"This town seemed to be built upon a true humus, a soil one might imagine to be as rich as the
wheatlands of the Beauce. These men live heedless of the fact that, here as elsewhere, life is a
luxury; and that nowhere on the globe is the soil really rich beneath the feet of men.
Yet, ten miles from Punta Arenas there is a lake that ought to be reminding them of this.
Surrounded by stunted trees and squat huts, as modest as a pool in a farm-yard, this lake is subject
to the preternatural pull of the tides. Night and day, among the peaceful realities of swaying reeds
and playing children, it performs its slow respiration, obedient to unearthly laws. Beneath the
glassy surface, beneath the motionless ice, beneath the keel of the single dilapidated bark on the
waters, the energy of the moon is at work. Ocean eddies stir in the depths of this black mass.
Strange digestions take their peristaltic course there and down as far as the Straits of Magellan,
under the thin layer of grasses and flowers. This lake that is a hundred yards wide, that laps the
threshold of a town which seems to be built on man's own earth and where men believe
themselves secure, beats with the pulse of the sea."
Wind, Sand and Stars e-book on the web: http://atenea574.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/wind-sand-and-stars.pdf
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