The Ajanta Caves

It helps if you spell a word right. There are many websites about the Ajanta Caves, mentioned in my last post. It's worth looking up. While Petra is undoubtedly the most famous carved cave site, the Ajanta caves are no less remarkable, especially as they are on a hillside.

Click here
and here


An even more fantastic story, though, is that of Oberto Airaudi, an Italian businessman who dreamed of fantastic temples and a benign culture, and who initiated the creation of secret underground recreations of his vision. This installation was revealed only in 1993, but already a spiritual community has grown up that includes organic farms, eco-friendly homes, and a commune operating as an independent "Federation of Damanhur."

It's too rich a story to try to summarize here - go to:
See Damanhur

Trapped in a Web of Words

Last night I was reading about the Deccan Traps and I distinctly heard my Grandmother’s voice saying, “Don’t forget your traps.” Grandma has, of course, been gone for many years, but her quaint sayings, as well as her admonitions and words of advice linger on. Grandma was not, in any way, referring to animal traps. But before I get to that, let’s return to the Deccan Traps for a minute.

Although this term sounds rather threatening, in fact it refers to a volcanic formation in India. In this case, the word comes from the Swedish trapp, meaning steps. The Deccan formation consists of layers of lava flow in huge terraces, laid down over a period of years. The jury still seems to out on the duration of this period (somewhere between 1.5 and 4 million years) but the major eruption occurred about 65 million years ago - about the time of the dinosaur extinctions. Some scientists theorize that the gases from this eruption may have contributed to that extinction, possibly in combination with a meteor strike in the Yucatan. (This combination poses an interesting scenario, which so far I haven’t seen addressed.) At any rate, it is estimated that the original flows covered up to 600,000 square miles. Today they cover about 200,000 – about the size of Oregon and Washington together. This is still one of the largest volcanic features in the world.

In a valley high in the Deccan Traps, the caves of Ajunta were discovered by a British horse officer in the 19th Century. These caves are carved out of the solid lava, with amazing statuary, including life-sized elephants, many figures of Buddha, and even a free-standing two-story temple; as well as many well-preserved frescoes. The caves were carved between the 2nd and 7th centuries A.D. – then abandoned and forgotten until their rediscovery.

Grandma’s word “traps” had nothing to do with geology or Buddist carvings. She would say “Don’t forget your traps” when you were leaving after a visit, and she was referring to your belongings – usually coat, hat, purse, whatever you had brought with you. I always assumed that it came from the word “trappings,” which it does, although both are shown as dictionary terms. We do sometimes come across “trappings” in older literature – phrases like “their elegant trappings.” The term also sometimes refers to caparisoned horses, and the word can also refer to a small horse-driven wagon. But I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing “traps” used the way Grandma did. Apparently the word – along with “trappings” – is slowly fading from use.


Me and my Grandma, Vera Green, fishing in Arizona when I was about five years old.

Frequently Grandma would say, “Company is coming, so I have to redd up the spare room.” The only other place I have heard or seen “redd” was in a book by a Scottish poet. that puzzled me, since most of Grandma’s phrases came from her Pennsylvania Dutch background. In fact, *redd* is Scottish dialect (from Old Norse rydhja) and brought to the American midlands by Scottish immigrants. “Redd up” is a particularly Pennsylvania use of the term. As a child, I was used to hearing “kaffee” for coffee, “pruins” for “prunes," and grammatical constructions such as “I’m going to take the broom out and sweep the walk around.” Mind you, Grandma spoke no German, but these inflections carried into everyday English for her family. Although her “dubishy” may have been a purely Grandma word – it meant “dubious.”

Pages from an altered book that I did, honoring my grandmother

About the San Francisco Earthquake

A stereo view card of the Refugees' camp at the ball grounds in Golden State Park,

in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

Many tens of thousands of residents were displaced or homeless after this great disaster.

Card published by The World Wide View Co., Photo (screened print) by Griffith & Griffith

We tend to use terms such as “steady as a rock” and “solid ground” and “down to Earth” to describe stability and immutability. But in fact, our earth is a molten ball of melted rock covered with thin slabs of solid material that float, slip, slide, ooze, fracture, sink, collide, subside and that sometimes melt, flow, and spew. Meanwhile our little planet is whirling around our sun, in a solar system that is traveling through space at incredible speed. It’s enough to give you vertigo, and reading a book such as Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World can make you a lot less sure of your footing.

This book (Harper Collins, 2005) is ostensibly about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. As he usually does, Winchester uses the San Francisco earthquake as the major “character” in a story that covers a great deal more – plate tectonics, the Gaia theory, seismology, and other aspects of what scientists have come to call “The New Geology” – the revision of geological theories since the mid-1960s.

Winchester undertook a journey across the North American Plate – starting in Iceland at its Eastern perimeter, and traveling across the United States to San Francisco, thence to the northern reaches of Alaska. In order to understand what all this has to do with the San Francisco earthquake, one simply needs to read the book and make the journey vicariously with Winchester, who as always imbues his story with excitement, tension, humor, human interest and anecdote. Nor is he ever afraid to give his personal reaction to a town, a person, a book, or a theory.

Although he is a consummate researcher and made use of many experts in compiling his information, I’d have to quibble with his reference to the death of David Douglas in Hawaii. Winchester relates the old pit and bull story, which was considered to be highly suspect at the time, and has since been disproved by witnesses who came forward long after the fact to testify that Douglas was murdered and tossed into the pit with the bull to simulate an accidental death.

As for the San Andreas fault, Winchester uses a train-car analogy that make a fine clear image of what happens when it generates an earthquake. And as for timing – he brings forth a persuasive argument that another slippage is overdue and likely to occur at any time, but fairly certainly within the next quarter-century or so.

I was disappointed with the inside of the dustjacket – which cleverly unfolds the way that the jacket for The Map That Changed The World does. However, whereas the “Map” jacket had a large depiction of William Smith’s beautiful map of the geology of England and Scotland, the inside of this jacket has only reproductions of some of the disaster scenes from the San Francisco earthquake. Larger renditions of the endpaper maps of the North American Plate and of American earthquakes and volcanoes (and the author’s route), plus a better “close up” of the San Andreas fault itself, would have been far more informative.

Meanwhile, I’m not taking the ground beneath my feet for granted any longer.