The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.3 The Haunted Caves

They saw it from afar, as they were traveling among the clouds in Helios’s chariot, the strange city of caves, carved in the soapstone of a cluster of spiky cliffs, sometimes by nature, sometimes by man, displayed amid the arid landscape like a giant sculpture, maybe an artifact the titans left behind, before his love of humankind landed Prometheus his penance.

A huge human beehive it seemed to be, where the diligent workers moved about through hundreds of holes in the stone cliffs towards the innards of the place, dug deep into the earth: the huge underground metropolis that marked the beating heart of Anatolia.

A large delegation welcomed the goddesses, with the traditional sheaves of grain and prolonged orations, and when it was done prostrating, the group surrounded them like living water and carried them down stairs and ramps through large subterranean chambers and hallways, past people carrying on their mundane activities, past carved galleries and alleys and arcades, public spaces and ventilation shafts, temples, tombs, and sanitation systems, stables and wells and water reservoirs, all the parts of a flawlessly functioning city, miles beneath the earth’s surface, illuminated only by Prometheus’s gift.