I apologise in advance for the wordiness of my post, but I adore anything to do with rocks and minerals, and I will go the full nine yards and use all sorts of words to make sure I'm saying it properly.

As our wonderful resident zoologist, Ainia, has noted, the small rocks in Payiferen glow when not in direct sunlight. This is notably apparent during the Payiferen night. Whilst we have had multiple theroies about why this is so, the favoured explanation is that the rocks contain some sort of luminescent crystal, that absorbs light from the Payiferen sun, and radiates it off, and is only visible where the sun is not shining on it.
The different colours produced could be due to slight changes in composition, similar to the colouration of saphires and rubies being caused by impurities to the corundum from which they grow. Indeed, they could be one large crystal, due to their regular prismatic shape, and their surface can be explained via weathering, since they are in a desert.
I would say that the rocks and the hills are made from the same material, but the hills do not glow since they are so much larger than the rocks, similar to how Coca Cola appears black when you pour a glass of it, but is brown when there's just a few drops left.

So, this presents us with a problem. Due to the inability of us easily being able to get samples of this stuff for analysis, what on earth (or should I say, Payiferen, or even better, the Pod Age) are these rocks made from?

Quote:

similar to how Coca Cola appears black when you pour a glass of it

Let the commercialism begin...Just a joke, as I know it was just used as a comparison.

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Undoubtedly, people across America and Britain, and everywhere else this topic is read, will be trying that out, just to see if it's true.

Perhaps if more of the pods were accessible, one could seek out other locations where the same phenomenon is exhibited. If more rocks of a similar type could be discovered elsewhere, their surroundings could play a part in helping to classify them... for instance, if they were discovered in another location in close proximity to a volcanic tube, it might be logical to presume that they are formed through an igneous process... though their crystalline nature perhaps already suggests that.

One thing that comes to mind as well is that perhaps they are not truly rocks at all, but rather fossilized remains... if the Payiferen region was once an oceanic area, perhaps there was a variety of marine life that formed a mineralized skeleton (like coral or marine diatoms), and imbued that skeleton with the properties of sunlight-fueled luminesence... This light would have then been emitted during dark hours to protect this organism from predation by startling their predators, or perhaps be used conversely to attract unsuspecting victims, or perhaps for no apparent reason at all (because things like that DO happen haha).

Of course, this does not explain why the small glowing rocks look the same as the large hills surrounding them and yet the hills do not glow... and also does little to encourage the theory that the rocks are indeed rocks and not a biological fossil...

Intriguing nonetheless! perhaps if Mr. Sharper's hobbies had been geology and chess rather than football and big game hunting, we would know a little more already about the glowing rocks of the Payiferen desert!!

Indeed. I guess all we can do is hope that restoration of the cavern becomes funded once more, so that we can bribe- I mean, persuade, someone to carry out experiments to find out what the rocks are made from.

I wonder if it is Nara [Stone from Spire (Myst IV-Relelations)]? If so, beware, as it is very unstable!

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How Many Times Does A Myst Player Play Myst Before A Myst Player Decides To Play Myst Again

No, nara has a different colour, and only glows green. Plus, nara is synthetic so it couldn't've formed on Payiferen.

DLordofTime wrote:

No, nara has a different colour, and only glows green. Plus, nara is synthetic so it couldn't've formed on Payiferen.

Nara in Spire glows green, but in another age? Can you point me to the reference that Nara is synthetic? Just curious.

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How Many Times Does A Myst Player Play Myst Before A Myst Player Decides To Play Myst Again

Charura wrote:

Can you point me to the reference that Nara is synthetic? Just curious.

In "The Book of Ti'ana" - "Part One: Echoes in the Rock" (pg 307 in The Myst Reader), they put rock excavated from the tunnels leading to the Great Shaft into a fusion-compounder which turns it into a highly compacted state and they call it nara.

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OU-Minkata Shard Testers Guide (in laymen's terms)

From page 307 in the Myst Reader wrote:

Atrus nodded. "It does. The cylinder is just temporary; a kind of jacket used to mold the nara into a storable form. When we have enough of the nara, we load up another machine with the cylinders. In effect, that machine is little more than a large pressure-oven, operating at immensely high pressures, within which the cylinders are burned away and the nara brought back to a more volatile, and thus usuable, state."

Nice Tai'lahr...Thank you! Now there is a Mystmaniac for you....

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How Many Times Does A Myst Player Play Myst Before A Myst Player Decides To Play Myst Again

From page 390 of the Myst Reader wrote:

The cavern, which at first glance seemed small, was in fact massive. What Anna had taken as the whole of it was in fact only a sort of antechamber. Beyond it was a second, larger chamber whose walls glowed with a faint, green light.

From page 392 of the Myst Reader wrote:

What did she have so far? The circle of rock and dust. The strange red "sealing" material. This other, green-black stone, which gave off a dim but definite light. And now these machines.

Shorah all,

I've been busy with the zoological thread lately but thought I might be able to stir the pot a bit here with a few photos from my recent Payiferen expedition. I'd noted the odd glowing behavior of the scattered rocks at the time but failed to mention then that there is another lighting oddity to be seen in Payiferen: the visibility of the sun at dawn and dusk. Here are some photos I took to show you what I mean:

The sun has just slipped down behind the mountains, yet we can still see the entire orb:

The sun now is beginning to slip down behind the nearer sand dunes:

The sand dunes are obscuring the sun from our sight. In Payiferen, the sunset is not complete until the sun has fallen below the sand dunes.

If you arrive early enough to see the Payiferen dawn, you will see the exact same phenomenon--the sun will shine through the mountains as it rises.

So this points to the mountains and sand as having important characteristics and may even hint that there is something unusual about the Payiferen sun...

More food for thought!!

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Wow. Do the mountains have that strange translucent quality at midday?

Shorah DLordofTime,

It's difficult to answer your question with any hard data since dawn and dusk are the only times of day I can actually view something that I know is behind the mountains. But I can only assume that the translucent quality persists throughout the day cycle (and night cycle as well).

Do you have any thoughts about how we might test this?

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As I'm a Messenger and only an amateur archeologist, the physical sciences aren't really my area...but I do have my own question. Are we sure those are actually mountains and not just giant sand dunes? After all, colored glass would have that same effect. In theory, isn't glass just melted or compressed sand (Silica)? Just throwing a possible "idea" into the mix.

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From wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass):

Glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline) solid material. Glasses are typically brittle and optically transparent.

The most familiar type of glass, used for centuries in windows and drinking vessels, is soda-lime glass, composed of about 75% silica (SiO2) plus Na2O, CaO, and several minor additives. Often, the term glass is used in a restricted sense to refer to this specific use.

In science, however, the term glass is usually defined in a much wider sense, including every solid that possesses a non-crystalline (i.e., amorphous) structure and that exhibits a glass transition when heated towards the liquid state. In this wider sense, glasses can be made of quite different classes of materials: metallic alloys, ionic melts, aqueous solutions, molecular liquids, and polymers. For many applications (bottles, eyewear) polymer glasses (acrylic glass, polycarbonate, polyethylene terephthalate) are a lighter alternative to traditional silica glasses.

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(Nevyn's Note: Any comments or opinions, taken whole or in part, are mine and do not reflect the stance of GoMe.)