Verse:Qu: Difference between revisions

Entering the tunnels, there is a smooth line in the rocks where the rotating tube attaches to the non-rotating tunnel. From this vantage point, one can observe the rotation of the tube, which takes about two minutes to make one revolution. The inside of these tunnels is described as being like a breezy, weightless cave. The air is filled with echolocating bats and swiftlets. It is not known if they breed in the tunnels or simply migrate through from one tube to the next, experiencing an eternal day or night and taking advantage of windblown insects on the way. Their droppings are mostly cleared by the winds, but the walls are coated with bioluminescent, filamentous fungi, which trap and feed on what they can.

[[File:Qu_Tube_Matrix.png|700px|thumb|right|Fig. 3. External lateral view of the ''vuqu'' matrix; artist's impression.]]When heading straight ahead to a consecutive tube, the path is generally short, only a few hundred metres long and fairly easy to navigate owing to the tell-tale breeze and thick layers of bioluminescent fungus on the walls giving off a dim blue-green glow. Travelling to a parallel tube is much more difficult. To get there, one must find the 'node' half way between the consecutive tubes. Six additional tunnels radiate away from a node. The closest parallel hubs are around seven kilometres away. In these long tunnels, there is less wind, less fungus and thus less light. Knowing which path to take to get to a particular tube is also challenging, as the rotation of the tubes shifts the apparent orientation of the six tunnels radiating away from the node, making it very difficult to know which tunnel leads where. Furthermore, after many kilometres of awkward weightless travel, a tunnel may turn out to blocked and be a dead end.

Although the tubes have never been seen from the outside, the knowledge of the structure of the tunnels leads to the conclusion that the tubes are arranged in a vast matrix of both parallel and consecutive tubes as illustrated in the figure 3. at right. The number of parallel tubes in any one parallelum is not known, nor is the number of consecutive parallela, and many Goqu believe that this matrix is infinite in all directions.