Call of the Void
Vanishing Point
Sometimes the void isn’t inside you — it’s outside, and it’s the size of an entire mountain.
Karain doesn’t greet you with a door but with a gap in the limestone, pulling you in like a breath. You stand on the slopes of the Taurus Mountains, surrounded by the rustle of insects and the distant echo of the road, but after just a few steps upward, the noise of human civilization cuts off like film snapping in an old projector. In that moment, you disappear not into darkness, but into antiquity.
Landscapes Without Hope
The path to the cave winds through sunburned hills where dry grass creaks underfoot and the air promises to overheat your thoughts long before noon. The trail climbs toward a limestone wall, and the higher you go, the less it feels like a casual walk: each step seems to cost you a drop of sweat and a fragment of the illusion that you’re in control. At the top — a stone maw, black and silent, like the entrance to someone else’s dream.
Cry of the Stones
Inside Karain there is no silence — there are the sounds of stones.
They drip, crack, huddle together, and in some places, whisper as if you were interrupting their stone conversations. The beam of a flashlight catches walls imprinted with millennia: layers of dust, black scars of ancient fires, the traces of hands that were here long before the word “hands” was invented. Here lived Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and then us. And maybe someone else history decided not to write about.
Shadows at the Edge of the Mind
You catch yourself afraid to blink — in case someone stands closer in the next frame.
Karain is not a museum. This cave doesn’t explain — it holds. The damp air presses on your chest, reminding you that others once breathed here, breaths long since turned to dust. Logic insists it’s just geology, but the brain stubbornly whispers: “We’re only here for a while. They are here forever.”
Tracks on the Map
Karain lies 30 kilometers from Antalya. The trip takes about an hour by bus, then a couple of kilometers on a country road, followed by a climb along a stone path. The cave is open to visitors, but bring a flashlight — the darkness inside is not decorative. In the summer heat, the coolness inside feels like a refrigerator that has been running flawlessly for half a million years.
Echo in the Void
Leaving, you glance back at the entrance — and it no longer looks like just a hole in the mountain. It’s a portal that has spat you back into the 21st century. You check your phone, and the signal is back, but deep in your skull lies a silence that has outlived empires, languages, and even the idea of humanity itself.
And maybe, a hundred thousand years from now, someone else will climb this path — and we will be nothing more than a layer in the wall.
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