—DESCARTES FOUNDED IN 1544 BY GOVERNOR SANCHO DE Almeyda, the city of Nueva Córdoba stood out against the surrounding wasteland—saffron-coloured deserts, anaemic patches of grass, cactuses, thorn bushes, and sponge trees smelling of the sweat of illness—as blindingly white as a Moroccan settlement, on the banks of a river (dry ten months of the year) whose sinuous course was hollowed out between stony tracts bristling with the bones, antlers, skulls, and claws of animals dead from thirst. Under the cloudless sky, from the rapid sunrise to crimson dusk, vultures and turkey buzzards flew over the hills at the mouths of mines, which were so divided up, and cut into steps with picks, shovels, and sledgehammers, that their original rotundities had been transformed into geometric shapes by the men who had for the last two centuries been extracting the slag hidden in their entrails. Like giants’ chairs and sofas, they were sculptures created by the rough, calloused, blackened hands of the peons of the Du Pont Mining Company, who had made of these euclidean shapes resulting from their labours a formless panorama of scree, ridges, and hills of rubbish, mineral waste, gravel, and pebbles, all adding their desolation to the sterility of the desert.
