The pillars of the earth
We got out of our taxi and looked around. Juan checked his phone. “Let’s go inside. Polo is there with the others.” I looked around. The taxi had dropped us off outside a skyscraper. The area was nice and modern in a vaguely American – maybe New York – way, with other glass buildings near the skyscraper. There was a water fountain in the middle of a roundabout where the taxi had dropped us.
Yiannis and I followed Juan into the building, where we met Polo, Tornike and Kristine. Juan and Polo said a few unintelligible words to each other in Spanish – my Spanish was terrible then, but these are Chileans we’re talking about –, and then Polo led us past a guard to the elevator and pressed the button for the 31st floor.
The view was impressive. But maybe I’m easy to please with these things; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a city view from high floor that wasn’t impressive. The perspective is always awesome, even if it’s overlooking a typical cityscape: the mix of glass, stone, concrete and brick buildings, with unsightly air conditioning and other ventilation machinery on the roof. Buildings generally aren’t designed to be beautiful from above, and Santiago’s are no exception.
My eyes roamed across the buildings, slowly at first for the ones near us, and then more quickly the further away it went, until it settled on some mountains in the distance. They seemed huge, their peaks just below some clouds.
“Are those the Andes?”, I asked, pointing at the mountains.
“No, no”, said Juan or Polo, I forget which one, after he noticed what I was pointing at. “Those are the Andes”, pointing in the same direction as me, but more upwards. At first I didn’t see what he was pointing at. I thought it was just sky or clouds, or the smoggy background to the mountains I had pointed at.
And then I saw.
Rising, towering above the mountain range I had seen, piercing through the clouds that had formed a halo above those lesser mountains, rising as grey and brown rock, covered in places with snow, and reaching, touching, supporting the sky were the Andes. My eyes had dismissed their brown bases as just a smoggy backdrop to those foothills. I could now see that their uneven, jagged ranges rose in the far distance, converging into points, and then splitting off into ridges, and then into points again, each of the highest points looking, whenever I wasn’t looking directly at it, like the tip of a pillar driven into the bowels of the Earth, holding the sky high above this glassy, grey city.
This is a heavily fictionalised account. The people are all real, and I think they were all there for this. And the impression of the magnificence of the Andes is real. But I can’t vouch for anything else.
