Atacama Night

Matías: The Rules of the Log

RULES OF THE LOG, copied from the board in Room 14 by Matías Soto, who has the neatest handwriting in the elective and therefore got stuck with page one.

One. Every entry starts with the writer's name, the day, the time and the place.

Two. Write what happened, not what you wish had happened.

Three. Write what you saw, heard, smelled, tasted and touched. A scientist who only looks is using one fifth of the equipment.

Four. Nobody tears out a page. If you make a mistake, cross it out with one line so the mistake can still be read. Mistakes are data.

Five. Every entry ends with the sky.

Six. The log goes around the group in order, and the order is on the inside of the back cover, and nobody may skip a turn except by trade.

Mr. Pizarro wrote these on the whiteboard on the last Friday of November and made us copy them, and then he held up the notebook, which is gray, with a cloth spine and squared paper, the kind surveyors use, and said, "This is the most important instrument we are taking north."

Thiago said, "More important than the telescope?"

"The telescope belongs to the observatory," said Mr. Pizarro. "This belongs to you."

---

Matías Soto. Monday, December 1. 5:50 a.m. Santiago airport, gate 18.

So here is everybody, for whoever reads this later, which Mr. Pizarro says will be us, when we are old and have forgotten.

There are nine of us from the Astronomy and Earth Science elective at Lomas Azules International School, which is in the east of Santiago where the city starts climbing into the foothills. There are two teachers. There will be a driver in the north, Don Ramiro, whom we have not met yet, and an observatory, and a desert, and as many stars as Mr. Pizarro has been promising since March.

Mr. Andrés Pizarro is forty-four and teaches physics. He grew up in La Serena, which he says is the reason he became an astronomer, because when you grow up under that sky you either look up or you become a very stubborn person who refuses to look up. He has a gray beard that is not gray on purpose and a hat with a brim like a cowboy's, which he wears without any sense of shame.

Ms. Claire Delmas is thirty-eight, teaches biology, is from Lyon, and is the trip's first-aid lead. She has a red bag with a white cross on it that she has not let out of her hand since the bus left school at 4:20 this morning. She told us at the meeting that her job on this trip is to be boring, and that if she is boring enough for six days she will consider it the best trip of her career.

Then us, in the order of the back cover.

Me. Matías Soto, fifteen, Santiago, born and raised. My great-grandfather Ernesto worked in a sulfur camp in the high country of the north before my grandfather was born, and when my grandfather was alive he used to tell me about it, about the yellow mountain and the cold and the tin houses, and I have wanted to go north my whole life and this is the first time.

Nour Haddad, fifteen. Her family came from Lebanon when she was six. She brought a bag of her grandmother's dried apricots and has already given away a third of it at the gate.

Hana Morita, sixteen. Japanese. Her father works for a company that ships fruit. She carries a small pack that weighs exactly what the school list said it should weigh. I know because she weighed it on the scale at check-in and said, "Good," to herself.

Thiago Barbosa, fifteen. Brazilian, from Recife, in Chile for three years. He is currently asleep across three chairs with his mouth open and I am recording this for history.

Valentina Restrepo, fifteen. Colombian, from Bogotá. Her father is a civil engineer who builds bridges. She has opinions about the airport roof.

Daphné Louis, sixteen. Haitian. She has lived in Santiago since she was seven. She is the only one of us who knows the names of everyone's little brothers and sisters, and she is the one Ms. Delmas asked to help with the head count.

Chen Mingyu, who everybody calls Ming, fourteen. He is the youngest. He skipped a grade, which is why he is fourteen in the same grade as Nour and me, and he hates when anybody says that out loud, so I will not say it again in the log. He has asthma and carries a blue inhaler in the left pocket of his jacket, and he showed Ms. Delmas the pocket at the bus so she would know which one.

Rocío Anza, fifteen. Chilean. Her family is Lickanantay, which is the people of the Atacama salt flat, and her grandmother lives in Toconao, near San Pedro, where we are going. Rocío was born in Calama and moved to Santiago at eleven when her mother got a job at a hospital there. When Mr. Pizarro announced the trip in March, everybody turned around and looked at her, and she looked at her desk. I am putting that in because of Rule Two.

Callum Pryce, sixteen. British, from a town in Cumbria, which he says is in the north of England near the Lake District, where it rains on three hundred days a year and the other sixty-five are a mistake. He has been in Chile two years. He asked Mr. Pizarro on the walk to the gate whether the desert really had no rain, and Mr. Pizarro said, "Almost none," and Callum said, "Almost," the way you say a word you are going to remember.

---

Matías. Monday. 11:15 a.m. Calama airport, and then the bus.

The plane came down over a brown country with no green in it at all. Not a little green. None. I have seen the north in pictures, but a picture has edges. From the window there were no edges, just brown and tan and a darker brown where the hills folded, and a road like a pencil line, and far away a huge gray hole in the ground with terraces going down into it, which Mr. Pizarro said was the copper mine, which is so large that you can see it from space.

[Thiago, in the margin: You can see a lot of things from space. Space is very high.]

The air in Calama was hot and thin and smelled like nothing. That is the strangest thing so far. Santiago smells of exhaust and jasmine and the bakery near my house. Calama, in the sun outside the terminal, smelled like a clean pan.

The bus to San Pedro took an hour and a half. Rocío sat by the window and did not say very much until we came over a rise and the whole salt flat opened up below us, white and gray and enormous, with the volcanoes standing along the far side of it like a row of teachers, and the biggest one, the perfect cone, Licancabur, with a little bit of snow on the top.

Hana asked her if she had climbed it.

"No," said Rocío. "My grandmother says nobody needs to climb everything."

"Is that a saying?" said Nour, who collects them.

"No," said Rocío. "That's just my grandmother."

San Pedro is a village of adobe walls and dirt streets and pepper trees, with the walls the same color as the ground, so that the town looks as if it grew out of the desert instead of being put on it. Our hostel has a courtyard with a pepper tree, rooms around it, thick walls, and a dog called Pituco who has adopted Thiago. The rooms are cool inside even at three in the afternoon. Valentina put her palm on the wall and said, "This is thermal mass," and nobody argued.

We met Don Ramiro at the hostel. He is short and wide and sixty-one, with a face like a walnut and a voice much bigger than he is. He has driven tourists and scientists around the desert for thirty years. He shook every one of our hands, including Ming's, and when Ming said hello in his careful Spanish, very quietly, Don Ramiro said in English, "Louder, young man, the desert is big," and Ming laughed for the first time today.

Our van is white, has fifteen seats and a dent in the back door. Don Ramiro calls it the Old Lady.

Tomorrow: the salt flat and the flamingos. Wednesday: the geysers before sunrise, then the observatory. Thursday: a day trip up a valley to a village where they grow quinoa. Friday: free morning, packing. Saturday: home.

Sky: At 9:40 p.m. from the hostel courtyard, Mr. Pizarro made us turn off every light, even our phones. At first I saw ordinary stars. Then my eyes changed, the way they do in a dark room, and the sky changed with them, and it was not a sky with stars in it. It was stars with a little sky between them. A very bright moon, almost round, was already high over the volcanoes and Mr. Pizarro was annoyed about it. Saturn low in the west. Orion lying on his side in the east. I wanted to write more but my hands are cold. Next is Nour.

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Nour: Salt

Nour Haddad. Tuesday, December 2. 7:10 a.m. Hostel courtyard, under the pepper tree.

My teta, my father's mother, who lives with us in Las Condes and who would have packed me four kilos of food for this trip if my mother had not stopped her at the door, has a saying for every situation. When I told her I was going to the desert with my class she said, "Wherever you go, take your bread and your kindness, because you never know which one the people there are missing." Then she gave me the apricots, which are not bread, but which she says count.

I am writing this before breakfast because Matías wrote two whole pages yesterday and I want to keep up. Breakfast smells like toast and the strong coffee the hostel owner makes in a metal pot. Pituco the dog is asleep on Thiago's shoes, which Thiago is still wearing.

---

Nour. Tuesday. 11:30 a.m. Laguna Chaxa, on the Salar de Atacama.

I did not know salt could look like this.

At home salt is a white thing in a jar. Here it is the ground. It is a crust that stretches farther than you can see, gray and white and lumpy, broken into plates and ridges and little knobs like coral, and when you walk on the path between the ropes it crunches like old snow. Don Ramiro told us the salt flat is three thousand square kilometers and Valentina did the arithmetic out loud and said that is bigger than some countries, and Callum said, "It's bigger than my county," and Don Ramiro said, "Everything is bigger than your county, my friend."

The lagoon is shallow and very still, the blue of a gas flame, with the whole line of volcanoes standing upside down in it. And in the water are the flamingos.

There are three kinds here, the guide at the lagoon told us, a young woman named Javiera who works for the reserve and who talked about the birds the way my teta talks about her grandchildren. The Chilean flamingo, with gray-blue legs and pink knees. The Andean flamingo, the biggest, with yellow legs. And James's flamingo, the smallest, with red legs and a yellow beak with a black tip, which she said is the rarest of them and which she pointed out to us one by one through her binoculars, as if she were introducing us at a party. They walk with their heads down in the water, upside down, swinging from side to side, filtering tiny shrimp out of the mud with their beaks. The shrimp are what make them pink. Javiera said if a flamingo stopped eating shrimp it would slowly turn white.

"That's me without my mother's cooking," said Thiago.

Ming asked how they survive the salt. Javiera said the water is saltier than the sea in some places and the birds have glands that get rid of it, and that the lagoon is fed by water that comes underground from the mountains, very slowly, over years. "Everything you see here," she said, "is water that fell a long time ago, far away."

Rocío was standing a little apart, at the end of the path, with her hands in her sleeves. I went and stood next to her. I asked if she had been here before and she said, "When I was small. My grandfather used to bring us." She told me the flamingos were already here before the reserve, before the tourists, before the road, and that her grandfather knew where they nested and never told anybody.

"Not even you?"

"Especially not me," she said. "I talked too much."

I have known Rocío since seventh grade and I have never once heard her talk too much.

---

Nour. Tuesday. 4:45 p.m. Toconao.

Toconao is Rocío's grandmother's village, twenty minutes south of San Pedro, and it is built of a white stone the color of bread crust, which Don Ramiro says is volcanic and so soft you can cut it with a saw. The houses are low and square. The streets are quiet. At the edge of town the ground falls into a narrow green valley with a stream at the bottom, and the valley is full of trees, real trees, fruit trees, pear and quince and fig, with little irrigation channels running between them that the families open and close in turns.

After a day of salt and stone, walking into that green was like walking into a cool room.

Rocío's grandmother, Doña Flora, was waiting at her gate. She is seventy-eight and very small and wears a straw hat with a wide black band, and she held Rocío's face in both hands for a long time without saying anything, and Rocío let her. Then she looked at the eleven of us standing in her street and said to Mr. Pizarro, in Spanish, "You brought a whole school."

"Only the good part of it," said Mr. Pizarro.

