Word: tufa
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...premonition of the Gaia hypothesis, which compares the planet to a living organism, he writes poetically, "We may say that the earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks...its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters...
...this I had ... The uneasy moonscape stretched away on every hand, and, below me, clinging to the roots of the fortified pinnacle of rock I stood upon, were the ruinous mud huts of the old village, their terraces heaped with melons yellow and green. Fantastical that landscape is, the tufa towers riddled with painted churches, like the sandcastles of giants' children, and I was amazed by it; but amazement is pretty soon exhausted...
...boulders get up there? That's the key to this mysterious valley. Geologists explain that the place is made of tufa, a soft rock deposited by the nearby volcano Ercyas Dagi. Harder rocks were interspersed with the soft tufa, protecting what lay beneath them from the rainwater that eroded the rest of the valley. As the land level declined, these peculiar shapes of tufa with boulders on top of them were left behind. In most cases the tufa columns wore away so much that their rock capitals eventually fell off; these columns have since sharpened to a fine point...
...these rock dwellings are above ground. On the perimeter of the valley, at Denikulu and Kaymakli, the Byzantines tunnelled down into the soft tufa and constructed underground cities eight levels deep and a mile wide, fit to house 10,000 people, their animals and their stores. The inhabitants cooked and ate communally. Special chimney systems were designed to conceal the smoke; ventilation shafts provided air. The various rooms are all connected by a labyrinthine network of stairs and corridors. These troglodytes wheeled mammoth stones across the entrance and holed themselves up for six months at a time...
...Revolution, seats 20,000; the smaller 6,000. Escalators go up to a library which will hold 500,000 books, a maze of museums, foyers, restaurants. Besides the two main halls, there will be four conference rooms. The base of the Palace will be marble and granite; the rest, tufa, a purple-red volcanic stone found in the Caucasus. Lenin's statue will be aluminum or chrome steel. Including the statue, the building will be 1,361 ft. high (Empire State: 1,248 ft.). Boris Michailovitch Iofan is one of U. S. S. R.'s best-loved architects...