198 PA RT T W O
“This was the dwelling, this is the place,” frozen in time. Este es el sitio.
Neruda first links city to earth via the surreal imagination of his early lyrics:
“Mother of stone, spume of condors,” he names the place (though hunting,
habitat loss, and pollution had long threatened the Andean condor),
High reef of the human dawn.
Spade lost in primal sand.The boy who’d lost his way in Arauco’s teeming maternal forest now reaches
this lost and found American site, an origin now a goal.
I plunged my turbulent and gentle hand
into the genital quick of the earth.
I bent my head into the deepest waves,
dropped down through sulfurous calm
and went back, as if blind, to the jasmine
of the exhausted human spring.Machu Picchu, Martín Chambi
Courtesy Teo Allein Chambi, Martín Chambi Family Archives, and Edward Ranney.