Area II of Twelve · The Artificial Time Warp Wheel
A vanished lake, remembered by satellites as a target painted on the sand.
The Taklamakan is one of the largest sand deserts on Earth, a sea of dunes so total that its old Silk Road caravans skirted its rim rather than cross it, threading instead from oasis town to oasis town along its northern and southern edges. At its eastern margin lies Lop Nor, once a shifting salt lake fed by the Tarim River, dried to a crust since the 1970s.
Lop Nor’s dry bed is more recently known for its role as China’s primary nuclear test site through the late twentieth century, and for the vast, still-mysterious geometric grid of trenches nearby that satellite imagery calls “the Great Ear.” Between ancient trade route and modern test ground, it is a landscape that has been watched from above for a very long time.
This Area is one of the Twelve registered in Planetary Time Warp Architecture, Book I, Part Seven. See The Artificial Time Warp Wheel for the full identification table.
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