On the thirty-first day of the vigil, Miguel and Alonso rearranged their camp, a rectangular shelter of tarps and plastic sheeting strung from rough lumber on the north side of the access road, next to a mound of gray boulders and stones slagged from the mine. They moved the four little tents to the slightly higher ground at the right end, where the kitchen had been, and they lugged the fire pit and the gas burners and the white plastic table to the lowest point, at the far left.
After the tents and the furniture had been positioned and the dirt floor swept clean of cigarette butts and stones, Miguel, who is 57 years old, reassembled the shrine. He tacked a scrap of a wooden pallet to a sawed-off metal barrel as a low pedestal, and he placed a Bible, opened to Psalms 78 through 83 and draped with two strings of rosary beads, in the center. He arranged holy cards of Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II and a venerated Chilean missionary, and he laid a triptych of Christ next to the Bible.
Along the back rail of the shrine, Miguel placed two statuettes of San Lorenzo, red-robed and round-faced. Saint Lawrence, in the English spelling, was a third-century deacon who is usually considered the patron saint of cooks—he was grilled to death—and sometimes comedians. (On the grill, he purportedly quipped, "Turn me over! This side's done!") But he also hid a cache of treasure from Roman officials, a heroic act involving precious metals and, marginally, digging, and so Chilean miners long ago adopted him as a protector.
Between those two statues, Miguel set the Virgin of Candelaria, the holiest of icons at Camp Hope. She stood taller than both, adorned in fabric and lace and holding the baby Jesus.
She originally appeared as a diminutive stone figure, a candle in her left hand and Jesus in her right, in 1392 on a beach in Tenerife, Canary Islands, where, after she'd been curing the sick and performing other such miracles for a century, the indigenous Guanches came to believe in the Virgin Mary and the one true, holy, and apostolic Catholic Church. That has nothing to do with mining, except that the Spanish (who got to tell the story) conquered the Canary Islands at about the same time they were setting off to loot the Incas, and the legend migrated with them. Every so often, the Virgin would show herself in the New World, often in the form of a small carving, and eventually her candle was said to light the holes in the desert. For generations now, the miners of northern Chile have worshipped her as their merciful guardian.
Miguel and Alonso believe the Virgin of Candelaria is in the San José mine now. They believe she is with Galleta and de Piedra and Binxu, who is Alonso's cousin but may as well be his brother, that's how close they are. They believe she is 2,300 feet beneath the Atacama Desert with thirty-two Chileans and one Bolivian who already have been entombed for a month and are expected to remain so for many more weeks. They believe she is in the camp, too, and surely she was with Miguel on August 5, when he would have worked the evening shift if the tunnel hadn't collapsed and buried the morning shift in the catacombs below.
Alonso came to the mine the day after, August 6. That first week, he and the others who waited for word of the miners' fates slept in chairs around fires of old, thick grapevines. In the second week, they began to build the shelters that became Camp Hope.
The miners were found not long after, on the seventeenth day, when a drill bit poked into a cavern and a half-starved Chilean banged on the tip until the drillers above heard faint metallic thuds. They were alive, improbably and astonishingly, considering hardly any miners had survived undetected for so long, let alone thirty-three of them.
"A great miracle," Alonso says.
But then, no. Perhaps it was not a miracle, Alonso says, because he always knew—not believed, knew—that Binxu and the others were alive, and a man can't be certain of a miracle before it happens. But he can recognize an act of God, which is not necessarily the same thing as a miracle, and that is what Alonso sees in the collapse of the San José mine. It had crumbled before, many times, and a couple of men were killed and more men were hurt, and yet still other men tramped through its depths to gouge out the copper and the gold while more rocks fell from the ceilings. There will always be men willing to take such a risk, so long as there are other men willing to pay them. So rather than wait for another miner to die, maybe God put thirty-three men deep in that hole and kept all of them alive to make it seem like a miracle when really it was just a way to make everyone pay attention.
"It's like God," Alonso says, "is calling for us to do something."
···
The desert bloomed in late July, which happens so rarely and so gloriously that it, too, can seem like a miracle. The Atacama is the driest place on earth, an endless sweep of ochre and beige that scientists believe to be nearly identical to the surface of Mars, and it remains that way, desiccated and barren, for years. Eventually there comes a winter, such as this winter, when slightly more rain falls than in the previous five or seven or nine, and then the desert is brilliant with añañucas and suspiros and small purple-pink flowers that grow in great fields that blush the hillsides along the road from Copiapó.