She did not invite all of us in, because her house is small, but she brought out a basket of last year's dried figs and a plastic bottle of quince juice so thick it was nearly jam, and we sat on the low stone wall along her street and ate and drank while she talked to Rocío in a low voice. Nobody tried to listen. Daphné started a quiet game of guessing everybody's middle names, and lost, because Hana does not have one.

Before we left, Doña Flora asked where we were going on Thursday. Mr. Pizarro told her, the valley up to the village of Coyo Alto. She looked east, toward the volcanoes, where some white clouds were sitting on the tops.

"In this season," she said, "the rain comes from over there. From the other side. You will see the clouds stand up behind the mountains in the afternoon, tall, like men standing up from a table. When they stand up, go home. Don't wait to see what they do."

Mr. Pizarro said Don Ramiro knew. She nodded.

"Don Ramiro knows," she said. "Everybody knows. Then they wait anyway, to see."

Rocío translated this for Callum, who had not followed all of it, and he wrote it on the back of his hand with a pen.

On the bus back to San Pedro I asked Rocío what her grandmother had said to her at the gate. She was quiet for so long I thought I had made a mistake by asking. Then she said, "She asked if they treat me like a guide."

"Do we?"

"A little," she said. "At the lagoon, everybody looked at me when Javiera asked who knew the birds."

I thought about that. Then I said, "My teta says the guest who comes to learn is welcome, and the guest who comes to be served should eat at home."

Rocío almost smiled. "Your grandmother has a lot of sayings."

"She has one for everything. She has one for when you have too many sayings."

"What is it?"

"Eat your food and be quiet."

That one got her.

Sky: 10:15 p.m., hostel courtyard. The moon was up and very bright, one or two nights from full, and Mr. Pizarro said it was the brightest thing we would ever see that we could not touch. It made shadows of the pepper tree on the ground. Because of it we could only see the brightest stars. To the south, two fuzzy patches that looked like pieces of cloud that would not move: the Magellanic Clouds, which are other galaxies. Callum said, "Those are clouds that aren't clouds." Valentina said, "Everything here is something that isn't what it looks like." Next is Hana. She has to get up at 3:45.

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Hana: Four Thirty in the Morning

Hana Morita. Wednesday, December 3. 4:28 a.m. In the van, outside the hostel.

Temperature in San Pedro: 6 degrees. Expected at the geysers: minus 9.

Layers I am wearing: thermal shirt, thermal leggings, fleece, down jacket, wool hat, two pairs of socks, gloves with a thin pair inside. School list said three layers. I have four. This is not a violation. The list said "at least."

People who did not wear enough layers: Thiago.

Ms. Delmas made him go back for his other sweater. He came back wearing the sweater and also the hostel blanket, and the hostel owner came to the door in her nightgown and said he could borrow it if he brought it back without geyser on it.

Ming is in the seat in front of me with his hood up. Before we left, Ms. Delmas asked him the questions from his form. How is your chest. Did you take your morning medicine. Where is your blue inhaler. Left pocket. Show me. He showed her. She asked how many doses on the counter and he said, "Forty-four." She wrote it in her notebook. I like that she writes it down.

My grandmother in Japan writes everything down too. She lives in a town on the coast in Iwate, in the northeast, in a new house on a hill. Her old house was near the harbor. When I was one year old the big earthquake came and then the sea, and her old house went with it, and she was not in it, because she went up the hill when the shaking stopped, without going back for anything. She told me this when I was eight. She told it like a recipe. Shaking stops. Go high. Do not go back. Count your people at the top.

I will write more when there is something to write. It is too dark to see.

---

Hana. Wednesday. 6:20 a.m. El Tatio geyser field. Altitude 4,320 meters.

Facts.

The geyser field is a wide valley high in the mountains, flat and pale, surrounded by brown peaks. There are more than eighty geysers and many more fumaroles, which are holes that only steam, and boiling pools. Don Ramiro said they are best at dawn because the air is so cold that the steam stands up in tall white columns, and when the sun comes the air warms and the columns disappear.

This is true. When we arrived it was still dark blue, and the whole valley was full of white pillars, maybe sixty or seventy of them, all standing straight up, some ten meters tall, glowing a little in the light before sunrise. It sounded like many kettles. It smelled like matches and eggs.

There are low stones and ropes along the paths. You must stay behind them. The ground near the pools is a thin crust and under it the water is boiling. Don Ramiro said a tourist went through the crust some years ago and he would not say what happened, and everybody stayed behind the stones after that, even Thiago.

The pools are many colors. Orange at the edges, from bacteria that like heat. Green. A yellow that looks painted. One pool gurgled up a column of water as tall as Callum every forty seconds. Valentina timed it. It was forty seconds, forty-one, thirty-nine, forty.

The sun came over the eastern ridge at 6:52. The light came across the valley floor like a tide. Where it touched, the steam turned gold and then thinned and then was gone. In ten minutes half the columns were gone. Mr. Pizarro said, "Now you have seen the difference between the sun and no sun," and nobody laughed because it was too cold for jokes.

Callum's eyelashes had frost on them. My water bottle had a skin of ice on top.

Ming.

At 6:35 Ming said he felt "tight." He said it very quietly to Ms. Delmas, and I was next to them so I heard. She did not make a fuss. She walked him back to the van, which was forty meters away, and sat him in it with the door open, upright, and stood beside him. He used his blue inhaler, two puffs, with the plastic tube that goes between the inhaler and his mouth, which she said is a spacer and helps the medicine go where it should. She checked her watch. She talked to him about something ordinary. I could hear her asking about his little sister's school play.

At 6:50 he said it was better. At 7:00 he came back to the path and watched the last of the steam. Ms. Delmas wrote in her notebook. Counter: forty-two.

Later, in the van, Ming said to me, "Don't write about that in the log."

I said, "Rule Two."

He said, "I know Rule Two."

Then he said, "Fine. But write that it was the altitude and the cold and that it went away."

It was the altitude and the cold and it went away.

Breakfast in the van at 7:30. Don Ramiro boiled milk on a little gas stove behind the van and we had hot chocolate and bread with cheese. Eggs were boiled in a geyser pool in a mesh bag on a string. This is apparently a tradition. They tasted like normal eggs. Thiago said they tasted like geyser. They did not.

---

Hana. Wednesday. 11:50 p.m. Observatory, south of San Pedro. Written by red flashlight.

The observatory is not a big one like the famous research observatories on the high plateau, which Mr. Pizarro says we cannot visit on this trip because they are working. It is small. It belongs to a woman named Doña Marta Saire, who is Lickanantay like Rocío, and who studied physics in Antofagasta and came home. It has a dome on a low building, a terrace of white gravel, and nine telescopes on stands, and twelve plastic chairs that lean back, and a kitchen that makes hot chocolate.

Red lights only. White light ruins your night eyes for twenty minutes.

Doña Marta is about fifty and has a laser pointer with a green beam that goes all the way up into the sky, like she is touching the stars with a stick. She said there are more clear nights here than almost anywhere on Earth because the air is so dry and so high and the cold current offshore keeps the clouds away.

"Almost," said Callum.

"Almost," she said, and looked at him in a way I cannot describe.

What we saw.

The moon, almost full. Through the telescope it was so bright it hurt. Doña Marta said a full moon is the least interesting moon because the sun shines straight onto it and there are no shadows. "Half moon is better. Shadows tell you where the mountains are." She is right. At the edge, at the side, there were a few shadows, and the craters there looked deep.

Saturn. This was the best one. Its rings are nearly edge-on this year, she said, which happens about every fifteen years, so instead of a wide ring like in pictures it had a thin bright line straight through it, like a needle through a bead. Thiago said it was broken. Doña Marta said, "No. You are looking at it from the side. Most things look broken from the side."

Jupiter, rising late in the northeast, after eleven. Four moons in a line next to it, very small and sharp. Ming counted them first.

Rocío asked Doña Marta in Spanish if she would show us the llama. Doña Marta said not tonight, it is in the wrong part of the sky this season and rises late, before dawn, and anyway the moon is too bright. She explained to us that the people of the Andes see shapes not only in the stars but in the dark clouds of the Milky Way, the dust between, and one of them is a llama, and its eyes are two very bright stars near the Southern Cross. "Some people see a llama," she said. "Some people see dust. Both are right."

I asked Rocío afterwards if her grandmother taught her the llama. She said her grandfather did. "He used to wake us up to see it," she said. "Before sunrise, in summer. Then he died and nobody woke me up for it anymore."

I wrote down that it rises before dawn in this season. In case.

Ming's counter: forty-two. He did not need it tonight. I asked.

Sky: Written above. But one more thing. At 11:30, Doña Marta turned off the red lights for one minute so we could see without any lights at all. In the east over the mountains, very far, there was a flicker of light inside a cloud. Silent. Then again. Doña Marta looked at it and said nothing. Mr. Pizarro looked at it and said nothing. Don Ramiro, by the van, said one word. "Bolivia." Next is Thiago.

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Thiago: Quinoa and Thunder

Thiago Barbosa. Thursday, December 4. 8:05 a.m. The Old Lady, leaving San Pedro, heading east and up.

First: I returned the hostel blanket. It has no geyser on it. I checked.

Second: I want it on the record that Hana's entry made me sound like a person who does not own a sweater. I own three sweaters. I am from Recife. In Recife a sweater is a decoration. I wear one in Santiago in July and my mother takes a photo of it to send to my vovó, who prints it and puts it on the fridge next to the picture of my cousin's graduation, as if both are achievements.

Third: we are going up a valley today to a village called Coyo Alto, two hours east, where people grow quinoa and keep llamas and where, Mr. Pizarro says, a family is making us lunch. Llama stew. I have told everybody I am going to try it. Nour says I am going to try it and then pretend I didn't. We will see who is correct. History will decide. History is this notebook.

The sky this morning is completely clear. Blue all the way down to the ground. Don Ramiro looked at it for a long time before we left and then looked at the mountains in the east, where there is nothing, and said, "Good. Early start, early home." He says this the way my uncle says the bus is coming, which is to say like a man who has been wrong before.

---

Thiago. Thursday. 11:20 a.m. Coyo Alto.

The road climbed up a valley that got narrower and narrower, with a dry riverbed of gray stones on one side, and tall brown walls of rock, and here and there a green line of bushes in the bottom where there must be water underground. We passed one truck. We passed three vicuñas, which are like small, elegant llamas who think they are better than you, and they looked at the van and decided we were not worth running from.

Then the valley opened into a sort of bowl, high up, and there was the village.

Coyo Alto is about forty houses, all made of adobe and stone, all the same brown as the hills, with flat roofs of mud and straw on poles, and some with tin. There are stone walls everywhere, low ones, making little fields that go up the sides of the bowl in steps, like a staircase for a giant. In the fields there is quinoa. I had only seen quinoa in a bag at the supermarket. It grows like a tall weed with a big heavy head on top, and the heads are red, orange, purple, yellow, so the hillside looks like someone spilled a box of colored pencils.

Behind the houses, a stone corral with llamas in it, maybe thirty, with red and pink wool tassels in their ears. They are bigger than I thought and they hum. Nobody warned me that llamas hum. One of them looked at me and hummed and I said, "Okay," and backed away.

