There are passages and roads and realms unknown, unseen
there are roads sometimes dark and narrow, and many voyages between.
Looking through the windows of stories going by, of places with nothing to hide..
yet when the passage is complete, something stays within us
And, if not, it will come to be..

(inspired by ‘The Door Within’)

These dilapidated remnants of an old Inca railway on the Argentine side were so whimsical. The segmented scraps looked like large-scale collectibles lying at a garage sale or a decaying antiquarian yard.

The corroded tunnels and rusty tracks followed the freeway all the way up to the Chilean border, where they abruptly stopped. And gave way to trailblazing serpentines sneaking down and across vineyards, towards Santiago.

“Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal

I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle

That was the real world; I have touched it once,
Roads that run and run and never reach an end,
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.

Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on.”

(E. Muir)

A frontier truly crossed: all orderly and ‘sterile’ after the Chilean border.

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