The San José mine is twenty-four miles out that road and near nothing in particular except the old San Antonio mine, a mile or so to the north and closed since it collapsed four years ago and killed a man. Both mines are owned by the same company, San Esteban, and both are in an especially rich parcel of the Atacama. Each ton of ore in the San José, for example, yields between five and thirty-five grams of gold—many other mines contain barely a third of a gram per ton—which, at the rate the desert was blasted away, meant the shafts were surrendering up to fifty kilograms every month. And gold was just a by-product; the San José was primarily a copper mine, and the production of that metal was measured in tons.
For all those riches, though, the San José was carved into peculiar rock. Miners call it soft, and they complain often about cuando la mina llora—"when the mine is crying," when pebbles and rocks dropped like tears from the tunnels. The San José is also in a geologic fault zone, and among its veins and strata are slabs of andesite, held in place by subterranean friction. One of those slabs, destabilized by the hollows and tunnels, jerked loose at about two thirty on the afternoon of August 5. It is the size of a midtown skyscraper and weighs 800,000 tons, and it slipped forty meters downward, crushing several levels of the San José's main ramp. Engineers have taken to calling it the Mega Block.
That a renegade slab would do such damage was not, of course, inevitable. Miners can safely extract precious metals from all manner of terrain. Geologists and engineers can thread precise channels through the earth, and they can design supports and reinforcements to offset the newly created spaces, and they can calculate, with a reasonable degree of certainty, where it is safe to detonate explosives and where it is not. In fact, Chile, which produces more copper than almost any other country, has some of the most experienced mining engineers in the world. Also, because it has so many mines—at least 1,300 in Atacama alone—Chile has voluminous regulations to guide the foolish and the reckless.
But that is all textbook material, the ideals of the prudent and cautious. In practice the regulations are effectively meaningless, considering that there are only four inspectors for all of Atacama. (A union organizer says the typical inspection, in addition to being rare, is also meaningless: "It's like asking a man if he's a good husband but not asking his wife.") Engineering and reinforcing require time and effort, which are time and effort not spent blowing holes in the ground. So despite the abundance of expertise available to its owners, the San José has for years been a notorious mine, in part because of the soft rock and the fault lines but mostly because of how it was mined.
The San José, like most gradually sloping mines, has a main tunnel, large enough for a heavy dump truck, descending from the surface in a rough spiral. Working from that main ramp, miners bore into the veins of ore, creating tunnels that spread out like culs-de-sac. Explosives are set and detonated, the rubble is loaded into trucks, and then the process is repeated, over and over, until the miners reach the end of the mineral-laden rock. The tunnels are usually four meters high and four meters wide, and they are supposed to be reinforced every three meters. When the miners are finished digging out one chamber, they move farther down the main ramp and begin excavating a new one.
The vertical distance between two tunnels in the soft-rocked San José used to be about thirty meters—a hundred feet, give or take, of solid, unexploited earth between the hollow spaces. About a decade ago, according to several miners and an engineer, that distance was reduced to ten meters. That difference, those twenty fewer meters of stability, allowed the San José miners to remove tens of thousands of tons of additional ore, each with many grams of gold and many pounds of copper. It is also the most probable reason why the mine was always crying, and why thirty-three men are buried a half mile below.
···
Gino does not like working in mines, and he has never liked working in mines, but he did it for the same reason most of the miners in Atacama burrow into the desert, which is that it's a job that pays unskilled and semiskilled laborers a reasonable wage. If a man starts young in the mines, and if his father was a miner and his father before that, he might call it a way of life, and that would be technically true but probably more a justification of happenstance: If the Atacama were green with potato fields, uprooting tubers would just as easily be considered a way of life. It would also be safer and easier. "To work in the mines," Gino says, "it destroys you."
Gino came late to mining, when he was 30 years old. He used to cut grapes in the vineyards near Copiapó, which is still an oasis, though less of one since the mining companies dried out the river and the poisons in their waste ponds leached into the aquifers. Fieldwork was seasonal, though, and Gino had a 7-year-old daughter and a newborn son to support. So he went to the mines, steady work where an ambitious man might have a chance to advance, maybe supervise a crew someday, maybe an entire shift.
