(Left: Face on Cave Floor / Right: Face on Mars)
Sometimes, perspective can be deceiving. Look through a microscope at glowing white bacteria on a petri dish, for instance, and you might think you’re looking through a telescope at stars shining in the evening sky on a clear, crisp spring night.
That sort of disorienting, close-far phenomenon caught up with me recently in, of all places, an Aruban cave. And of all things, I saw the Face on Mars. On the floor.
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But I’m getting ahead of myself. I recently vacationed in Aruba, which has a good amount of adventure-like activities perfect for a family with a young boy, not least snorkeling and hiking. Along Aruba’s East Coast, a wild, windy, sea-sprayed national park, the constant wave action over the millennia has carved shallow limestone caves into the hills, just a few hundred yards from the ocean.
We bumped over the dirt road in our rented Kia, then hiked into several collections of caves where a few thousand years ago, Arawak Indians dwelled. There, the Arawak left handprints and drawings in some of the chambers, using a red ink made from the stems of native plants. Unfortunately, no one knows what they meant to say, since that particular Arawak language has never been translated.
Native Island Tribe Redefining Survival
Turning away from the mysterious drawings, the guide pointed out a rock formation on the floor of the cave that happened to have a shaft of sunlight shining on it. What does the formation (at the top left of this page) look like to you? Maybe it was just because I’d just looked at Indian cave drawings, but I saw a craggy Indian face.
The only other face I’d ever seen like this was very, very, very far away from that cave: the Face on Mars, captured in 1976 by the Viking spacecraft as it circled the Red Planet.
Compare the two faces at the top of this post, and just keep in mind that the one on the left was taken by me from about five feet away. The face at the right was taken by Viking I, which orbited about 930 miles above the surface of Mars at its closest.
I’m not drawing any conclusions here about the two faces. I just find it fascinating that we can see the same patterns whether they’re right in front of us or crazy far away.
Image: Right photo: NASA / Left and all other photos: Lori Cuthbert
Tags: Mars
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