Mesa Trail ch. 33
Draft 2

"Now, clinging to the bottom of the boat, Keeper knew. There was no mermaid mama. There never had been. There had only been Meggie Marie, who almost let her down on a star-filled night just like this one, who had told her to ride the wave ponies." – Keeper









The number of folks who have been up inside the maze and labyrinth of these mountains who wished they knew where they were would take all day and all night and into the next day to count.  Happens all the time, even these days, you get off trail and before you know it one rockfall looks like another.  A rock promintory looks like the next and the next.  False horizons keep you guessing.  Sure, creeks run downhill, and you could follow that, but through what rough terrain, where?  Those old miners used to stick close to camp without a compass.  Not that they didn't know the territory, they sure did after awhile, but false leads are not worth a gold nugget.  Compasses come in handy, for anybody.  Pull that up out of your pocket, match up the needle direction to the direction you came from, and voila, you might double back and begin to see some familiar landmarks.  The ancients of the world knew all about being lost and they got tired of it.  You can imagine crossing the seas following nothing but the stars or dead reckoning, zig zagging, losing hundreds of miles on overcast days, waiting, waiting for the sky to open up and the sun and moon and stars to give you a little break.  So, so long ago, way back in the B.C.'s, the Chinese found a funny little stone to help them with all of this, the lodestone, which, unknown before, happened to attract other metals.  Believe it or not, some lodestones look an aweful lot like element 79... gold!  Take a little bit of the lodestone, dangle it freely, maybe from a single thread of silk, and lo and behold it spins slowly toward the earth's magnetic field.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that they called this first known magnetic compass a 'south governor'...and was used mostly to show the user where the divine spirits of the earth resided.  There was an old story from the Dream Pool Essays, the first known written mention of any compass on earth, about the magic of rocks:

In the Zhi-pink reign a man of Zezhou was digging a well in his garden, and unearthed something shaped like a squirming serpent, or dragon. He was so frightened by it that he dared not touch it, but after some time, seeing that it did not move, he examined it and found it to be a stone. The ignorant country people smashed it, but Zhen Boshun, who was magistrate of Jincheng at the time, got hold of a large piece of it on which scale-like markings were to be seen exactly like those on a living creature. Thus a serpent or some kind of marine snake (chhen), had certainly been turned to stone, as happens with the 'stone-crabs.

Serpents in the fossils, serpents are the rocks, serpents high up in these mountains, how did they get here?  Gold veins running through the serpents of the rocks.  Lodestones. How did they get magnetic? The only way known? From the lightening bolt!