A man named Don Aurelio showed us the fields. He is somebody's uncle and somebody's cousin and he has done this all his life. He said this year's quinoa will be cut in April. He showed us how the terraces hold the little water there is and send it from step to step. Rocío asked him something in Spanish about the water channel, and he answered her for a long time, and afterwards she told us that in this valley the families share the water by turns and have done so for longer than anyone can remember, and that the one who opens the channel at night is trusted by everybody.

Valentina was so interested in this she forgot to complain about anything for twenty minutes.

---

Thiago. Thursday. 1:40 p.m. Doña Emilia's kitchen, Coyo Alto.

The kitchen is a separate adobe building with a smoke-black ceiling and a clay oven outside, and Doña Emilia, who is Don Aurelio's sister, cooks in it with two big pots on a gas ring and a third pot on a wood fire in the yard.

Lunch:

A soup with quinoa in it, thick, with potato and pumpkin and a green herb on top. It was so good that Daphné asked for the recipe, and Doña Emilia laughed and said the recipe is, "You put things in a pot," and Daphné said, "That's my grandmother's recipe too."

The llama stew. Dark, with potatoes and big white corn kernels, the kind called mote, and the meat in pieces, cooked so long it falls apart with a spoon.

Okay. History. Here it is.

I tried it. It was good. It tastes like beef that went on a long walk and thought about its life. I had seconds. Nour can confirm.

[Nour: Confirmed. He had seconds. He also pretended he didn't for about one minute.]

Bread from the clay oven, round and flat and still warm. Tea made from a little gray-green desert plant called rica rica, which smells like lemon and pine and mint together, and which Doña Emilia says is good for the stomach and good at altitude and good for most things. Ming drank two cups. Doña Emilia patted his head like he was her grandson.

Then she disappeared and came back with a cloth bag and gave it to Mr. Pizarro: roasted fava beans, salty and crunchy, a whole bag of them, and six more of the round breads, and a bundle of the rica rica, dry, tied with string. "For the road," she said. Mr. Pizarro tried to pay and she would not let him. Nour's grandmother would approve. Nour said so.

During lunch, I noticed something. Don Ramiro got up three times and went outside and looked east. The third time, I went out with him to see what he was looking at.

Behind the mountains to the east, the sky was not blue anymore. It was full of clouds, white ones, but not normal clouds. They were tall. They were stacked. They were piling up on each other, flat on the bottom and boiling up on the top, very slowly, like milk when it starts to rise in the pan.

I said, "Is that the thing Rocío's grandmother said? The men standing up from the table?"

Don Ramiro said, "That's them."

"So we go home?"

"We go home," he said, and went back in and said something quietly to Mr. Pizarro, and Mr. Pizarro stood up and clapped his hands twice and said, "Ten minutes. Bathroom, bottles, bags. We're leaving."

Everybody complained, because there was still dessert, which was some kind of sweet made with quinoa and milk. Doña Emilia put it in a plastic container and gave it to Hana, because she has the most organized backpack.

---

Thiago. Thursday. 3:50 p.m. The Old Lady, on the road down the valley. I am writing in the van because Ms. Delmas says writing keeps people calm, and because Daphné told me it was my turn and it is still my turn until I hand it over.

We left Coyo Alto at 2:35. Don Ramiro did not wait to see what the clouds did. I want that written. He went when he said.

The clouds went faster.

By three o'clock they were over us. Gray underneath, a dark heavy gray I have only seen in Recife in June, and then the light went yellow, a strange flat yellow, and the temperature in the van went down so fast that Valentina said, "Wow," and pulled her jacket on.

At 3:20 it started to rain. Not like Santiago rain. Big fat heavy drops that hit the windshield like somebody throwing coins, and then hail, little white stones, bouncing on the road and on the hood and on the roof so loudly we had to shout. The road went white with it. Don Ramiro slowed down to walking speed. The thunder was very close. Ming had his hood up and his hands over his ears and Daphné had her arm around him.

Callum said, "Almost no rain."

Nobody laughed. Not even me. But I want it written that it was funny.

The rain is falling so hard now on the hills above us that the hills have changed color. They were brown. They are dark brown and shining. And small streams are coming down out of the rocks, little white threads, everywhere, where there were no streams at all an hour ago.

Don Ramiro just said, "Mr. Pizarro." Only that. And Mr. Pizarro went up and crouched next to him and they talked in low voices and Don Ramiro pointed ahead at the bottom of the valley, where the road goes across the dry riverbed.

The riverbed is not dry.

The van has stopped. I am handing the log to Valentina. She is sitting closest to me and she is the one who knows about water.

Sky: Gray. Low. Moving fast from the east. Hail.

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Valentina: The Water Came Down

Valentina Restrepo. Thursday, December 4. 8:20 p.m. Campamento Lucía, the old schoolhouse, by headlamp. My hands are mostly dry now and I am going to write this in order, because my father says that when something goes wrong, the first thing you do afterwards is write down the sequence while you still remember it, because memory is a bad engineer and fills in the gaps with whatever it likes.

Sequence.

3:52 p.m. The van stopped about fifty meters before the place where the road goes down into the riverbed and crosses it. This morning, going up, that crossing was a dip in the road, gray gravel, a couple of big stones, completely dry. We drove through it without slowing down. I did not even notice it.

Now there was water in it. Brown water, about as wide as a basketball court, moving fast from left to right, with a sort of standing wave in the middle where it went over something. It did not look deep. That is the thing I want written down most of all. It did not look deep. It looked like something you could drive through if you were brave.

Don Ramiro got out and stood at the edge of the road in the hail, with his hand on his hat, and watched it. He watched for about one minute. In that minute the water got wider. I saw it. The edge of it moved toward the road like someone pulling a brown sheet across a table.

Then we heard it. A sound from up the valley, to the left, like a train, but deeper, with knocking in it. Mr. Pizarro said later the knocking was boulders hitting each other inside the water. I did not know water could carry boulders. Now I know.

Don Ramiro ran back to the van. He is sixty-one and he ran. He got in and put it in reverse and backed up the road without turning around, fast, looking in the mirror, and nobody said a word, and then the sound got very loud and I looked out the front window and the brown water in the riverbed stood up.

That is the only way I can describe it. It stood up. A front came down the riverbed higher than the van, brown and gray, with foam on it and stones and a whole bush rolling over and over, and it filled the crossing from one side to the other and kept going, and where the road had gone down into the dip there was no road anymore, only that.

4:01 p.m. Don Ramiro stopped backing up. We were on a straight piece of road along the side of the valley, higher than the riverbed, maybe four meters higher. He turned the van around in three moves. He said to Mr. Pizarro, "We go back up to Coyo Alto." We drove back up the road toward the village.

4:09 p.m. Second crossing. Going up this morning, about two kilometers below this one, there was another dip where a side valley comes in from the right. It was also running. Not as big. But the water was already across the road and brown and noisy, and Don Ramiro looked at it for three seconds this time, not one minute, and said, "No."

So the situation at 4:10 p.m. was: two crossings, both flooding, and us on a piece of road between them about two kilometers long, along the side of the valley.

My father builds bridges. He has told me since I was little that water is the most patient engineer in the world and it always, always goes back to the road it took before. "You can build a house in a dry riverbed," he says, "and the river will wait fifty years, and then it will come home." The road crossings are where the old water roads are. The water was coming home.

4:12 p.m. Don Ramiro said, "Lucía."

Mr. Pizarro said, "What is Lucía?"

Don Ramiro pointed up the hill on the left, above the road. Through the hail I could see, on a flat shelf of ground maybe eighty meters above us, some square shapes. Walls. Roofs. Rows of them.

"Old sulfur camp," said Don Ramiro. "Campamento Lucía. The company left in the sixties. There is a track. It is high. The water never goes up there."

Matías, behind me, said, "A sulfur camp," in a voice like he was in church. I will let him explain that.

4:15 p.m. Don Ramiro drove onto the track. It was a narrow dirt road going up across the slope in two long zigzags. It was already muddy and there was water running down it in little channels. The van climbed the first zigzag. On the second one, at the corner, the back wheel on the downhill side went into a gully the rain had cut across the track, and the van went down on that side with a crunch and a lurch and stopped, leaning.

Ms. Delmas said, "Everybody stay seated." Everybody stayed seated. Don Ramiro tried to go forward. The wheel spun. He tried again. Then he turned off the engine and said, "The Old Lady is tired."

4:20 p.m. Hana said, "We should go up."

She said it very clearly, not loudly, and everybody turned to look at her.

"My grandmother says when the water comes, go high and do not go back," she said. "We are close to the top. We can walk."

Mr. Pizarro looked at Don Ramiro. Don Ramiro looked up at the camp, which was about two hundred and fifty meters away, and down at the valley, where the noise was getting louder. He said, "She is right. The van is safe here. It will not move. But up there is better."

So we walked.

Ms. Delmas took Ming first, with her red bag, going slowly. Daphné stood at the door and counted everybody out of it, out loud, Ming and Ms. Delmas first, then the rest of us one by one, then Mr. Pizarro, then Don Ramiro last, twelve. Callum and Don Ramiro carried the big water jug from the back of the van between them. Mr. Pizarro carried the two wool blankets and the blue plastic tarp from under the seats. Nour carried Doña Emilia's cloth bag of bread and beans like it was a baby. I carried my own backpack and Ming's, because he needed his breath for walking.

The hail stopped while we walked and became rain. Cold, hard rain, straight down. The track was red mud. We went up it in a line with our heads down. Nobody slipped. Thiago sang something in Portuguese under his breath, a song with a rhythm like walking, and I have never been so happy to hear Thiago sing.

4:41 p.m. At the top. A flat terrace of gravel with old buildings on it. Daphné counted again. Twelve.

4:45 p.m. We stood at the edge of the terrace, under the overhang of the first roof, and looked down into the valley. The road we had been on was still there, along the slope. But at both ends of it, where the crossings were, there was brown water, and in the bottom of the valley where the gray riverbed had been there was now a river. A real river, brown, wide, loud, filling the bottom from wall to wall, carrying things. I could see the second crossing from up here and there was no road there at all. Just water.

Callum said, "How long does it last?"

Don Ramiro said, "Tonight, it runs. Tomorrow, maybe less. Maybe after tomorrow it goes back underground and the road people come with their machines."

"So we're stuck."

"We are guests," said Don Ramiro. "Of Lucía."

I do not know what time it was when I started shaking. Maybe five. It was not the cold, or not only the cold. Daphné saw and came and stood next to me and did not say anything, just stood very close, shoulder to shoulder, and after a while it stopped.

I am the one who knows about water. I knew all of this. I knew that rain in mountains runs off fast, that a dry riverbed is a river that is resting, that you never drive into moving water you cannot see the bottom of. I knew it from books and my father. I did not know it in my stomach. Now I do.

Sky: At 6:30 the rain was still falling. The clouds were so low they touched the hills across the valley. There was no sky. Only a ceiling. Lightning in it, every minute or two, and the thunder bouncing up and down the valley like a ball. Next is Daphné. She has been counting us all afternoon, she should get to write it.

