Amirhan desert mission, day 326
The snow is still here. The temperature has stayed below zero the whole time, even though the sun shines warmly during the day, and many times I have been sure the temperature is below freezing, but every time both our thermometers and the non-melting snow have disagreed.
We got fresh water today. It was surprisingly refreshing a drink after months of mata'ir sap. Though we are mostly not using it for drinking, since we have better things to do with fresh water than drink. Even so, we sometimes have to reward ourselves for the work we do here (and for being here for so long in the first place) and a drink that doesn't taste like anything. Although mata'ir sap doesn't actually taste like much either. (I never thought I'd miss water.)
In my rambling I am missing the most interesting point about the water. We only got the water today, because the snow took this long to melt. We took inside the water Enembe and Ndali got into the canisters on the first day of snow, and it took it this long to melt, even though we are able to keep the temperature inside not quite warm enough to be an idea temperature, but warmer than enough to melt a canister of snow in a few hours. This is another reason I didn't want us drinking too much of the water: I don't trust it. It melting so slowly means there is not only something weird in it being here in the first place, there is something weird also about the snow itself. Even so it did taste like nothing, as clean fresh water should. We need to look into it once we have more time.
Today we went to check the Floating Rocks. After all this time I still don't understand that place. I think we are beginning to glimpse some edges of maybe how, maybe why (I am not sure of even that) the Rocks are floating in the air. Today, however, some of them had stopped. There was no immediate logic to it as far as I could see. Some of them were simply not in the air anymore, but there were still Rocks at twenty meters, like the highest have always been, just as barely above the ground. And the Rocks that had stopped floating were of all sizes, meters wide, the size of my fist, and everything in between. The area wasn't any smaller either.
And there was something different about the Rocks still in the air, too. I could put my finger down on it at first, because they looked exactly like they have always looked: stationary in the air, some rotating at various but slow speeds. Or maybe they are all rotating, only some so slowly we have no way of measuring it. We took all the usual measurement at the scene, as we always do, and they too were normal. We had been there for hours before I realized what it was that was different. Even though everything seemed as it usually was, the feeling of the Rocks had changed ever so slightly. The impression you got looking at them was that they weren't so much floating as hovering. I am not even quite sure what the difference between floating and hovering is in a scientific sense, especially since there wasn't any kind of physical difference there, but I am absolutely sure the Rocks still in the air were hovering, and not floating. This bothers me very much, since seeing a change in a place as only the change in a general feeling in that place isn't very good science at all. At least it isn't outside Amirhan. Either way, I'll have to look through our data from today and compare it to our previous data from Floating Rocks to see if there is any verifiable difference, other than some of the Rocks having simply stopped floating.
And, well, the snow, of course. I don't know if it covers the entire desert, but we didn't come across or see a snow line on our way to the Floating Rocks, or looking around as far as we could see there. Since there isn't that much snow and the Rocks are at least fist-sized, we could see that all the Rocks that had stopped floating had done that after the snow came, because none of them were covered. Also, there wasn't any snow on any of the Rocks, floating or on the ground, which I found curious, since there is no reason the snow should not be in them as it is on the ground, since the Rocks are quite stationary.
My mind, of course, jumped right to the conclusion that coming of the snow had made the Rocks stop floating. I resisted the urge to take that as a truth, though, because even though both of these things happened (approximately) the same time, it doesn't mean there is a causation between them. It could be a coincidence. Although there is something undeniably weird about both, which I think makes it more likely they are connected, but in a place like this two unlikely weirdnesses at the same time might not be all that unlikely. It is annoying, not having any way to test my hypothesis.
I would have liked to take one of the smaller fallen Rocks with me to the camp, but I didn't dare. I don't understand them well enough yet to move them. I am not even sure if moving them is possible, we have never tried. And even if we had, not being or being able to move one of the Rocks floating does not mean the same applies to the no more floating Rocks.
We got back so late I won't have any time to go through the data today, but I will definitely have to get back to that soon.
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The topic for tomorrow is Glimpse
~matu
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