Towers of Old Fire

That dawn Polly travelled in the basket instead of flying alongside it. The pilot took the balloon down low over the tops of the stone towers, close enough that she could lean out across the rim and lay a wingtip against the smooth grey cap of rock balanced on the crown of one of them.

The pilot pointed toward the horizon, where a single white mountain stood clear of the haze in the morning light. "That was a volcano once, a very long time ago indeed," he said. "Its ash fell across everything you can see and settled and hardened into the pale soft stone underneath us."

What followed took millions of years. Wind and water worked at the soft stone and cut it back into towers, and each tower held on to a cap of harder, darker rock at its summit. The cap acts as an umbrella, sheltering the softer column beneath it from the weather that would otherwise wear it away. The people here call them fairy chimneys, which is a better name than anything geology has managed.

The stone has one further quality that changed the history of the region. Freshly cut it is soft enough to work with hand tools, and it hardens on contact with the air. So the people cut doorways, windows, staircases and whole rooms directly into the rock and moved in. Polly looked through one small carved window as the balloon drifted past it. A cool, quiet room waited on the other side, shaped by hand and still perfectly sound.