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Daphné: Count Everyone

Daphné Louis. Thursday, December 4. 9:40 p.m. Campamento Lucía, the schoolhouse. Twelve people in this building. I have counted four more times since Valentina wrote. Twelve every time.

My mother counts. Everybody in my family knows this about her. When we go to the beach she counts us. When we come out of a movie she counts us, even now, even though there are only four of us, my father and her and me and my brother Wesner, and you can see four people without counting. My father used to laugh at her for it. Then one day when I was twelve he asked her, gently, at the table, "Why do you always count, chérie?" and she told us, and he never laughed at it again.

I was a baby in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake came, in January, when I was four months old. My mother was holding me on the step of my aunt's house when the ground started to move, and she said it went on for so long that she had time to think three whole thoughts, and the third one was, Where is everybody. When it stopped, she said, there was dust everywhere, so thick you could not see across the street, and people calling names, and she stood in the street with me and did not run anywhere and did not go back inside. She counted. She called each name in our family and waited for an answer. Some answered right away. One answered after a long time, from under a table. She told us that the counting was the only thing that kept her from going crazy, because once you know who is here, you know what you have, and then you can start to work. She said the numbers you don't know are the ones that frighten you.

So I count. It is a family thing now.

---

Daphné. Thursday. 10:05 p.m. Same place.

Here is what we have. Mr. Pizarro asked me and Hana to make the list, and Hana wrote it on a page in her own notebook and I am copying it here so it is in the official log.

People: 12. Nine students, two teachers, Don Ramiro.

Water: The van's jug, which was ten liters this morning and is now about eight. Plus our bottles, which together hold about four more liters, and some are half empty. Total: about eleven and a half liters. Mr. Pizarro did the arithmetic out loud and said it was enough for tonight and tomorrow if we are careful and if nobody washes their face with it, which was aimed at Thiago.

Food: Doña Emilia's six round breads. Her bag of roasted fava beans, about a kilo. The quinoa dessert in Hana's container. Nour's apricots, about half the bag. Callum has two bars of chocolate, one of them with nuts. Thiago has a packet of crackers he says he has been saving for an emergency, and everybody looked at him because nobody believes Thiago has ever saved anything. Hana has two emergency food bars in a zip pocket because the school list said "recommended." Ming has a bag of dried mango. Valentina has gum.

Warm things: our jackets, two wool blankets from the van, the blue tarp, the seat covers from the van, which Don Ramiro and Mr. Pizarro went back down and got before dark, and some old flat wooden benches in this room.

Light: nine headlamps, two flashlights, the red one from the observatory that Hana forgot to give back. Phones: no signal, none, not a single bar. Mr. Pizarro asked everybody to turn their phones off to save the batteries except his, which is on, on airplane mode, for the clock and as a flashlight if we need it.

Radio: The van has a radio for talking to other drivers. Don Ramiro tried it four times this afternoon, from the van, and twice more when he went down for the seat covers. Only noise. He says the valley walls block it, and that up on top of the hill behind the camp it might work, but not in the dark and not in the rain.

Medicine: Ms. Delmas's red bag. Ming's blue inhaler. That is all I am going to write about the medicine, because it is Ming's turn next and he can write what he wants about it.

Fire: yes. Here is how. Behind the schoolhouse there is a long low building with no roof, which Matías says was the company store, and part of its wall makes a corner out of the wind. Lying around it are old pieces of wood from roofs that fell in years ago, very dry inside even though the outside is wet, gray and cracked like an old man's hands. Don Ramiro built a small fire in the corner of the store wall, under a piece of tin that is still hanging there, with the smoke going away from the schoolhouse, and Mr. Pizarro said that is where the fire stays, because smoke and Ming do not go together. We go out to it two at a time. Don Ramiro is sitting by it in his hat like he does this every weekend. He heats water in a clean tin can from the store and makes rica rica tea with Doña Emilia's bundle, and we each get half a cup, and it is the best half a cup of anything I have ever had.

Rules from Mr. Pizarro, said in the voice he uses for exams:

Nobody goes anywhere alone. Not even five meters. Pairs.

Nobody goes near the edge of the terrace after dark.

Nobody goes down the track to the van without him or Don Ramiro.

The bathroom is behind the third house in the row, by the wall, with a headlamp, in pairs, and your partner turns around.

Nobody goes into any building except this one and the fire corner, because the old ones could fall.

Then Ms. Delmas said, "And nobody pretends to be fine when they are not fine. That is also a rule."

---

Daphné. Thursday. 11:00 p.m. Same place.

The schoolhouse is one big room and a little room at the side. It has adobe walls as thick as my arm is long, a tin roof that still holds, with a few holes we can see the dark through, and a cement floor. Three windows with no glass but wooden shutters that close. And on the end wall, which was painted black once, a blackboard, still faintly black, and on it, in the corner, very faint, there is chalk writing. Somebody wrote the alphabet. Somebody small, with big round letters.

When Matías saw it he went very quiet and stood in front of it with his headlamp for a long time. I will let him write about that on his turn.

We laid the benches along the wall away from the door and put the seat covers on them and that is where people will sleep, two or three to a bench, close together, so nobody is lying on the cold floor. Callum said that is the first thing his grandfather taught him: it is not the air that takes your heat, it is the ground. Put something between you and the ground. He and Don Ramiro hung the blue tarp across the inside of the door to stop the wind coming in. The rain on the tin roof is very loud. It is like being inside a drum.

Everybody was too quiet. Thiago tried to make jokes and they did not land. Nour kept checking the bread. Valentina was sitting with her knees up and her arms around them.

So I said, "Krik?"

Nobody answered, because they did not know. In Haiti, when somebody wants to tell a story, that is what they say. Krik? And if you want to hear it, you say, Krak! And if nobody says Krak, there is no story. My grann taught me. When the power went out in her neighborhood she would sit on the step in the dark and say Krik, and all the children for three houses would come running and shout Krak.

I explained it. I said it again. "Krik?"

Rocío said, "Krak," very quietly, which surprised me, because Rocío never goes first.

Then everybody said it. "Krak!" Thiago said it so loud Ms. Delmas told him to lower his voice, and everybody laughed, and something in the room got warmer.

So I told them the story of Bouki and Malice, who are the two most famous characters in Haitian stories. Bouki is big and greedy and not very clever, and Malice is small and clever and a bit of a liar, and they are always trying to trick each other out of food. I told the one where Malice convinces Bouki that the moon is a cheese at the bottom of the well, and Bouki drinks the whole well trying to get to it. Thiago said, "That's me," and everybody agreed.

At the end of a story my grann always said a saying. So I said one of hers in English for them: "Beyond mountains, more mountains." Hana asked what it means. I said, it means when you get over one problem, there is another one behind it, so do not waste all your breath on the first.

Callum said, "That's grim."

I said, "No. It means you keep walking."

Then Nour said one of her grandmother's, and Thiago said one of his vovó's, and it turned into a competition, and Mr. Pizarro sat on the floor with his back against the blackboard and listened with his eyes closed.

Sky: Nothing. Rain. Thunder further away now, I think. Mr. Pizarro said the storm is moving west. Don Ramiro said, "It is moving. That is all we know." Next is Ming.

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Ming: Thirty-Eight

Chen Mingyu. Thursday, December 4. 11:50 p.m. Schoolhouse, Campamento Lucía. Temperature inside, by the thermometer on Mr. Pizarro's watch: 7 degrees. Outside, by the door: 4 degrees. Rain on the roof: still.

Daphné said I can write what I want about the medicine. Here is what I want. I want to write all of it, with numbers, because numbers are easier than the other way of writing it.

Counter on my blue inhaler at the start of the trip, Monday morning: 46. I know that is low. My mother bought me a new one, with 200, the week before we left. She put it in the side pocket of my suitcase and said, "Switch when this one is under fifty," and I said I would, and then I forgot, because I was thinking about Saturn. The new one is in my suitcase. My suitcase is in Room 6 of the hostel in San Pedro, under the bed, next to Thiago's.

Counter at El Tatio, Wednesday, before: 44. After: 42.

Counter today at 4:45 p.m., at the top of the track after walking up in the rain and the cold, when my chest went tight and Ms. Delmas sat me down under the roof edge and stayed with me: 40.

Counter at 10:30 p.m. tonight, when the dust came off the benches when we moved them and it got in my throat: 38.

Thirty-eight.

When I told Ms. Delmas the number at 10:30, I said it in a bad voice. I could hear that it was a bad voice. I said, "There are only thirty-eight."

She sat down next to me on the bench. She took out her notebook, the one where she writes everything, and showed it to me. She had written every number. Then she opened her red bag and took out a box and showed me what was in it, which was another blue inhaler, a school one, full, that she carries for emergencies, for anyone. She put it back in the bag.

"So," she said, "there are thirty-eight in yours and two hundred in mine. Two puffs each time. You have used it four times in four days. Even if tonight and tomorrow were your worst nights ever, which they will not be, we will not run out."

I said, "But what if."

She said, "Then we follow your plan. The plan your doctor wrote, which I have here." She tapped the bag. "It says what to do, and how many puffs, and how long to wait, and what to watch for, and it says when it is time to get help faster. I have read it eleven times. I know it better than I know my own phone number."

I said, "There is no faster help. There is a river."

She did not pretend there wasn't. That is the thing I like about Ms. Delmas. She said, "That is true tonight. That is why Mr. Pizarro and Don Ramiro are making a plan for first light. And that is why you and I are going to do the boring things very carefully. We never save medicine, Ming. If you need it, you take it, every time, exactly as the plan says. What we save is you, from needing it. That means warm. That means calm. That means no dust, no smoke, no running."

Then she made a list on her fingers.

Warm: I am sleeping in the middle of the bench by the inside wall, between Thiago and Matías, under one of the wool blankets, with my hat on.

Calm: she said that is everybody's job, not only mine.

No dust: Valentina and Rocío wet a T-shirt with a tiny bit of water and wiped down my part of the bench and the wall next to it. Valentina said it was a waste of water. Then she did it anyway, very carefully, with about one capful.

No smoke: the fire is outside, behind the store wall, and the wind takes the smoke away down the valley. I am not allowed to go to it. Nour brings me my half cup of tea.

No running: there is nowhere to run.

---

Ming. Friday, December 5. 12:25 a.m. Same bench.

I cannot sleep, so I am still writing. Thiago is asleep already. He fell asleep in one minute. He snores with a little whistle at the end, like a kettle that is not sure.

I want to write something that is not about my chest.

My nainai, my father's mother, lives in Harbin, in the far northeast of China, where in winter it is minus thirty and they make whole palaces out of ice. When I was nine we went there for the New Year and I got sick from the cold air, and she made me sit on the warm brick bed in her apartment and put a hot water bottle on my stomach, and she said, "Keep your feet warm and your belly warm and the rest of you will follow." She said cold comes in from the bottom and the middle, never the top. Then she gave me a hat anyway, a red one with flaps, because she said a grandmother's saying is not a guarantee.

So I told Matías and he took off his extra socks and gave them to me, and I am wearing three pairs now. And Daphné heated a bottle of water a little at the fire, only warm, not hot, and wrapped it in a sweater, and it is on my stomach right now. I can feel it working. Nainai was right.

