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So mountains are more than chunks of rock?

I see mountains as almost living organisms, as dynamic things. They grow. If the whole history of the earth was speeded up, you would see its surface almost pulsing. Take the Andes: 40 or 50 million years ago there was no mountain range at all. One way of thinking about it is to take a million years of geological time and say that is equivalent to one year of our time. A typical life of a mountain range is about 70 million years - call that 70 years. If something geological happens in a million years, that's fast.

The Andes are probably in middle age, in their 40s, with plenty of life ahead of them and lots of experiences behind them. They have been late developers because they hung around for a long time without growing much, then suddenly rocketed up and doubled in height. If I couldn't think of the mountains this way I wouldn't be so interested in them. They would turn into great lumps of inert rock, which is how I think most people see them.

What's the "devil in the mountain" of your book title?

The Bolivians are descended from the Incas, who saw the earth as being ruled by spirits. Different domains of the earth have different spirits, and there is a spirit in the underworld, the bedrock of our world.

When the Spanish came to South America, the locals created a hybrid, mixing their traditional beliefs with the Christian ideas. The devil from Spanish Catholicism got mixed up with this spirit of the underworld. The Spanish were pretty cruel about getting the peoples of the Andean countries to extract gold: the hardship in those mines was unbelievable. So the spirit of the underworld became a formidable character, a devil.

Today if you are a miner you make a pact with the devil, otherwise you are in big trouble. If you go into any mine in Bolivia, there's a big effigy of the devil close to the entrance. They give it presents in the hope everything will be all right. For me, as a geologist, the devil in the mountain is the nature of the bedrock, what has happened there, all the stories locked up in it.

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Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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. Boulders, hills, a clan of mountain nomads tumbled from the SthCaz Mountain range, as the range raised a scaly head. The five large hills that covered the head of Mother fell violently to the valley below as she bellowed the first of her calls. Her scaly body, covered by centuries of dirt and rock and forests and lakes rose to her legs. Then mountains of wings opened up, stretching literally for miles. They pumped once, then thrice more, creating blasts of air that effected the global weather system for months. She slowly lifted into the air. The sentient survivors below cringed in awe at the launch of a god. Again, a monstrous roar filled the air. The roar deafened all within 15 miles of the mountain range, and was heard by some sensitive reptilian ears around the world.

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