Bozzhyra is a valley in the Mangystau region of western Kazakhstan where two chalk towers about 200 metres tall stand alone on the floor, and they are not growing out of it. They are being left behind. The plateau above ends in a steep escarpment, and water and wind keep eating into it. Undercut slabs of chalk drop away, the rim steps backwards year by year, and anything that resists a little longer ends up stranded on the new plain as an island. The fangs are two such survivors, and one day they will go the same way. The Kazakh name ignores them completely. Zhyra is a gully cut by running water and boz is pale, ash-grey, so the name describes the hollow itself — what the erosion took away rather than what it left. The chalk is not ordinary stone either. These white walls are built almost entirely from the shells of microscopic sea creatures that rained down on a quiet seafloor, which is also why wind can carve them.
There is no road out here, only hours of unmarked track over flat, colourless plateau, and the arrival does the work: the ground ahead of you simply stops and the towers appear all at once. There is not one viewpoint but three, spread far apart along the rim, each giving you a different angle. The head-on view is the furthest, another forty kilometres of track and then a kilometre's walk to the edge. First light is the hour to be up on the terrace. For a few minutes the towers go from grey to white to hard gold while the floor behind them stays in shadow, and the whole thing resets as the light drops down the walls. At night, with the nearest settlement seventy kilometres off, there is nothing to dim the sky over them. Then you walk down among the towers and look at what you are standing on. The rubble is full of shells, coral fragments and the teeth of sharks that swam here when all of this was open sea.