At the beginning of 2009, Gino took a job at the San José, and he did that, too, for the same reason as most of the men who worked there: It paid better than the other mines. Even a desperate man in an overstocked labor market will demand a few more pesos if he suspects he might die before the end of his shift. Gino's monthly check went from 300,000 pesos, or about $600, to 500,000 pesos.
Miners had been maimed and killed in the San José and San Antonio mines for almost a decade. In 2001 a collapse in the San Antonio took a man's leg off and hurt three more men; the next year, another miner lost a leg in a San José cave-in. In November 2003, the San Antonio fell in again, and for the next seven days the tunnels and chambers gave way and the desert above slowly sank into a massive crater. When it settled, the miners dug a new route around the rubble and continued blowing out ore. Five months later, a thousand feet down in the San José, a chunk of ceiling broke loose and crushed a man to death, and in 2006, back at the San Antonio, a man named Fernando was killed in another collapse.
The San Antonio was closed not long after Fernando died. The San José remained open, and in January 2007 a geologist's assistant named Manuel was asked to drive some men down into the mine. It was a favor, as Manuel, who was 26 years old, worked at the surface. But he was affable and well liked, even by the men who worked in the depths, and on his way back up he stopped to chat with a few of the miners. The mine began to creak and moan in a particular way, which the miners understood meant a wall was straining and weakening and probably about to blow out. They dropped to their bellies. Manuel, who did not understand what was about to happen, did not. A rock smashed his face.
The San José was closed after Manuel died, and supposedly it was shored up and reinforced before it returned to full production in the spring of 2008. Still, an extra 200,000 pesos every month is a lot of money, and Gino believed he could manage the risks, that his experience and his smarts and the cross around his neck would protect him. He was a boss now, too, supervising four men responsible for both excavation and fortification.
Excavation is straightforward enough. Drill holes in the rock face, stuff them with explosives, detonate, repeat once the broken ore has been removed. Fortification followed the path of the explosives, securing the newly opened tunnel as it moved forward. Done properly, a row of holes is drilled across the width of the ceiling and partway down the walls every three meters; long rods are then cemented into the holes. The tips of those rods are threaded and remain exposed, like thick bolts, and a metal mesh is pushed over them and against the ceiling. Flat plates are then screwed onto the rods, pulling the mesh tight. Finally, a layer of concrete is sprayed over the mesh.
Gino and his men did much more excavating than fortifying. They did not space rows of reinforcing rods every three meters, and they rarely covered the mesh with concrete. "If we were working fortification," he says, "production stopped." Besides, any rods and mesh they bothered installing would almost surely be ripped out not long after. Once the tunnel was cleaned out to the end of the vein, Gino says, the miners would begin excavating the ceiling, and it was not unusual to continue pulling down ore until they broke through to the tunnel above—which might already have been expanded into the next chamber up. Caverns forty meters high, Gino and several other miners say, are not uncommon in the San José mine.
···
Three days before Miguel repositioned the prayer cards and the statues, the wife of the oldest miner buried in the San José appeared on one of Chile's most popular television programs. Her name is Lila, and she spoke of the fear of waiting seventeen days in the desert, and of how, like Alonso, she always knew—not believed, knew—her sweet Mario was alive. She told, too, of the joyous moment when she learned he was indeed alive, that all the men had survived. And she promised that when her Mario is finally hoisted to the surface, he will not return to another mine.
"What I want most," she said, "is to buy him a taxi."
"Very well," the program's host said. "We need to win at least 7 million pesos for that. Let's start this adventure!"
Lila was on a game show. Granted, the most important game show on the planet, as Sergio, the host, likes to boast. But Mario's future as a taxi driver depended on his wife and a moderately famous actor playing on her behalf correctly answering trivia questions on the Chilean version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Not even a month after the Mega Block slipped loose, and it had come to this, to quiz shows and silly banter and the proper definition of a melocotón. (It's a peach.)
Among the families at Camp Hope, where almost everyone had already taken a turn on national, if not international, television, Lila's appearance was a matter of minor dissension. It seemed, to some, to be rather tacky, as if she were trading on Mario's misery, even if the taxi was for him. "This," Alonso said, sweeping his gaze up the camp road to the minehead beyond the gate, "is not a joke. This is not a play."