---

Ming. Friday. 12:50 a.m.

Mr. Pizarro came and sat on the floor next to the bench. He was being quiet so as not to wake anybody. He asked how my chest was. I said fine, which was true. He said, "Do you want to hear something about the sky that you can't see right now?"

I said yes.

He said that above the clouds right now, the moon is full. It became exactly full a few hours ago, around eight o'clock, while Mr. Pizarro and Don Ramiro were carrying the seat covers up the track in the rain. And that above the moon and the clouds there is everything we saw at the observatory, Saturn with its needle and Jupiter with its four moons in a row, all still there, all still going around, even though we cannot see one of them. He said that is one of the things he likes best about astronomy. "The sky does not need us to look at it," he said. "It keeps doing its job."

I said, "That's like Ms. Delmas's notebook."

He laughed through his nose, very quietly, and said, "Yes. Exactly like that."

Then I told him a story my nainai told me, about two stars. One is a weaver girl in the sky, and one is a cowherd on the earth, and they fell in love, and her mother, who was the queen of the sky, was angry and drew a river between them with her hairpin, and the river is the Milky Way. Once a year all the magpies in the world fly up and make a bridge with their wings so the two can meet. The weaver girl is Vega and the cowherd is Altair. I asked Mr. Pizarro if we can see them from here.

He thought about it. He said in December, from this far south, Vega is very low in the northwest just after sunset and then it sets, and Altair is a bit higher in the west in the early evening. "If the sky clears tomorrow evening," he said, "we will look. Before they go down."

I said, "If we are still here tomorrow evening."

He said, "If we are still here. And if we are not, we will look from the hostel. They will be in the same place. That is the other thing I like about astronomy."

---

Ming. Friday. 1:10 a.m.

Counter: 38. No change. Chest: fine. Feet: warm. Belly: warm. The rest: following.

I am going to give the log to Rocío now. She is not asleep either. She is sitting by the door with her back against the wall, listening to the rain. I can see the shape of her against the tarp. She has been sitting there for an hour. I think she is listening for something.

Sky: Clouds. Full moon somewhere behind them. Saturn somewhere behind them. Vega and Altair already set, both of them, down behind the mountains, on the same side, which my nainai would say is a good sign.

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Rocío: Rain Is Water

Rocío Anza. Friday, December 5. 1:15 a.m. By the door of the schoolhouse, behind the tarp.

Ming is right. I was listening for something.

I was listening to the river. From up here you can hear it under the rain, a low sound with no breaks in it, and every few minutes a heavier knock, a stone hitting a stone somewhere down in the dark. My grandfather used to say you can tell what a river is doing by its voice. A river that is getting bigger gets louder in the knocks. A river that is getting smaller gets smoother. I have been listening for an hour to decide which this one is. I think it is staying the same. That is not the answer I wanted.

I was also listening to the roof.

---

People keep looking at me. Since the van stopped. Not in a bad way. They look at me the way you look at the one person in the room who might know the answer, and I want to write down, under Rule Two, that I do not know most of the answers. I was born in Calama, in a hospital, in an apartment building, and I moved to Santiago when I was eleven. I know the desert the way you know your grandmother's house. I know where the cups are. I do not know where the pipes go.

But I know some things. My grandmother taught me some. My grandfather taught me more, before. And tonight, sitting here, I remembered one of them, because of the sound on the roof.

When I was small, in Toconao, there was one summer when the rain came over from the altiplano the way it did today, and my grandmother put out every pot she had under the edge of her roof. Every pot, every bucket, the washing tub. I asked her why, because there is a stream at the bottom of the town and the water there is fine for the trees. She said the stream was fine for the trees. She said when the rain comes hard in the mountains the rivers fill with everything the mountain has, mud and ash and whatever is in the rocks. She said some of the water up in these valleys has always had things in it you cannot see or taste, from the stone, and the old people knew which water to give the animals and which water to give the children, and rain from a clean roof is for the children.

So I went to Valentina, because she was awake too, and said, "The roof."

She understood right away. That is the thing about Valentina. She is very annoying for most of the day, and then she understands something before you finish the sentence.

---

Rocío. Friday. 1:40 a.m. Outside the schoolhouse, under the roof edge, with Valentina and Mr. Pizarro.

The schoolhouse roof is sheets of corrugated tin, old and rusty on top but holding, and the rain comes off the edge of it in a row of little streams, one from every groove. It has been raining for more than nine hours. Mr. Pizarro said any dust or dirt on top of that roof has been washed off a hundred times by now.

We asked Mr. Pizarro first, because of the rules. Pairs, he said, and him with us, and only along this wall where the ground is flat, and nobody goes past the corner. He held the flashlight.

Valentina found a long piece of tin from the fallen roof of the store, half a sheet, bent in the middle like a gutter already. We wiped it with the rain itself, three times, and then she and Mr. Pizarro propped it under the edge of the schoolhouse roof on two stacks of adobe bricks from a fallen wall, sloping down at one end, so the water from about ten grooves ran into it and along it and poured off the end in one stream, as thick as my finger.

Under the stream we put the clean tin can that Don Ramiro uses for tea. It filled in about a minute. We emptied it into an empty bottle with Valentina holding a folded tissue over the mouth to catch anything. Then another. Then Hana brought out the quinoa dessert container, which is empty now because Thiago and Ming ate the last of it, and we used that too.

Valentina timed it. About one and a half liters every ten minutes.

Ms. Delmas came out with her jacket over her head and looked at it and said, "Good. We boil it before we drink it. Every time." So there is a system. Rain to gutter to can to bottle. Bottle to Don Ramiro at the fire. Fire to boil. Boiled to the cooling row along the inside wall. Valentina wrote the system on her arm.

By 2:30 we had about five liters. Mr. Pizarro did the new arithmetic out loud: eleven and a half minus what we have drunk tonight plus five. He said it in a different voice from the first time.

"So we are fine on water," said Valentina.

"We are fine on water," he said. "As long as it keeps raining."

"Which is the problem," said Valentina.

"Which is also the problem," he said.

---

Rocío. Friday. 2:40 a.m. Back inside, by the door.

Before he went back to his place by the blackboard, Mr. Pizarro sat down next to me for a minute.

He said, "Your grandmother told us to go home when the clouds stood up. We did. Don Ramiro did. It came anyway."

I said, "She says that happens too."

He said, "Does she have a saying for that?"

I thought about it. My grandmother is not like Nour's teta. She does not have a saying for everything. She mostly has looks. But there is one thing she says when something goes wrong that nobody could have stopped. In Spanish it is only a few words. In English it would be something like: "The desert is not empty. It is waiting."

He asked what it means.

I said, "It means the water was always here. Under the ground, in the mountain, in the clouds over there. We just could not see it. The desert looks empty and it isn't. Same with people."

He was quiet. Then he said, "You should say that tomorrow. To everyone."

I said maybe.

I want to write one more thing before I hand this on. My grandmother's people, my people, the Lickanantay, had our own language once, Kunza. It is not spoken anymore. Nobody grows up talking it. But my grandmother knows some words of it, the way you know the names of your grandparents' grandparents, and some of the words are for water and for the places water comes up out of the ground. She taught me a few, when I was small. I am not going to write them in the log. They are hers to give, not mine. But I said them in my head tonight, standing under that roof with my hands in the cold stream, and I felt better.

Sky: Still clouds, but higher, I think. Once, at 2:35, a patch went thin over the hills to the west and there was light behind it, white and strong, the moon trying. Then it closed again. The rain is softer on the roof. The river is the same. Next is Callum. He is on night watch with Mr. Pizarro and Don Ramiro until dawn, because he asked to be, three times.

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Callum: Be Warm, Be Dry

Callum Pryce. Friday, December 5. 3:30 a.m. The fire corner behind the old store. Night watch. Mr. Pizarro on my left. Don Ramiro on my right, feeding the fire one stick at a time like he is paying it.

Rocío says I asked three times to be on watch. It was four. I am putting that in under Rule Two, and also under Rule Four, because it was a mistake, though not the mistake she thinks.

My grandad was in the mountain rescue team in our valley in Cumbria for thirty-one years. He was a plumber the rest of the time. When the phone went, he would put down whatever pipe he was holding and go, in any weather, at any hour, up onto the fells to look for walkers who had got lost in the cloud or slipped or been stupid. He told me a lot of stories. Most of them were the same story. Somebody went out in bad weather, it got worse, they kept going.

The rule he taught me, the first one, before I could read, was: be warm, be dry, be found. In that order.

So you would think I would be the last person on this trip to want to do something stupid.

---

Callum. Friday. 3:45 a.m. Same.

Here is the stupid thing. I will write it down so it is on record.

At about two o'clock, when the rain was softer, I said to Mr. Pizarro that at first light I could go and get help. I said I am the fittest one here, which is true, I run cross-country. I said Coyo Alto is only maybe eight kilometers up the valley and people live there and they might have a radio or a landline. I said I could go up over the hill and around the upper crossing instead of through it, along the slope, and be there by nine.

Mr. Pizarro listened to all of it. Then he said, "No."

I said, "But..."

Don Ramiro said, "No," at the same time as Mr. Pizarro said, "Callum," and they looked at each other, and Don Ramiro let Mr. Pizarro go on.

He said, "Three reasons. One, the slope above the upper crossing is loose rock and wet, and you do not know it. Two, there will be side valleys between here and Coyo Alto that you cannot see from here, and every one of them is running. Three, the people at Coyo Alto know exactly where we are, because they watched us leave at 2:35 and they know what the river did. So does the hostel, which expected us at six. So does the observatory. So does Rocío's grandmother. The most useful thing any of us can do is stay exactly where they will look for us, and make it easy for them to see us."

Then he said, "What would your grandfather say?"

I have been thinking about that for an hour and a half.

My grandad said the ones they found in time were almost always the ones who had stayed put. Who had found a wall and got behind it and put their bag under them and their bright jacket on top and waited. And the ones who were hardest to find, and the ones who got hurt, were the ones who had decided to walk out. He said, "It is very hard to sit still when you are frightened. It feels like doing nothing. It is not doing nothing. It is doing the hardest thing."

He also said that the people who wanted to walk out were usually the ones who felt responsible for the trouble.

I said "almost" about the rain on the bus on Monday, like it was a joke, and then the rain came. I know that is not how weather works. Valentina would say that is not how weather works. But when the hail started yesterday, I felt like I had done it.

So I am sitting still. It is very hard. My grandad was right about that too.

---

Callum. Friday. 4:05 a.m. Same. Something is happening.

The rain has stopped. Completely. I did not notice the exact moment. Don Ramiro noticed. He held up one hand and we all listened and there was no sound on the tin, only the river down below, and the fire.

Then the cloud over the west started to come apart. It went thin and silver at the edges and then tore, and behind it was the moon. Full, huge, low over the mountains on the far side of the valley, so bright that the whole valley lit up at once, like somebody switching on a light in a room.

