Two travelling feet

The earth turns on her pivot with an ancient ease. Her fingers outstretched, she traces an outline, sharp and jagged as the teeth of a shark. In one unceremonious moment, land is severed from sky, night from day, past from present. The world yawns below us.

Braced against a bitter wind in blankets that smell of must and wood fire, we watch as the sky drumrolls the sun’s arrival. A steady saturation of light shifts the blackness of night to hues that once gave navies their blues. These fade, losing their depth, and dissolve in an effervescence of citrus, of lemons and grapefruits and tangerines.

Before this display, the mountain peaks around us blush. The highest pink first, then turn a deep crimson, set ablaze by a sun that arrives without warning, like an actor rushing onto a stage before his cue. The mountains become tangible, weighed down by their immensity, more substantial than the cardboard cutouts they have been until now. The view granted, carved by glacial hands, is free of human interference. Above us, a condor cruises the rising thermals.

An amplified groan breaks the scene. It is the sound of hunger, a deep and agonising rumbling that rises, subsides, revives and builds to a crescendo. A crashing follows, a child throwing a tantrum in a room of crystal. We do not move. Already we have grown accustomed to the glacier’s moods and movements, to the sounds that give this mountain in southern Argentina its name. This is Monte Tronador, a title related to both the Spanish and the indigenous Mapuche word for thunder, a landscape that has been talking to those who walk its slopes and scale its summit for centuries.

Our legs still aching from yesterday’s hike to this place at the world’s crest, we sit. We do not speak. We take no photographs. We: two strangers accidentally united by good fortune and common interests, our friendship accelerated by travel, as travel is wont to do. Two and a half hours later, we stand and stretch. A gas stove and a dented kettle hold the promise of warmth.

The earth continues her circular dance.