Yet the miners, those particular thirty-three miners, are national heroes. Had they all died, they would be anonymous—a miner dies in Chile every ten days, on average, and no one notices but his foreman and his wife—and their only significance would have been in the number of the dead. When they were found alive, improbably and unexpectedly, they became characters in a telenovela of survival and endurance, icons in a parable of salvation and resurrection. They are, as Sergio explained, "people whose lives have given us examples of valor, perseverance, and courage."
So why shouldn't their proxies stand in the spotlight?
Besides, the name of the show, literally translated, is "Who Deserves to Be a Millionaire?" And who, really, deserves to be a millionaire more than Mario? He is 63 years old and wracked with silicosis, entombed in a mine he knew was dangerous, that he knew was wrecking his lungs even more, because he needed the paycheck. And he is a good man, a religious man: Way down in the hole, he built a small shrine, and he leads the other men in prayer every day.
But he will not be driving a taxi. For 12.5 million pesos—$24,000—Lila and her actor partner were asked where Al-Azhar, the oldest Islamic university in Egypt, was founded. They used a lifeline, the fifty-fifty, and their choices were narrowed to Alexandria or Cairo.
They guessed Alexandria, which was wrong, and Lila went home with 3.2 million pesos, 3.8 million short of her dream.
···
On the morning of July 3, Gino was a half mile down in the San José, where miners typically find bornite and chalcopyrite. He was 40 years old, a veteran of a decade in the mines, and still ambitious, still advancing. He'd just completed a training course for heavy machinery, and soon he hoped to be driving a loader, making a better living, maybe 800,000 pesos a month, enough to pay for his daughter's university classes. His wife was seven months pregnant, too.
At about half past midnight, he began walking up the main ramp to the shelter, which was built to keep men alive if they're trapped by a cave-in and is also where the men gather to wait for a truck to ferry them to the surface. Along the way, about 800 meters before the shelter, there was a section of tunnel where the bare mesh had caught so many loose rocks that it began to sag and tear until it was removed altogether. That was twenty days earlier, and eventually, maybe, it would be replaced.
Gino was in midstride, his right foot forward. He felt a glancing blow to the back of his head, rock striking him at an obtuse angle, then scraping down his back.
That rock weighed four tons. It landed on his rear leg, his left, and cleaved it off just below the knee.
It did not hurt. Gino thought he was dreaming, looking at the empty space where his leg should have been. He was angry: He'd never been hurt working and now, when he was not working, when he was going on a break, he was hemorrhaging from a stump. He was going to bleed to death in the middle of the earth.
Then he saw the lights of a pickup. A pickup should not have been in that part of the mine at that hour.
"Thanks to God," Gino would say later, when he'd have only one leg and an 8-day-old daughter and no money for diapers or milk. "Thanks to God that pickup was coming."
···
One day before Miguel rebuilt his shrine, four members of the 1972 Uruguayan national rugby team arrived at Camp Hope. Thirty-eight years earlier, those four and a dozen others survived for more than two months after a plane crash high in the Andes, partly because they resorted to eating the flesh of their dead friends. Several books have been written about their ordeal, and there was a Hollywood movie, Alive, in the early '90s, and so those four graying and middle-aged men are famous, even in the middle of the Chilean desert. They are the cannibals.
The Uruguayans had come to the San José, like all the demicelebrities before them and the rest who would come after, to offer symbolic support to the miners and their families and grist for the journalists who at times outnumbered relatives and friends and fellow miners. Television trucks lined the sides of the camp road, and reporters tapped out dispatches from the shelter of the press tent barricaded by yellow sawhorses.
Those dispatches had been thin of late. The important stories had either already been told—Miners Survive!—or had yet to happen—Miners Rescued!—and everything in between was merely filler. Accounts of their first seventeen days, their survival on nibbles of tuna and peaches, had been told and retold. Their subterranean quarters—the small and stiflingly hot shelter, yet also the two kilometers of empty tunnels and caverns that allowed for a latrine a reasonable distance away—had been detailed, parts even shown on video. By the beginning of September, when the miners were no longer in imminent physical danger, all that was left were the mundane details: what food was sent down one of the three slim chutes that connected them to the surface, or how far the Raise Borer Strata 950—a big drill—had penetrated into the desert, or when the next, bigger drill would start spiraling another rescue hole, or when the forty-two trucks that carried the third, even bigger drill would begin to arrive. Eventually one of those three machines will cut a hole about the size of a bicycle tire all the way down to the men, who will then be lifted out, one by one, in a specially designed capsule.