I could see everything. The terrace. The rows of roofless houses, their walls throwing black shadows. The track going down in its zigzags, red and wet. The Old Lady at the corner, leaning, shining white. And below, the river. It filled the whole bottom of the valley, silver in the moonlight, wide and moving and loud, with stripes in it where it ran over stones. It was beautiful. I did not expect that. I hated it and it was beautiful.

The clouds kept going. They pulled back to the east like a tablecloth being taken off a table. And there were the stars.

Not like the hostel. Not even like the observatory, because the moon was so bright. But enough. Mr. Pizarro stood up and started pointing, very quietly, the way he does in class when he forgets he is in class. Jupiter, very bright, high in the north. Sirius, the brightest star, almost straight overhead. Canopus high in the south, which you never see from England. Orion tipping over toward the west, upside down to my English eyes.

Then he turned around to the southeast, over the hills behind the camp, and said, "Oh."

Low over the hills there were four stars in a little kite shape, tilted. And to the left of it, two very bright ones close together, one brighter than the other.

"The Southern Cross," he said. "And the Pointers. Alpha and Beta Centauri."

I knew what the two bright ones were. Hana had written it in the log on Wednesday. In case.

I said, "Those are the llama's eyes."

Mr. Pizarro looked at me. Don Ramiro looked at me. Don Ramiro said, "Go and get her."

---

Callum. Friday. 4:20 a.m.

I went in with my headlamp on red and woke Rocío, who was asleep for once, by the door, sitting up. I said, "The llama is up."

She did not ask what I meant. She came out with the blanket around her shoulders and stood by the fire corner and looked southeast, and she looked for a long time without saying anything. The moon was so bright you could not really see the dark shapes in the Milky Way, only the two eyes, very bright, side by side, coming up over the hill.

Then she said, "He used to wake us up for it." She said it to nobody. Then she said to me, "Thank you," very formally, like at school, and I said, "Hana wrote it down," and she said, "Then thank Hana."

I will. I am writing it here so I remember.

---

Callum. Friday. 4:40 a.m.

Ming woke up coughing just before five. The coldest part of the night is just before dawn, Grandad always said, and the air coming in under the tarp was icy. Ms. Delmas was there before I had even turned round. She sat him up straight, the blanket round him, the warm bottle back on his stomach, and he did his two puffs with the spacer, slowly, while she counted with him and talked about nothing, the same voice as at the geysers. Daphné woke up and held his hand. After about fifteen minutes he was breathing normally and grumpy about being awake, which Ms. Delmas said is the best sign there is. She wrote it down. Thirty-six.

Mr. Pizarro said at first light we would try the radio from the top of the hill behind the camp, where Don Ramiro thinks it might reach. He and Don Ramiro will go. He asked if I would like to come and carry the radio battery, and I said yes before he finished, and he said, "Slowly. Behind Don Ramiro. Every step where he steps," and I said yes again, and I meant it.

Sky: CLEAR. Full moon setting in the west. Jupiter in the north. The Southern Cross and the llama's eyes in the southeast, over the hill. First gray light behind them at 5:50. Next is Nour. It is morning. We are still here. All twelve. Daphné counted.

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Nour: Teta Says

Nour Haddad. Friday, December 5. 7:30 a.m. In the sun, sitting on the step of the schoolhouse.

By the back cover this is Matías's turn. He traded it to me at dawn, under Rule Six, because he wants to write about the blackboard when the sun is on it. The price was one apricot. I would have done it for free, but my teta says never refuse a fair price, because it insults the person paying.

The sun came over the eastern hills at about seven, and the first thing it did was turn the whole camp to steam. Every wet adobe wall, every tin roof, every puddle on the terrace began to smoke in the light, thin white curls going straight up, and for a few minutes Campamento Lucía looked like El Tatio, and Hana said so, and that was the first time this morning anybody laughed.

The second thing the sun did was make us warm. I cannot describe how good it is. I am sitting with my back against the adobe and my face up like a lizard. Callum says the sun here at this altitude is so strong you can get burned in twenty minutes even when the air is cold, so Ms. Delmas has made us all put on the one tube of sunscreen we have, which was in Hana's pack, of course.

My job this morning is breakfast. Nobody gave it to me. I took it. My teta says, "The one who divides the bread should take the last piece," and so I have.

Here is what everybody got: half of one of Doña Emilia's round breads. A handful of fava beans, counted, fourteen each. Two of my apricots. A square of Callum's chocolate, the plain one. A cup of rain water, boiled last night, cold now, and tasting a little of tin.

Twelve halves of bread is six breads. That was all of them. I thought about saving some for later and then I thought about my teta, who has lived through some hard years in her village and in Beirut and who says, "Hunger in the morning makes a bad day. Eat in the morning, worry at lunch." So we ate. Still in the bag: the rest of the beans, Thiago's crackers, Hana's two bars, Ming's mango, the nut chocolate, nine apricots, and Valentina's gum, which she is guarding like a dragon.

Don Ramiro would not take his half bread at first. He said, "The children first." I said, "Don Ramiro, you are not allowed to argue with the person who divides the bread. That is the rule in my house." He looked at me and then he took it and said, "Your grandmother must be a general."

She is a retired schoolteacher, which is the same thing.

---

Nour. Friday. 8:10 a.m. Same step.

The radio team came back down at eight. They went up the hill behind the camp at first light, Don Ramiro first, then Callum carrying the battery from the van in his backpack, then Mr. Pizarro, slowly, on the path the old miners used, which Don Ramiro says is still good. We watched them from the terrace. It took them half an hour up and twenty minutes down.

Here is what Mr. Pizarro told us, all twelve of us, standing in a circle in front of the schoolhouse.

At the top there is a flat place with a broken wooden post, which might once have held a telephone wire. From there you can see over the next ridge to the south, all the way to the edge of the salt flat, very far away, white. Don Ramiro connected the radio to the battery and called. Nothing. He called again. Nothing. On the fourth call there were voices. Not answering them. Two men talking, other drivers or road workers, somewhere far away, broken up and crackling. Don Ramiro heard them say "the road" and "both sides" and "machines," and then one of them said "the van from San Pedro," and then something they could not hear.

Don Ramiro called back, slowly, clearly, three times. Twelve people, all well, Campamento Lucía, the old sulfur camp, on the terrace, above the road.

There was a crackle. A voice said one word. It might have been "Lucía." It might have been "copy." It might have been nothing. Then there was only noise.

"So they know?" said Thiago.

"They might know," said Mr. Pizarro. "They know there is a van. They know where the road is cut. They may have heard us. We can't be sure. So we keep doing everything as if they didn't, and we make it easy to find us."

My teta says, "Hope is a good breakfast and a bad dinner." I did not say it out loud. But I thought it, and then I thought that it was breakfast, so it was fine.

---

Nour. Friday. 8:40 a.m.

There was almost an argument.

After the circle broke up, Thiago and Matías wanted to walk down the track to the Old Lady, and then a bit further, to the corner above the road, to see the river close up. Thiago said he wanted to film it for his family. Matías said he wanted to see if the water had gone down.

Hana stood in front of them on the track. She is not tall. She stood with her feet apart like a gatekeeper.

"No," she said.

"Hana, it's just to look."

"My grandmother's neighbor went back to look," Hana said. "After the shaking stopped, before the sea came. He went down to the harbor to look at the water, because it had gone out very far, and he wanted to see. He was a nice man. He gave my grandmother vegetables from his garden every summer." She stopped. She did not finish it. She did not need to.

Then she said, more quietly, "The water does not care that we only want to look."

Matías said, "Okay." He said it right away, and I respected him for that. Thiago took longer. Then he said, "Okay. Okay. Sorry, Hana." And then, because he is Thiago, "Can I at least film it from the top?"

Mr. Pizarro, who had been standing behind us the whole time without anybody noticing, said, "From the top, yes. From the edge of the terrace, with someone holding your jacket."

So Daphné held Thiago's jacket by the hood while he filmed the river for thirty seconds on his phone, and then he turned it off again to save battery, and that was that.

Afterwards Hana sat down next to me on the step. Her hands were shaking a little. I gave her one of my last apricots, which I was saving for myself. My teta says, "Give the sweet thing to the one who did the hard thing." I did not say that one out loud either. I just gave her the apricot.

She ate it in very small bites. Then she said, "Your grandmother has too many sayings."

"I know," I said. "Do you want another one?"

"Yes," she said.

So I gave her the one about the neighbor. "A neighbor who is near is better than a brother who is far." Hana thought about it for a long time and then she said, "That's true here," and I looked around at the eleven other people on that terrace, who were mostly not my family and were all, this morning, my neighbors, and I said yes, it was.

Sky: Blue. Completely blue, from one side to the other, the way it was yesterday morning, as if nothing had happened. A few white clouds sitting on the tops of the volcanoes in the east. Don Ramiro looked at them and said, "Not yet. Maybe this afternoon. Maybe not." Next is Matías. He has been waiting all night to write about the blackboard.

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Matías: The Company Store

Matías Soto. Friday, December 5. 10:15 a.m. Campamento Lucía, on the terrace, sitting on a stone in the shade of the schoolhouse wall.

Daphné was right that I have been waiting to write about the blackboard. But first, the camp, because if anybody reads this later they should know where we were.

Don Ramiro told us what he knows, and I am adding what my grandfather told me about his father's camp, which was not this one but was like it, further north and higher, and I will say which is which.

Lucía was a sulfur camp. Up the valley, on the side of one of the volcanoes, there is yellow rock, sulfur, which the volcano made, and from the twenties to the sixties a company dug it and brought it down here on mules, and later in trucks, to be melted and purified in big iron pots and sent on to the coast. The ruins of the furnace are at the north end of the terrace, a black chimney of brick still standing, and the ground around it is yellow-gray and smells, very faintly, after the rain, of matches. Don Ramiro says at its biggest maybe two hundred people lived here, workers and their wives and children. Nobody knows anymore why it was called Lucía. Don Ramiro says it was the owner's daughter. Rocío says her grandmother says it was a cook. Mr. Pizarro says both stories are better than knowing.

My great-grandfather Ernesto went to a camp like this in 1938, when he was seventeen. My grandfather told me his father said three things about it. That it was so cold at night the water in the washbasin froze, even in summer. That the company paid the men not in money but in tokens, little metal coins, which you could only spend at the company store. And that the best day of every month was the day the truck came up with oranges.

The company store at Lucía is the long roofless building where our fire is. You can still see the counter, which was made of adobe and plastered smooth, and the shelves cut into the back wall, empty. On the floor, when Thiago and I were collecting wood with Don Ramiro this morning, I found a little round piece of metal, green with age, with a hole in the middle. I do not know if it was a token. It might have been a washer. I held it for a long time. Then I put it back exactly where it was, because Mr. Pizarro said on the first day of the elective that you take pictures and leave things, and because it is not mine. It belongs to whoever left it.

---

Matías. Friday. 10:40 a.m. Same.

The blackboard.

The schoolhouse was the camp school. You can tell because the end wall was painted black for writing, and there are holes in the floor in rows where the desks were bolted down, eighteen holes in three rows, which Ming counted. Maybe twenty children.

In the bottom right corner of the blackboard, very faint, almost gone, somebody wrote the alphabet in chalk. It must have been a child. The letters are big and round and uneven, and they go uphill at the end, the way your writing does when you are small and the line runs out of room. The writer got all the way to the end, every letter.

