For my sixteenth A to Z blog challenge post, I’m going to play tour guide once again. Anne and her compatriots get to see a lot of corners of Russia in the course of their adventures in Dust to Blood. While visiting Ekaterinburg, they make a side trip to visit the Kapova at Shulgan-Tash. It’s still challenging to travel there, so I thought you might enjoy this information, too.
The human-made markings in the mile-long gallery in the cave are estimated to be 15-20,000 years old and sit in the middle of an almost 53,000 acre nature preserve. There are old-growth forests there, where more than 100 varieties of plants are endangered and under protection. The cave itself is designated a historical monument.
It’s a beautiful setting to speculate on the universality of human experience. They were documenting animals even in the Upper Paleolithic, and it’s eerie to imagine there were people even then creating records of their reality. Where, despite my fiction, there were unlikely to have been dragons–even though I do see a coil right by a strangely deformed animal in the lower left of that picture at the top of this post.
😉
My editor approved of my ending, and any remaining loose ends are resolving, so I’m looking forward to sharing the story with the world at large.
🙂
I would love to go visit some of those age old cave paintings that are located around the world.