Remi-niscent

Chapter 30:

Finally getting a stretch of in my opinion well deserved good luck, the rest of the night as it passes is really quite uneventful, as all we do sit around the flickering fire while eating pieces of roasted pheasant that just drip with fat and sing happy campfire songs. Though to anyone on the outside it may seem as though we are all acting rather blasé about today's events, I think that it has more to do with the fact that everyone is just so relieved that nothing even more serious had happened.

In another step of positive progress, Ty and I have manage to keep things surprisingly civil between us and now just keep on making eye contact from the opposite sides of the fire. Each time it happens we both smile shyly and quickly look away like primary schooler's with a silly playground crush, yet both find that our eyes keep being drawn back to one another.

By the time we all start to wake up the next morning, I have to say I'm somewhat disappointed that the weather still hasn't changed. Layers upon layers of thick ominous clouds cover the sun in the sky, but thankfully I don't get the sense that it's about to start raining anytime soon. However what still weirds me out even more is the strange tendrils of fog that are continuously creeping silently through the trees around us. Having made the decision to continue on our quest to find the whatever it is that I had seen the day earlier, we pack up the meagre belongings that the boys had brought over from the canoes and the start making our way uphill from our little campsite through the forest.

Much to my embarrassment, since I obviously can't walk on my own right now, Ty promptly proclaims that he is going to be the one to carry me, fending off any protests from the other boys as they suggest that they could all take turns. Seeing as I don't want to be the one to break the shaky peace between us, I don't complain and instead haul myself up onto his back, perching there with my arms slung around his broad shoulders to hold tight and his hands firmly clasped onto the bottom of my thighs.

It doesn't take long at the pace we're marching at, that the gorge we're in gets steeper and steeper, but surprisingly Ty doesn't even break a sweat even though he's carrying not only his own weight, but a pack on his front and my whole body weight. Carrying on like this for a while it still takes us quite some time to find what I had been looking for. But finally after about three quarters of a hour, what we see in front of us makes it all worth it.

It's a large mesa up ahead, which is also otherwise also known as a plateau, but what makes it so unusual are the weird giant pillar like rock structures that rise up out of it from the ground. These rock towers not only rise meters above our heads, but the ends taper off into razor sharp pinnacles and looking more closely I can see that the stone itself has countless ripples through it, which creates a mesmerising pattern to look at. Though when you think about it, if someone were to get lost inside, they would also make it hard for anyone to find their way out of the maze like structure. The whole thing just feels weird and eerie, giving off an even stranger atmosphere, especially with the fog still hanging around even though it's almost midday already.

"Aliens?" Wonders Logan out loud, the only one of us who seems to be able to put his thoughts into words at this point in time.

As I kind of expected, no one says anything to answer him because there's no one here who even has the slightest idea of what actually could have formed these beautiful, eye catching and odd structures. 

Curious to know more, I reach out running my fingers gently across the hard surface.

"This almost has to be limestone I think," I murmur, more aimed at myself than anyone else. "Because limestone is one of the few types of stone that will erode with rainwater that contains a weak carbonic acid; Which isn't unlikely to be the case here considering the abundance of the nitric or sulphuric acids in our atmosphere all around us. Seeing as both of these acid types are highly soluble, it means that when it rains they'll quickly dissolve into water droplets in the clouds and come down as rain. This would then create a chemical reaction between the limestone and the acidic rain, dissolving and eroding away at the vertical joints and horizontal planes to create this karst landscape."