Underneath the alphabet, even fainter, one word. It took four of us with headlamps at different angles last night to be sure. Rosa.

I do not know who Rosa was. A child of the camp. Maybe she was six. Maybe she wrote the alphabet on the last day of school before the camp closed and nobody ever wiped it off. Chalk should not last sixty years. But it has not rained here, really rained, very many times in sixty years, and the room is dark, and nobody came.

I stood in front of it again this morning when the sun came in through the shutters. And I thought, she learned to write here. Right where Ming slept. Rosa learned her letters on this wall, and maybe her father dug sulfur on the volcano, like my great-grandfather, and maybe she ate oranges once a month when the truck came.

I am not a person who cries. I want that in the log. But I had to go outside for a minute.

When I came back in, Rocío was standing in front of the blackboard. She did not say anything about me going out. She said, "We should write her name in the log." So I am.

Rosa. She learned the whole alphabet. Every letter.

---

Matías. Friday. 11:30 a.m. The flat open part of the terrace, between the schoolhouse and the furnace.

Mr. Pizarro said that if anyone comes looking, from the road or from the air, they need to be able to see us and know what we need. So we made a sign.

Valentina designed it. Callum and Don Ramiro moved the big stones. All of us carried the small ones, in pairs, from the fallen walls of the houses, which Mr. Pizarro checked first and said were safe to take from at the bottom because they had already fallen as far as they were going to.

The ground of the terrace is dark red-brown, wet. The stones from the walls are pale, almost white, the same stone as Toconao. White on brown shows up.

The letters are each about four meters tall. That was Valentina's arithmetic, from how high a helicopter might fly. We made:

S O S

and under that, smaller:

12 OK

Valentina wanted "12 ALL WELL" but there were not enough stones. Hana said "OK" was the international one. Thiago said it was the most beautiful word he had ever built.

Then Ms. Delmas had an idea and we laid out the red seat covers from the van next to the S, and the blue tarp next to the other S, because colors that do not belong in a desert are easy to see in a desert. Callum said the same thing his grandfather said: bright jacket on top.

Nour has a little round mirror in a case, a compact, which was her mother's. Mr. Pizarro showed us how to aim it, by holding up two fingers in a V and catching the sun on them and then moving the spot of light onto the place you want to signal. Every fifteen minutes one pair goes to the edge of the terrace, with someone holding the back of the other one's jacket, and flashes the mirror toward the road below the lower crossing, and toward the ridge across the valley, and toward the south, where the salt flat is. Thiago and Ming had the first turn. Ming was very serious about it. He counted the flashes. Ten each direction.

Then we sat in the shade and looked at our sign. From the ground it does not look like anything. It looks like a lot of stones in rows. Rocío said that is how it is with most signs. You have to be above them.

Sky: Blue. Two clouds on the volcanoes, small. A hawk circling over the valley, very high, the only thing up there that can read our sign so far. Next is Hana, again. Then Thiago. We are on the second time around the back cover. I did not think we would be.

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Hana: Stop

Hana Morita. Friday, December 5. 2:30 p.m. Inside the schoolhouse, out of the sun.

Status.

People: 12. Daphné counted at 2:00.

Water: about 7 liters, boiled. Rain has stopped, so no more is coming in. Mr. Pizarro says this is enough until tomorrow morning if necessary.

Food: Thiago's crackers, eaten at lunch, one and a half each. Ming's mango, eaten at lunch. Remaining: my two bars, the nut chocolate, about two handfuls of beans each, five apricots, Valentina's gum.

Ming's counter: 36. No use since 4:40 a.m. He has been doing mirror duty. He says the mirror is good for his breathing because it is boring.

River: lower. Rocío and Don Ramiro both say so. Rocío says the knocks are fewer. Don Ramiro says the brown is lighter. From the terrace you can see a line of wet stones along the sides that were underwater this morning.

Clouds: building on the volcanoes in the east again, like yesterday. Not as tall. Don Ramiro checks them every half hour.

Mood: bad, from about 1:00 to 2:00. I am including this because of Rule Two. After lunch people were hungry and hot and nothing was happening. Valentina and Callum argued about whether the sign should have said HELP instead of SOS. It was not a real argument. It was a hungry argument. Ms. Delmas made everyone go inside to the shade and lie down for half an hour, and nobody did, and then Thiago said, "Okay. Stop."

---

Hana. Friday. 3:05 p.m. Same.

Stop is a game from Brazil. Thiago said in Recife it has another name but everybody in Chile knows it as Stop, so that is what we called it.

Rules. Each person has a page. At the top, across, you write categories. We used: Country. Food. Animal. Name. Something in the Sky. Somebody says the alphabet silently in their head and somebody else says "Stop" and the first person says what letter they were on. Then everybody writes a word for each category starting with that letter. The first person to finish all five shouts STOP and everybody else must put down their pen. You get ten points for a word nobody else has, five for a word somebody else also has, zero for nothing.

We did not have twelve pages to spare in the log. Mr. Pizarro donated the back pages of his own notebook. Don Ramiro played. Ms. Delmas played. Mr. Pizarro was the judge, because he is an astronomer and would have won every Sky category, which Thiago said was unfair.

Selected results.

Letter C. Valentina: Colombia, ceviche, condor, Camilo, Canopus. Daphné: Cuba, cassava, cat, Claudette, clouds. Callum objected that clouds are not in the sky properly, they are in the atmosphere. Mr. Pizarro allowed it. Callum: Chile, crumpet, crow, Callum, comet. Ming said you cannot use your own name. Mr. Pizarro allowed that too.

Letter L. Rocío: Laos, llama, llama, Lucía, Licancabur. She used llama for food and for animal. Mr. Pizarro said the food one counted because we ate one yesterday. Thiago said that was dark. Nour gave him a look.

Letter M. Ming won. Mongolia, mango, magpie, Mingyu, magpie bridge. Mr. Pizarro asked what a magpie bridge was doing in the sky. Ming explained the weaver girl and the cowherd. Mr. Pizarro gave him ten points. Thiago said that was favoritism. Mr. Pizarro said it was astronomy.

Letter S. Don Ramiro: Suiza, sopaipilla, suri, Sergio, Sol. He said the suri is the bird of the high country, like an ostrich but smaller, and the sun is the most important thing in any sky. He got ten points for suri. Nobody else had it.

Then everybody had to teach a game from home.

Daphné taught riddles. In Haiti, she said, when you want to ask one you say a word and the others say a word back, like Krik and Krak, and then you ask. Her best one: What has a mouth and never eats, a bed and never sleeps? Answer: a river. Nobody got it. Then everybody looked out the window at the river and nobody thought it was funny for one second and then everybody did.

I taught shiritori. It is a Japanese word chain game. You say a word, and the next person must say a word that starts with the last sound of your word, and if you say a word that ends with a sound nothing starts with, you lose. In Japanese it is the sound "n." In English I made the rule that you lose if you repeat a word or take longer than five seconds. We went around the room eleven times. Matías lost on "salt." He could not think of anything starting with "t." Callum said "tea" afterwards and Matías said, "Where were you."

Callum taught a game called Twenty Questions. Nour taught a clapping game her teta taught her with a rhyme that she put into English, about a cat on a roof, faster and faster, until Thiago and Valentina knocked heads and both said it was the other one's fault.

Then Thiago played the drum.

There is an old oil drum, rusty, empty, lying on its side by the furnace. Don Ramiro checked inside it first. Thiago rolled it to the shade of the schoolhouse and sat on a stone and played it with his hands and two sticks of the gray roof wood. He said his grandfather in Recife played a big drum at parties for a kind of music called forró, and that the drum was the heart and the accordion was the voice and the triangle was the person who would not stop talking. He played the heart part. Then Daphné tapped a stone on a tin can for the triangle. Then Nour sang, not words, just a melody, and Rocío clapped. It sounded like something. It sounded like a party a long way off.

I did not play. I wrote it down. That is my instrument.

---

Hana. Friday. 3:42 p.m. The edge of the terrace. URGENT.

At 3:38 Ming was on mirror duty with Valentina holding his jacket. He was flashing toward the ridge across the valley, to the west.

At 3:39 Ming shouted, "Somebody's there."

On the ridge across the valley, high, there was a man. Small, dark, with a hat. Next to him, animals, maybe eight or ten, light brown and white. Llamas. And a dog.

Ming flashed the mirror at him. Ten times. The man stopped walking.

Then he took off his hat and waved it over his head. Big circles. All of us were at the edge by then, with Mr. Pizarro and Don Ramiro holding the back of whoever was in front, and we all waved our arms and Thiago waved his jacket and Callum waved the red seat cover from the sign, and Don Ramiro put his fingers in his mouth and whistled so loudly that the dog on the far ridge barked.

The man pointed down the valley, to the south, toward San Pedro. Then he pointed at us. Then he held both arms out and brought them together, like closing a book, or like a bridge. Then he put his hat back on and turned and went fast along the ridge, south, with the llamas behind him and the dog running in front.

At 3:44 he was gone over the ridge.

Don Ramiro said, "That is Celestino. Celestino Tito. He has animals up there in summer. His house has a radio."

Mr. Pizarro said, "Are you sure it's him?"

Don Ramiro said, "Nobody else whistles back at me like that dog."

Ming is sitting down now with Ms. Delmas, very excited, breathing fine, holding the mirror in both hands. He says he wants it in the log that he saw him first. He saw him first.

Sky: Blue overhead. The clouds on the volcanoes stood up a little at 3:00, and then they sat back down. Next is Thiago.

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Thiago: Lights on the Road

Thiago Barbosa. Friday, December 5. 10:20 p.m. The hostel in San Pedro. Room 6. On the bed. With a pillow. And a dog.

I am going to write this one without jokes. I want that on the record first, because nobody will believe it later. I will put the jokes in brackets at the end, separately, so they do not get in the way.

---

5:05 p.m. Matías heard it first. A sound from down the valley, to the south, under the noise of the river, which was much quieter by then. An engine. A big one. Grinding.

5:12 p.m. Around the bend below the lower crossing came a yellow machine, a loader, with a big bucket on the front, from the roads office. It came very slowly to the edge of where the road had been and stopped. Behind it, a white pickup with a blue light on the roof. Behind that, a dusty red pickup. Behind that, Doña Marta's truck from the observatory, which I knew because it has a sticker of Saturn on the back window.

Daphné counted the vehicles, out loud, and then counted us again, out loud, as if she needed to check we were still twelve now that there were other people.

We all shouted. You could not have stopped us. Ms. Delmas did not try.

5:20 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. The loader worked on the crossing. The river by then was not a river. It was a wide brown stream, fast, maybe knee deep, running over a new bed of stones and mud where the road used to be. The loader pushed stones and gravel into it from the near side, back and forth, back and forth, making a hump, a sort of ford, so that the water ran over the top in a thin sheet and around the ends. A man in an orange vest walked in front of it with a long pole, checking the depth, with a rope tied around his waist that another man held. They were very careful. Nobody hurried. I watched them the whole time. Hana stood next to me. She did not say anything about it but she nodded every time the man with the pole tested the water before he took a step.

