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I awoke to strange
surroundings, my first view of the plaster-peeling room in
which I had spent the night being afforded by the
early-morning sunrise on the Bolivian Altiplano. After
arriving near midnight in the frigid darkness of the high
desert, my thoughts had been only of how quickly I could
unpack my sleeping bag and crawl in. Now as I peered out
of the window, it became apparent that I was in a
quadrille, the famous architectural style of
squares-within-a-square that is a hallmark of the former
Spanish Colonial Empire from California to South America.
My "room" consisted of a small shack, which with
a series of other small, straw-thatched, adobe huts,
defined the walls around a central courtyard paved with
flagstones. There was no heat source, and thus my morning
dressing routine required only that I emerge from my
sleeping bag, it having been too cold to consider removing
my several layers of clothing the previous night.
The courtyard upon which I
gazed had been the home of a Polish mining engineer who
came to seek his fortune in the fabled land of the Inca,
drawn, as many before him, by stories of fabulous wealth.
The first reports of silver to reach the Spanish Colonial
authorities came from a Spanish priest in 1537, although
the Inca had undoubtedly extracted the precious metal for
their own use before that. I had also come to seek my
fortune in this place, not by extracting tons of silver
ore, but by unraveling the geological history as a subject
of thesis research. In fact, I was living my dream of
working as an exploration geologist amid remote, rugged
surroundings, as the only Norteamericano for a hundred,
and probably three hundred, miles.
I exited the courtyard
through a low wooden door that represented the only means
of egress, and found myself on a narrow, cobblestone
street bounded by the adobe walls of other quadrilles. The
stygian darkness that accompanied my arrival the previous
night had concealed the size of the town. I trudged up the
street, panting for breath in the thin, 12,000-foot air.
Upon reaching the outskirts of the village, which required
only a few minutes, I assailed a ridge and, upon reaching
the crest, took in what the view afforded. I surveyed a
desolate landscape devoid of trees or vegetation, save for
the small, wind-worn tufts of spiked grass that dotted the
hillsides. The Bolivian Altiplano stretched to the horizon
in all directions, broken only by jagged mountains that
floated in a shimmering, salt-tinged mirage in the
distance. The bright blue sky similarly stretched
everywhere to the horizon, unblemished by the smallest
cloud, until merging with land in the parallax of
distance. The blazing white sun constituted the sole
occupant of the sky, and although its rays burned my skin
and faded my clothes within days, no warmth seemed to
emanate from that orb. Instead, the biting wind tore
through my layers of clothes, chilling me even as I was
being sunburned. The thin air, lack of vegetation to
provide perspective of distance, the expanse of blue sky,
and blazing sun combined to induce a detached, dreamlike
state of near-hypoxia in which concepts of distance and
time ceased to have meaning.
The village below was laid
out in a grid, consisting of four streets by five streets,
and apparently little changed since the 16th Century.
There was no electricity, no running water, and no source
of heat except bundles of mesquite acquired at some remote
location. The source of water that was available was
frozen except for two hours in the afternoon. A haze of
mesquite smoke hung over the village, nestled in a shallow
valley within a larger depression. The village appeared to
have some natural fortification, hidden by a ring of
volcanic hills. The valley breached the ring of hills
along a fault zone, which fractured the rock into three
giant spires. In local lore, these three great rock spires
were known as Tres Gigantes, or the Three Giants, and
appeared in pictures with the patron saint of the town.
Who knows but that the founding saint, Saint Christopher,
might have been the same Spanish priest that first
reported the presence of silver to the outside world?
The surrounding hills were
white, the volcanic rock having been altered to the
consistency of powdered sugar by acidic solutions. But
rather than tasting sweet like sugar, the powdery rock was
alkaline, like corroded battery cables. Far from being
associated with the feelings of defeat and failure evinced
by a dead battery, this natural acid-bleached rock
constituted the bulk of the silver resource at the site
and was a source of great excitement. The countless miners
who toiled to wrest high-grade ore from wide silver veins
would have found it impossible to recognize this as silver
ore. How ironic that for centuries, miners had removed
silver ore from the district until all thought it
exhausted, when in fact the vast bulk of silver occurred
in this white, crumbly rock, unseen to the naked eye. As
often occurs in life, great treasure may lie at our very
feet if only we could but recognize it.
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About
The Author
I
am a geologist and have visited several
countries in Latin America and Europe, and
worked on various civil engineering and
mining-related projects throughout the
world. I have published in journals with a
scientific perspective, but thought it
would be fun to write about some of my
travel experiences on a more informal
level. I have some other pictures and
geology-related items at my web site, at: http://sedward.home.netcom.com/petrography.html
sedward@ix.netcom.com |
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