How can you replicate in a lab the banding in rocks and mountains? The banding occurs at micro and macro scales, with widths measured in millimeters (or fractions thereof) and hundreds of meters (even kilometers; the Mohawk Mountains have a band that is at least a large fraction of a kilometer, perhaps a kilometer or more wide). The bands are straight, twisted, folded, cross-cutting. The bands cut through rock boundaries sometimes: other times they change direction at a clearboundary of rocks of different colors. The bands curve in sine-like waves sometimes; other times they seem haphazard. Bands adjacent to each other incline in different directions sometimes; other times they are parallel. How can you recreate such diversity, such contradictory behavior, in rocks of many different types, across rock type boundaries, on such vastly differing scales? I don't think you can do it with temperature and pressure alone. I think you need some other force. Perhaps electro-magnetism on a heretofore unimaginable scale?

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I think of First Born in the Tohono O'odham Creation Myth (see link), wandering around, thinking, creating, as I wander around the desert he created, trying to create a world inside a computer. I think of I'itoi ("Elder Brother"), who created people, as I try to create agents in my computer world. I enjoy the crimson evening I'itoi created for the inhabitants of the Papagueria; I stare transfixed for minutes at the "peculiar irradiance" the setting sun casts on the mountain sides, revealing banding and caves and strange rock formations and figures in the rocks. I think of the story of people getting frozen into rocks on mountainsides ...

I think of the story of how First Born cast spider webs to hold the earth together; in the wash that borders the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, at the Charlie Bell Road entrance, there are fine, crosscutting, deeply curved bands of a wispy white rock that look like spider webs. Or roots ... how long does it take a root to fossilize, turn to stone? How big would spiders have to be to produce such large webs?

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The O'odham creation story begins with water and darkness. Is this a memory of the K-T boundary, when, supposedly, an asteroid impacted with such force that the sky was darkened for many thousands, or millions, of years? The rise of mammals happened after this event; does the creation story date back to those times?