6:20 p.m. The white pickup crossed first, slowly, on the hump. Then the red one. They came up the road below us and stopped at the bottom of our track and two police officers and a man in a hat got out and walked up. The man in the hat had a dog.

Celestino Tito. With his dog. He had come down off the ridge, gone to his house, called on his radio, and then, when the machine came, ridden in the back of the red pickup to show them which track. He is about seventy. He has very few teeth. When he got to the top and saw the sign, the SOS and the 12 OK made of white stones, he laughed so hard he had to sit on the edge of it.

"I saw the mirror," he said to Ming, in Spanish, and Rocío translated, though Ming understood. "From so far away. I thought it was a piece of tin. Then I thought, tin does not count to ten."

The officer in charge was a woman, Sergeant Tapia, short gray hair, a voice like a coach. She did her own count. Twelve. Then she shook hands with Don Ramiro, and with Mr. Pizarro, and then she shook hands with every one of us, the same way Don Ramiro did on the first day, and when she got to Ming she asked, "Are you the one with the lungs?" and he said yes, and she said, "Then you come with me first."

So Ming went first, down the track in the last light, with Ms. Delmas holding one hand and Sergeant Tapia walking just ahead. They went across the ford in the white pickup straight to the health center in San Pedro, where a nurse checked him and listened to his chest and said he was fine, tired, and should go to bed, which he says was the most boring sentence he has ever been happy to hear.

The rest of us went in three groups, in the red pickup and Doña Marta's truck, which crossed the ford to get us, slowly, one at a time, with the man with the pole watching. I was in the second group, in the back of Doña Marta's truck, with Rocío and Callum and Nour, sitting on blankets. When we went over the ford the water hissed under the wheels and Nour held my arm so hard it hurt, and I did not say anything about it, and neither did she.

The Old Lady stayed behind at the corner of the track, leaning. Don Ramiro patted her on the hood before he left. He said a tow truck will come for her tomorrow. He said, "She brought us to the right place," and nobody laughed.

We left the sign. Rocío said to leave it. She said someone else might need it.

---

8:40 p.m. San Pedro.

When we drove into the hostel courtyard, the whole courtyard was full of people. The hostel owner. Her husband. Two neighbors. Doña Marta's husband. Javiera from the flamingo lagoon, who had heard. And at the front, in her straw hat with the black band, Doña Flora. A neighbor had driven her over from Toconao that afternoon when the news came. She had been sitting in the courtyard under the pepper tree since four o'clock and the hostel owner said she had refused to move even to the kitchen.

She held Rocío's face in her hands again, like on Tuesday, for a long time. Then she let go and looked at the rest of us and said, "You waited to see." And Mr. Pizarro said, "No, Señora. We went when the clouds stood up." And she looked at Don Ramiro, and Don Ramiro nodded, and she said, "Then it was the desert's business, not yours," and that was the end of it.

Then the phones.

We had signal. All of us at the same time. Twelve phones buzzing like bees. My mother was crying before I said a word. Then my father. Then my vovó on a video call from Recife, in her kitchen, holding up to the camera the picture of me in a sweater, the one from the fridge, and saying, "I knew you had a sweater." I am not putting that in the brackets. It is not a joke. It is the best thing that happened all day.

Nour's teta was on speaker in the corner and I heard her say something in Arabic and Nour laughed and cried at the same time. Hana talked to her father in Japanese very fast and then said, in English, so we could all hear, "Yes. We went high." Ming talked to his mother for a long time with his back to everyone.

The hostel owner had made food. Soup with quinoa and potato and a big pot of chicken, and sopaipillas, the round fried bread with pumpkin in it, a whole mountain of them on a tray. Celestino ate four. His dog ate one that fell off his plate, by accident, on purpose.

Ms. Delmas came back from the health center with Ming at 9:30. Ming went straight to Room 6 and pulled his suitcase out from under the bed, opened the side pocket, and took out the new blue inhaler, and showed it to Ms. Delmas. She read the counter out loud. Two hundred. She wrote it in her notebook. Then she sat down on my bed, the one I am on now, and put her face in her hands for a minute, and then she said, "Well. That was the least boring trip of my career," and Ming said, "Was it the worst?" and she said, "Ask me in a week."

---

Jokes, separately, as promised:

The llama stew was still the best thing I ate this week.

Pituco the hostel dog and Celestino's dog met in the courtyard and are now married.

Callum should never be allowed to say "almost" again.

Sky: From the courtyard, at 10:00, the moon came up over the volcanoes, one night past full, enormous and orange and then white. It was the clearest sky I have ever seen. I could not look at it for very long. Mr. Pizarro did not ask us to turn off the lights. Next is everybody.

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Everybody: The Log Goes Home

Matías Soto. Saturday, December 6. 11:40 a.m. Calama airport, gate 3.

The Old Lady was towed down to San Pedro this morning, on the back of a flat truck, and Don Ramiro rode in the cab with the driver so she would not be lonely. He came to the bus to say goodbye. He shook every one of our hands again. When he got to Hana he said, "You told us to go high," and she said, "My grandmother told us," and he said, "Then tell your grandmother that Ramiro Cruz says thank you," and Hana said she would, and wrote it on her hand, the way Callum did on Tuesday.

On the plane I am going to look out of the window at the brown country for as long as it lasts.

---

Nour Haddad. Wednesday, December 10. 8:00 p.m. My bedroom, Las Condes.

Mr. Pizarro photocopied the whole log on Monday, every page, the crossed-out words and the margins and the coffee ring on the page Hana wrote at the geysers, and gave each of us a copy in a gray folder. He said the original stays in the school library, in the glass case by the door, where the first-graders can see it.

Then he gave each of us one blank page and said, "This is for your family. Whatever they want to put. Thursday night we put them all together."

My teta filled hers in one evening. Eleven sayings, in Arabic, with English under each one in my handwriting, because she made me. Number one is about bread and kindness. Number eleven is, "When the children come home, the house remembers how big it is." I did not know that one. I think she made it up on Saturday night.

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Hana Morita. Thursday, December 11. 7:15 p.m. The school courtyard, Lomas Azules.

Facts. Families present: all nine. Total people: sixty-three, Daphné says, not counting the security guard.

Each family brought one dish. Long tables in the courtyard under the jacaranda, which is shedding purple flowers on everything, including the rice.

My grandmother's page came by email from Iwate and my father printed it. It is a drawing of her hill, with her new house on top, and an arrow going up, and four words in Japanese, which my father translated underneath: Go high. Count everyone. She sent Daphné's mother a separate message, which I am not allowed to read, but Daphné's mother cried when she read it.

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Daphné Louis. Thursday. 7:50 p.m. Same courtyard.

My mother wrote her page about the step of my aunt's house. Then she stood up in front of everybody, which she never does, and read it out, and when she got to the counting part, every single one of the nine of us, without anybody planning it, started counting under our breath, one through twelve. She stopped reading and looked at us. Then she laughed. I have not heard my mother laugh like that since I was small.

Then I said, "Krik?" and sixty-three people said, "Krak!"

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Callum Pryce. Thursday. 8:10 p.m.

My grandad's page came from Cumbria. Three lines. Be warm. Be dry. Be found. And under it, in his handwriting, which is worse than mine: "And sit still, which you did, and I am prouder of that than of anything you will ever win."

I will never say "almost" about the weather again. I have been asked to put that in writing. It is in writing.

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Valentina Restrepo. Thursday. 8:25 p.m.

My father drew the crossing. Not the one we saw, the one he would build. A bridge, high, with the road going over the old water road instead of down into it, and a note in the corner with the arithmetic. My mother says he worked on it until two in the morning on Sunday. He gave a copy to Mr. Pizarro to send to the roads office in San Pedro. "They will not build it," he said. "But they will know somebody thought about it."

Also: I gave everybody a piece of the gum. I still had it. I had been guarding it for exactly this.

---

Chen Mingyu. Thursday. 8:40 p.m. At the telescope.

My nainai wrote the story of the weaver girl and the cowherd on her page, in Chinese, and my father wrote it underneath in English.

Mr. Pizarro set up the school telescope in the courtyard. Vega had already set by the time it was dark enough. But he found Altair, just over the trees to the west, for about ten minutes before it went behind them. The cowherd. I showed it to my mother and my sister and to Rocío's mother and to Thiago's father, who said it looked like a small light, which is what it is.

Counter: 198. I used it once, on Tuesday, after running for the bus. Ms. Delmas still asks. I still tell her.

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Thiago Barbosa. Thursday. 8:55 p.m.

My vovó's page is the photo of me in the sweater, with "Recife Winter Champion" written underneath. My father played the triangle with a spoon on a pot lid at the food table and Nour's father sang with him. It sounded like a party a long way off, and then it sounded like a party right here.

Our parents made the families' pages into one book. They glued them in at the back of every copy of the log. Nine families, eleven sayings, one bridge, two stars, a hill with an arrow, a step in Port-au-Prince, a sweater.

[No joke here. I checked.]

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Matías Soto. Thursday. 9:10 p.m.

There was nobody left in my family who knew my great-grandfather Ernesto. So my page is not from a grandparent. My page is for Rosa. I wrote her alphabet on it, every letter, big and round, going uphill at the end, the way she did. Underneath I wrote: She learned it here. My great-grandfather was in a place like hers. They might have eaten the same oranges.

Mr. Pizarro is sending copies of the whole log to Don Ramiro, to Celestino Tito, to Sergeant Tapia, to Doña Marta, to Doña Emilia in Coyo Alto, and to Doña Flora in Toconao.

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Rocío Anza. Thursday. 9:25 p.m. Last.

My grandmother does not travel. She sent a bag of red quinoa from Don Aurelio's terraces in Coyo Alto, and her page. She dictated it to my mother on the telephone on Tuesday, and my mother wrote it, because my grandmother says her own handwriting is for the people who already know her.

It is one line. I read it out at the end, in Spanish and then in English, because Mr. Pizarro asked me to.

"The desert is not empty. It is waiting, and so are your families, and both of them are full of water you cannot see."

Then I said the thing Mr. Pizarro told me to say in the night at Lucía, which I did not say then, because I was not ready. I said that everybody had looked at me like I was the one who would know what to do, and that I mostly did not, and that it turned out nobody had to know everything, because everybody knew one thing. Daphné knew how to count. Hana knew to go high. Valentina knew how water moves. Callum knew to sit still. Nour knew how to divide the bread. Ming knew how to keep his feet warm and what a mirror could do. Thiago knew how to make it a party. Matías knew whose school it was. And I knew to look at the roof.

Then we turned off the courtyard lights, all of them, for one minute.

Sky, written by everybody, Thursday, December 11, 9:30 p.m., Santiago, under city light: Not as many stars as the desert. Saturn, high in the northwest, with its needle. Orion coming up over the mountains in the east, on his side. The Southern Cross so low in the south it is hidden behind the gym roof. It is still there. It climbs later. The llama will come up before dawn, over the hills, the way it always does, whether anybody is awake to see it or not. This year, somebody will be.

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