The families, meanwhile, had been picked clean, ravenously and efficiently. All of Chile and much of the world, for instance, knew that a miner's wife named Marta discovered that her husband's mistress was also waiting at the mine, and that she learned this when the mistress, Susana, papered her own love poems over Marta's shrine to Yonni. Anyone following the miners with even a passing interest knew that Ariel's wife was about to give birth to a daughter and that, instead of naming her Carolina, as they'd planned, she would be named Esperanza, which means "hope." Also, Esteban promised his wife, Jessica, the church wedding he never gave her when they got married in a civil ceremony twenty-five years ago. There were only so many stories to be told, and most of them had been.
So there was a fair amount of time to kill in Camp Hope, which wasn't so bad. It had evolved into a tiny village, a monument to the stranded miners and the holy saints and the Chilean nation. A hundred yards upslope at the western edge, behind the communal tent where the families were fed and the reporters freeloaded the leftovers, thirty-two Chilean and one Bolivian flag flapped on the desert wind. Below, in a dirt patch in front of a playhouse shed, red-nosed clowns amused the miners' children. There was no wailing, save for the occasionally misplaced toddler. Musicians appeared now and again to perform or, in the case of the black-clad Chilean band Los Charros de Lumaco, to deliver a flash drive of their songs to be shuttled into the hole. On the same day the Uruguayans arrived, so too did fishermen from Caldera, a town a few miles away on the Pacific Coast. They unloaded immense iron pans and fried at least a day's catch of fish, and a wiry-armed Calderan stirred shellfish and root vegetables into a stew that he insisted, through pantomime, would make anyone who ate it remarkably virile.
The Uruguayans, meanwhile, basically told the miners to hang tough. They did not mention the specifics of their own survival, which would have been nonsensical—the miners were being fed, after all—and gratuitously grotesque. So it fell to a British reporter, almost nauseated with shame because editors a hemisphere away were demanding "more cannibal questions," to goad a quote out of one of them. The Uruguayan was obliging, too, explaining in practiced words precisely how unpleasant it is to choke down human flesh.
"They are much luckier than we were," the Uruguayan said as the last of the fish were being fried, "because they didn't have to make the difficult decision to eat their friends."
···
Willote woke up early on Thursday, August 5, so he could meet Chico Yonni and Luciano and Esteban at the corner market in Tierra Amarilla, where they would board a minibus for the ride into the desert to the San José mine. Willote had worked seven days straight, and he had the next seven off, his regular rotation, but he wanted the extra shift because he wanted the extra cash.
Mining is Willote's way of life, in the sense that he's been digging rocks out of the Atacama since he was 13 years old, first as a piquenero scavenging from shallow shafts and, for seven years now, as a grown man working the legitimate mines. But he does not like it. He does not like being sore and he does not like being underground, especially since he was trapped for two hours when the San Antonio collapsed in 2003. "But it is necessary," he says. "It is the only thing I know I can do for sure."
Willote is 27 now, and he has worked at the San José for four months. Mostly he handles explosives, drilling the holes and placing the charges, but he has other tasks as well, such as jabbing the ceilings with a long metal pike to dislodge loose rocks or sweeping up or, truth be told, whatever the boss tells him to do. In exchange, he is paid 500,000 pesos every month, which is 120,000 more than he was paid at the last, safer mine where he worked.
He got out of bed at five thirty that morning, stood, stretched. His muscles hurt, but Willote was used to that. But then his stomach…what? Fluttered? Spasmed? Ached?
Willote cannot describe, exactly, the feeling in his stomach, except that he had never felt it before and he has never felt it since. It was not painful, just uncomfortable enough that he decided to lie down again, but only for a moment, because he had to meet Chico Yonni and the others at six.
When he opened his eyes again, it was ten minutes past seven. The minibus had left more than an hour ago. Willote had no other way to get to the mine, so he wasn't there seven hours later when the slab of andesite crushed the ramp and trapped every man on the morning shift a half mile beneath the desert.
···
Many years ago, in the little town of Monte Patria, a miner dreamed of a mountain elf who led him through the desert to where a fabled vein of gold was buried. The next morning, he set off into the Atacama, following the path the elf had described in his dream.
