Old caravanserai in Beysehir, Turkey

Working on a fair copy of a poem in book 6 of The Song ov Elmallahz Kumming. The poem is fairly short, 36 lines, but because of some technical complexities, it has gone thru untold numbers of revisions. I'm closing in, and will publish it here, soon, with a peek behind the surface, to some of the discarded and unrevised lines. In the meantime...

I continue to work on digitizing and restoring slides of Turkey taken in 1983 and 1986. I intend to use some of them for my ebook, Ottoman Beachcomber. Yesterday I came across this image, which allowed for some surprising results. Here's the original, a shot of a ruins of a rather grand caravanserai (pre-industrial truck stop; caravan resting place) in Beyşehir (pronounced BAY-sha-heer), a small town in south central Turkey.

There wasn't much I could do with this to enhance it while remaining true to its realism. But then again, as I see it, realism is just the surface of things. With not much effort, I found a lot of color lurking behind the surface. First this:

Which quickly revealed this:

Then this:

And then finally, taking some color away, this:

Who knew there were all those gemstones in the matrix of stone and the mortar mix? In 1983 when we first came across this site, this last picture approximates what I saw. The image prior to the last one is what I speculate Nancy saw when she clicked the shutter.