Today, we visit the Valley of the Moon, Valley of Death , the Three Marias and the Salt Cave.
They are, in possible, more intriguing than their names.
We begin with the Valley of Death. We walk through dusty corridors flanked by red brown rocks, so crumbly you can pick bits off and crush them in two fingers, yet somehow intact, looming over us. These landscapes have all been formed by the sea, 65 million years ago. This whole place was below the ocean once, hence the salt deposits we see later, and the strange, almost dripping formations when you get close. We are quite literally walking along the sea bed. And that's the truth. It's amazing, and incredible, but if you look closely, or consider the make up of minerals and chemical substances, it is clearly born out. The landscape is truly jaw dropping. I am having trouble doing it justice in words, and M is the man with the pictures, though frankly, despite him being quite an outstanding photographer, it still cannot possibly be captured on screen. Perhaps it is the atmosphere, the almost imperceptible cracking of the rocks as they contract in the changing temperatures, the way they loom above, or the sense of isolation. Either way it is crazy beautiful.
In this kind of surroundings, you become rather expectant of further craziness, and it can take you by surprise when details are anything less than deeply dramatic. I ask why it is called the Valley of Death. I assume it is because people fall from the rocks, because it is impossible for ant living thing to survive there, because ancient peoples performed sacrificial rituals.
Apparently it's because some Belgian guy wandered along and mistranslated the actual name 'Valley de la Marte' (Valley of Mars) for 'Valley de la Muerte' (Valley of Death).
Rather less poetic as explanations go, though Valley de la Matte certainly fits it too.
We walk on and encounter a dry, cracked flat, which we are told was once a lagoon, in the 'rainy season' (this is an oasis, which is how it manages to have a 'rainy season' in the driest desert in the world). The waters dried enormously quickly under the burning desert sun, leaving a grey expanse of cracked land, looking like a child's impression of an earthquake. In the expanse are occasional 'splashes', holes with static splashy walls, like a photograph of a drop of water as it hits the surface. They remind me of the bubbling mud pools of New Zealand (which in turn reminds me, rather mundanely, of a computer adventure game I used to play as a child).
"Do you think," I ask M, wonderingly, "that the water dried so quickly it caught it mid bubble?"
"No" says our guide when we ask, "that's where people have thrown stones in to see how soft it is."
Ah. Less impressive. But that's the thing about this sort of landscape. You've seen so much that really just shouldn't be real, that you are ready to believe just about everything.
We move to the salt caves. These are similarly ridiculous. Jagged rocks, less crumbly now, but with various formations of salt encrusted into and onto them. In places the salt is in compacted round balls, like hard snow, in others it forms thin, brittle plates on the ground, and in still others it is like thick cold glass, glinting like diamonds where the sun catches it. The rock itself looks a lot like a sort of broader kind of upside down icicle, perhaps also consistent with something under the sea. It reminds me a little of coral. I can't believe that this dry landscape can have once been flooded. Our world is not static, nothing we know now is certain to remain this way and there are no guarantees that the world as we know it now will not seem unbelievable to civilisations to come.
Rather more unbelievably, once we exit the 'cave' (more a rock corridor) into the main salt scape, I clamber about nimbly and like a mountain goat that has never once been vaguely fearful of heights all over the rocks, enjoying myself immensely. I am not sure what came over me, but it was nice doing something even slightly adventurous without the accompanying inner battle.
We move on to the valley of the moon, climbing up the rock cum sand dune and gaze at the panorama, which manages to incorporate snow covered Andes mountains, white salt flats, dusty red rocks, sand dunes, and greyish landscapes like the images of the moon landing.
We move on to the 'Three Maria's', red rocks standing slender and tall and entirely isolated amid flat desert land.
"If you use your imagination" says our guide, "you can see the praying Maria's with their hands clasped above their heads".
This I can see. But there are only two. I imagine a huge storm, dashing to pieces a rock formation built and sculpted by the elements over thousands of years. But no.
" there were three Maria's " says our guide, "but a tourist climbed up one to take a photo and it broke off."
Tourists. Who'd have them?
Finally we climb to Carey's Broken and the Coyote Rock (of course the first was another mistranslation, originally meaning something along the lines of 'New Ravine', and the second contained no coyotes but a fair number of braying tourists.) The view (if not the soundtrack) is stupendous, however. We are ostensibly there to watch the sunset but, in a (for an English girl, eerily cloudless) sky, this simply consists of a large bright ball sinking behind a mountain. What us really unreal is the moon, which rises as the sun falls, casting a hazy pink light across the red mountains, which mixes like watercolours with the deepening blue of the sky, so that the whole view, lit by a blazing full moon, is a mirage of colours, like the curious beauty you get in the rainbows created in spilled petrol, only much less bad for the environment.
It is stunning. It is much, much more stunning than anything created by the human race, with its failed translations and careless rock shattering, its pisco sours (though those are pretty good) and its sky scrapers and its money and its bloody, pointless wars.
We have seen a majesty in nature entirely unachievable by man. And I am glad. Because it means it's still free.
No comments:
Post a Comment