Through the door, the air ran out quickly. I stopped Juan when I started to feel suffocated. I was afraid for him, and I put my hand on his chest: his heart was beating fast and too hard, but it was regular. Laura was panting, breathless. This feels just like altitude sickness, she said. I nodded. It reminded me of La Paz. When Dad and I went there, I hadn’t been able to walk and I got scared. I’d thought: this is how Juan feels all the time, and I cried in a corner that reeked of urine while Dad yelled at me because we were late to a meeting with the ambassador.

The duct or underground passageway led to a very narrow mountain path. There was running water nearby. A river, but not rapids. It was nighttime through the door, though it wasn’t dark. We didn’t need the flashlight we’d brought with us. Laura and I were exhausted after three hundred meters, but not Juan. He approached what looked like the end of the path. We followed and saw it was not a precipice, but that the path continued down through trees. It wasn’t so steep and you could descend fairly easily. Below, we saw the silvery flashes of a river.

The silence was powerful and horrible. A place like that, a forest with a river, cannot be so still. Where were the animals, the birds, the rustling leaves? Maybe our ears were clogged by the height. Nor was it cold or hot. The place was still in every sense. Laura said it reminded her of the mountains in Wales, but it was like an imprecise copy. A sketch. It’s cold in the mountains, there’s fog, she said, and the colors here are wrong.

It’s all wrong, said Juan. It’s a stage set. He kept walking. After the curve, the path straightened out again and opened on to a footbridge flanked by trees. Laura pointed to the branches, and Juan went closer. There were bones in the trees, bones littering the ground. Eaten away, most of them, very clean and old. The ones in the branches formed strange decorations, adornments of interlaced phalanges and femurs, fastened with slender twigs into delicate shapes, carnivorous geometries. Juan touched some of them, like he was trying to memorize them. They look like writing, Laura said. On the ground, the bones were scattered with no clear goal. Would someone come, later on, and assemble them into pendants? When Juan touched another of the decorations, it came off and dropped into his open hand like a ripe fruit. We studied it. It was a sign, a seal. Juan kept his hand open and three more fell. He gave thanks and put them into his pocket.

The path was covered with bones as far as we could see. They were from all parts of the body and of all sizes. Were they the remains of centuries of banquets? Were people brought here to die? Or had the bones been carried here in order to make this mortuary path? There was no smell. They were old bones, or they’d been savored until there was nothing left on them, no trace of flesh.