Spelunking

As I rode an elevator into the depths of an Icelandic volcano, I noticed that a child had fallen and was drowning in the magma! I would have gone to save him, but I was wearing my nice new shoes and didn’t want them to melt.

Traveling next to Guilin, I found the walls, once just a blank slate, covered in ink-written inscriptions dating as far back as the Tang dynasty.

Wandering through the Room of the Candles and the Room of the Infinite in this Italian cave, I revised my opinion that stalagmites and stalactites were naturally nasty, brutish, and short.

I wanted to spend more time admiring the huge stalagmites in the Big Room’s Hall of Giants, but a tyrannical majority of our group forced all of us to move on.

Seeing myself reflected in the mirror-like water, I began to wonder if my gender was as much of a performance as the bell-like organ music produced by the stalactites all around me.

The bright sparkling ceiling, covered in what seemed like as many insects as there are people in China, reminded me of the firing of neurons in a giant simulated brain.

It looked almost as though an invisible hand had shaped these basalt walls into their perfect hexagonal columns.

In the passageways of the longest cave system in the world, I came up with the hypothesis that they would never end. I came up with an empirical scientific method for testing this hypothesis, and I appear to be finding verification so far!

Staring at the calcified skeleton tossed to the floor of this ‘crystal sepulcher’, I wondered whether it would be worth ritually sacrificing one person to the Mayan gods if it could prevent the deaths of five others.