Page 34 of Monster's Mystery

“Now,thatI will tease you about,” he replied with a grin. “Accept your limitations and ask for help.” He paused, eyebrows raised.

I sighed. “Fine. Help me, please?”

“Music to my ears. Here, this distance aligns with this one, so you need to set up your similar triangles in this way...”

We had almost finished our chart when Professor Akhtar called us back to the portal head.

“You’re all doing very well so far. I thought we might explore a bit more toward the middle of the island. There’s something else I want to show you. We haven’t exactly looked at what this nexus point has done to the ecology here. Any guesses?” The professor looked around for raised hands.

I raised mine when it looked like no one else was going to. “I haven’t noticed any mosquitoes.”

“Fascinating, isn’t it? Follow me!” Professor Akhtar pointed into the sun and took off through the grass, leading us toward the center of the island.

I grabbed Aiden’s hand, excitedly following the professor up the hill. The view from the top was breathtaking. The Pacific Ocean spread out behind us, stretching as far as the eye could see.

“Not much further!” Professor Akhtar said, walking around the edge of the hill.

I looked down into the bowl of the hill with astonishment. “This isn’t a hill! It’s an old volcano crater!” I said excitedly.

“Correct! There are quite a few of these on this island. What does that mean?” he called over his shoulder.

“It means that the plate tectonics move really slowly here,” I said. “Giving the volcanic eruptions plenty of time to build up land.”

“Exactly. Why do you think that is?”

I squinted in thought, avoiding a rocky outcropping. “Well, on the Pacific side, the plates are moving together, rather than apart like on the Atlantic side. There must be some immovable plates in the Antarctic shelf.”

“You’re thinking like a geologist. I want you to think like awitch.”

“Oh. Right.” I flushed. “Umm, I would guess that the nexus point would slow the plate down in order to create this island on purpose. There must be something here that needed land.”

Professor Akhtar held up a hand, bringing us all to a halt behind him, and pointed down into the bowl. “We’re going to stay here, leaving them alone, but you can see their houses from here. Use your glasses to get a closer look.”

I peered down into the bowl of the old crater, unsure of what I was looking for. There were plenty of rocks piled haphazardly in the middle of the crater, but the longer I looked at them, the more sense they seemed to make. I lifted my opera glasses to my eyes and gasped excitedly. “They’re miniature rock people!”

Sure enough, the people were no bigger than the tip of my finger. Each one was a slightly different type of rock. They moved around their little village, busy in whatever it was that they were doing.

“How many communities like this are there on this island?” I asked, delighted to be able to observe them.

“Many. They were born when the erupting volcanoes cooled, and have been here ever since,” Professor Akhtar said. “They can make more of themselves, not in the way humans can of course, but by digging down under the earth and molding new life from the embers of the volcano.”

My eyes widened. “Wouldn’t that set off the volcano again?” I inquired, alarmed.

“You’re forgetting that the volcano has moved on,” the professor chided. “Volcanoes are only on the edge of the plate, not in the middle.” He moved one hand overtop of the other. “As the plates shift on top of each other, you get volcanic activity, leaving islands behind that show us the motion of the plate. Hawaii is a brilliant example of this motion. But the island here no longer has an active volcano underneath it, so when these Vulcans dig, they don’t awaken the volcano.”

“I see.” I rolled the name of the people,Vulcans, around in my mind for a minute while I watched them. “Vulcan is the Roman God of volcanoes. Do these people have cousins in the Mediterranean?”

Professor Akhtar chuckled. “Other way around, I’m afraid. These were named for him. Easter Island is the only known location of Vulcans.”

CHAPTER10

We spenta little more time discussing the Vulcan culture before Professor Akhtar signaled us to return the way we had come.

Aiden and I trailed behind the others.

“Want to sneak away and make out?” Aiden asked me, grinning rakishly. “We still have about twenty minutes before we have to return to the school.”

“I like the way you think,” I replied.

---