how to breathe.

Glow little glowworm, glimmer glimmer

This picture may not look like much, but it is the best of my many attempts to capture Arachnocampa luminosa, the New Zealand glowworm, in the Ruakuri cave on the road from Rotorua to Auckland.

This was from a section of the cave where there were only a few glowworms; there was another, much larger section where the walls and ceiling looked like that starry sky in the Outback, little pinpoints of blue and green and white light everywhere. There were no lights there, and we had to turn off our phones and cameras before shuffling into the pitch darkness like preschoolers on a field trip, each of us holding on to the shoulders of the person in front of us.

It was a little creepy and extremely clammy and not recommended for claustrophobes. I'm glad I did it anyway.

Non-astronomy Tuesday

Sticking with the theme here: Lake Superior has frozen enough to allow access to the ice caves at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin. These photos, by Barbara Alwes, are from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources photostream on Flickr. (via Colossal, where there are many more photos.)

Beautiful as they are, somehow I'm not tempted to jump on a plane and go see them in person.