The miner never returned. He'd left a woman behind, of course, and she withered with grief and soon died of a broken heart. The people of Monte Patria all wept, because she had been the most beautiful woman in the town, and then they buried her in the desert on one of those rare and strange days when it rained.
The next day, when the sun shone again, red flowers rose from the earth, gorgeous flowers no one had ever seen before. The townsfolk named them for the woman they had buried the day before. Her name was Añañuca, and her flowers still come out when it rains.
A writer for a European weekly loves that story. If one is writing a longish piece about miners buried beneath the desert and their families keeping vigil and telling of miracles, and this is happening while the desert is blooming, it would be almost irresponsible not to allude to the legend of Añañuca. Yet responsible journalists, if they're going to write about añañucas blooming near the San José mine, have an obligation to find some añañucas. But there aren't any on the road from Copiapó. There are only those great blushing fields of purple-pink flowers, and there is no legend about them. Hardly anyone even knows what they're called.
···
Two days after the collapse, on August 7, a trapped miner named Jorge and some other men—he does not say who in the note he sent to the surface—were exploring, looking for a way out, which was surely maddening. In a properly constructed, maintained, and equipped mine, there would have been at least two escape routes, fortified concourses that led from the depths into the desert sunlight, and the men could have simply walked out. The San José had no escape tunnels. Also in a proper mine, the ventilation shaft—which after the initial San José collapse remained clear, an unobstructed path to the surface—would have been fitted with a ladder. The men could have climbed out in time for dinner.
Jorge and the others were driving one of the vehicles that had been buried with them. They were about 200 meters above the shelter, where the Mega Block slammed the ramp.
"Ahead of us," Jorge wrote in the note, "a white butterfly flew by."
In the common iconography of the devout, a white butterfly is a symbol of resurrection and rebirth. To recognize one in the dark depths of a mine shaft, in addition to being unusual, would require slowing down to catch it in the headlights, which Jorge obviously did.
An instant later: "An avalanche of dirt and dust fell upon us. I couldn't see my hands."
But the heavier rocks, the ones that might have crushed him, had fallen just ahead.
When the books are written and the movies are filmed, that image, that improbable, mystical butterfly, will surely be included. And then it will be another legend in the desert. The few people who know the story and have Jorge's note are calling it "the butterfly effect."
Already at least two films are being made. One is a documentary, a joint production of WGBH, the public-television station in Boston, and England's Channel 4. A small production crew arrived at Camp Hope in early September, when two drills were twisting into the mountain and pieces of the third were arriving, and they planned to remain until the men were freed and perhaps a little longer.
The other will be a theatrical release. It is being made by a Chilean producer and director named Rodrigo, who has been shooting preliminary footage for weeks in Copiapó and Camp Hope. He has a title—Los 33—and a poster, which is a blue-black tunnel with a blurry figure wearing a headlamp in the white light at the distant end. Also, because there are thirty-three miners and their first note up from the depths—"We are all fine in the shelter, the 33"—is thirty-three characters long in Spanish, the film will be one hour and thirty-three minutes long. Rodrigo also says he will donate any profits to a fund for miners' kids. "A great, great story," he told a German reporter. "It will be like a rebirth, you know? When they are pulled out, it will be like passing through the vagina again."
···
Not long after the miners were found alive, a Chilean businessman rumbled into the desert in his Hummer, past the fields of purple-pink flowers, and on to the San José. He'd come, another benevolent pilgrim, to give each of the thirty-three families a check for 5 million pesos, just shy of $10,000. He also beseeched Chile's other wealthy businessmen to match him until every miner had an even million dollars.
Willote does not know if he will be paid his wages for the month of September. He lives in a rented shack with a concrete floor and plywood walls on a muddy slope above the main road of Tierra Amarilla. He has a 4-year-old boy and a pregnant wife and no money.
And so he wonders, softly and quietly because he might be edging toward blasphemy, if he'd be better off way down in the hole. He wonders if the thirty-three, miserable as they are, might be the lucky ones.
But that would mean he'd just had a stomachache and that he'd just overslept and missed his ride. That there had been no miracle, only something that seemed like one because it was rare and strange, like those blooming fields of purple-pink flowers.
They are called pata de guanaco, by the way, and they might be the only thing in this desert that is neither sacred nor profane.