The horizon is still clear: has been all day. Cypress-shaped junipers stand in the rust and hazy distances, still as monuments. The first purple flowers are showing on the heather. It is not the busy peace of late summer, but the peace of a burial ground. Among the prehistoric German tribes, that’s what this country was: the territory of the dead.

A dozen nationalities, dressed as Argentine estancieros, crowd around the soup-kitchen commissary. El Ñato is standing on the saddle of his horse, Gaucho style, looking off into the German pampas. Felipe is kneeling out in the sun, making his noontime devotionals to the living presence of a certain rock back in the wasteland of La Rioja, on the eastern slopes of the Andes. According to an Argentine legend from the last century, María Antonia Correa followed her lover into that arid land, carrying their newborn child. Herders found her a week later, dead. But the infant had survived, by nursing from her corpse. Rocks near the site of the miracle have since been the objects of yearly pilgrimages. But Felipe’s particular rock embodies also an intellectual system, for he believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals, except for the time scale. Rock’s time scale is a lot more stretched out. “We’re talking frames per century,” Felipe like everybody else here lately has been using a bit of movie language, “per millennium!” Colossal. But Felipe has come to see, as those who are not Sentient Rocksters seldom do, that history as it’s been laid on the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible fraction. That we must also look to the untold, to the silence around us, to the passage of the next rock we notice—to its aeons of history under the long and female persistence of water and air (who’ll be there, once or twice per century, to trip the shutter?), down to the lowland where your paths, human and mineral, are most likely to cross… .

Graciela Imago Portales, dark hair parted in the middle and drawn back from her forehead, wearing a long black riding skirt and black boots, sits shuffling cards, stacking herself flushes, full houses, four of a kind, just for her own amusement. The supernumeraries have brought next to nothing to play with. She knew it would come to this: she’d thought once that by using it only in games, money would lose its reality. Wither away. Has it, or is she playing a game with herself? It seems Beläustegui has been watching her more closely since they got here. She doesn’t want to threaten his project. She’s been to bed with the solemn engineer a few times (though at first, back in B.A., she’d have sworn to you she couldn’t have drunk him even with a silver straw), and she knows he’s a gambler too. A good pair, wired front-to-front: she picked it up the first time he touched her. The man knows his odds, the shapes of risk are intimate to him as loved bodies. Each moment has its value, its probable success against other moments in other hands, and the shuffle for him is always moment-to-moment. He can’t afford to remember other permutations, might-have-beens—only what’s present, dealt him by something he calls Chance and Graciela calls God. He will stake everything on this anarchist experiment, and if he loses, he’ll go on to something else. But he won’t hold back. She’s glad of that. He’s a source of strength. She doesn’t know, if the moment came, how strong she’d be. Often at night she’ll break through a fine membrane of alcohol and optimism to see really how much she needs the others, how little use, unsupported, she could ever be.