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….