And suddenly the car filled with the scent of an Alpine plant!

Aleš. We talked for a few more minutes. Outside the temperature dropped below zero. But stars could be seen behind the clouds.

Monument Valley. Harun arranged his cameras in the dark and came back to the car. We sat in the van for hours gazing into the darkness. It had grown quite cold outside, late snow must have fallen somewhere nearby. I don’t know what Harun was taking photographs of in the pitch dark. The camera lens sees more than the human eye. Sitting calmly in the driver’s seat, he fell asleep for a few hours before dawn while I stayed awake till morning. It was only after daybreak that I caught sight of the amazing stone forms in the valley in front of us. So that’s what our cameras were photographing all night? Those stone forms had been shaped by the wind. I got out of the car. I sat down on a stone and looked at the sculptures that I had until then believed existed only as “matte paintings” in Ford’s films, just a drawing in Italian cartoons, published in my childhood, and later in Harun’s by Sergio Bonelli . . . A wind had gotten up from the north. I sat on the stone, watching. After all, the wind was a greater sculptor than Ivan Meštrović.

Well done, wind!

On the plateau from which we had been photographing the sky all night, just before morning a young Asian man, a photographer, appeared. I watched him putting the lenses on his camera in his white Toyota. Then he tied a flashlight around his head. It was not yet daybreak. He got out of his car into the darkness and, with a beam of red light from his forehead, set out into the desert. A unicorn. He had not been there at dawn. As far as the eye could see: desert, and not a single human shadow.

So, it was only after dawn that I became aware of the place where we found ourselves. I had not known that the desert was so beautiful. We like to ask ourselves metaphysical questions about the world, life, and man. But we ought to ask ourselves again and constantly: Why fill our lives with such effort and torment, when we know that we will be here only once and when we have such a brief and unrepeatable time in this indescribably beautiful world?