The First Morning the Rocks Refuse to Make Sense
You step off the coracle at Virupapura Gaddi before the sun has cleared the Matanga Hill, and the first thing that stops you is not the Vijayanagara ruins. It is the boulders. They are stacked in formations that should not hold, granite spheres the colour of dried blood balanced on narrower granite spheres, columns of rock leaning into each other at angles that look negotiated rather than geological. The Deccan plateau pushed these formations up through volcanic activity roughly 2.5 billion years ago, making them among the oldest exposed rock surfaces on earth. That number sits in your head without landing. What lands instead is the silence inside the stacks, the way sound drops out when you walk between two boulders and the world outside them disappears.
