Doorways

There's something about doors that is magical.

They're portals from one room to another or from the inside of a house to the outside -- and sometimes stand between imprisonment and freedom.  As such, they belong to neither realm.  They're boundaries, edges, passageways.

I'm not the only one who finds the "middle ground" doors occupy to be evocative.  How many stories have the word in the title?  A Wind in the Door, The Door in the Wall, The Doors of Perception, The Door into Summer, and The Door to December -- that's without even thinking hard.  Stories that feature doors as portals from one realm to another are even more commonplace; I've done it myself (in Sephirot and The Accidental Magician).

Maybe you've even seen the following meme that was going around on social media a while back:

My immediate answer was that if I could bring along my puppy, then hell yes.  (I rather shamefacedly added that I should probably bring along my wife, too.)  I mean, chances are that rather like the Bear That Went Over The Mountain, where I'd end up after walking through is merely the other side of the doorway.  But hell, I've read books with way more interesting options.  If there was even a chance I'd find myself in Earthsea or Narnia or Prydain or the Dreamlands or Middle Earth, it'd be worth the risk of disappointment.

It's that sense of doorways as liminal spaces that probably explains the current hoopla over the discovery of what appears to be a giant oval doorway in the Dzungarian Alatau Mountains of Kazakhstan.  To be fair to the hooplites, it's pretty odd-looking:

Its dimensions (about 12 meters tall and wide) and shape immediately brought up comparisons to the Gates of Moria from The Lord of the Rings and the doorway into Jabba the Hutt's palace in Return of the Jedi.  Then the Ancient Aliens crowd got involved (because of course they did) with claims that it's the entryway to an alien base.

Maybe even one that's still occupied.  *cue scary music*

The likeliest explanation, of course, is much more prosaic; this is simply a weathering pattern in the rock face.  All you have to do is visit Arches National Park in Utah to see dozens of examples of rock formations eroded into arches (thus the name).  Geology, in fact, can do some really freakin' weird stuff.  The Giant's Causeway, a hexagonal basalt formation in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, is so peculiar-looking it seems like it couldn't be natural (until, of course, you understand the mechanism of how it formed).

That hasn't slowed down the speculation any.  It doesn't help that some early twentieth century Spiritualist writers speculated that Hyperborea, one of the mythical lands invented by the ancient Greeks, was located in the mountains of central Asia.  Gary Manners, who wrote the article linked above, concludes with the following equivocal passage:

Despite scientific explanations, the Kazakhstan doorway continues generating intense interest and debate online.  Social media users propose theories ranging from concealed alien bases to entrances to underground civilizations...  The formation's remarkable symmetry and positioning challenge even skeptical observers to consider alternative explanations beyond conventional geology.

Let's clear one thing up right away; these are not theories.  What the social media users are proposing are what we skeptics call WAGs (wild-ass guesses).  A theory is a well-tested model that explains a set of data -- i.e., a framework backed up by actual hard evidence.  All the social media users are doing is looking at a single photograph and saying, "Hey, that looks like..."  As such, these guesses are nearly worthless -- only valuable in bringing attention to an interesting site, and perhaps prompting some actual geologists to go over there and see what we've got.

So me, I'm waiting for the scientists to weigh in.  If they get to Kazakhstan, and have to say the Sindarin word for "friend" to get the doorway to open, or if they hear a gurgly voice behind it saying, "Bo shuda!  Huh huh huh huh huh," or if (best of all) they pry it open and find an underground alien base, then we can talk.

Until that time, I'm gonna Ockham's Razor the shit out of this and stick with "it's an odd-looking rock formation."

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