Daytime in the Driest Place

Polly slept until late morning. The night-shift astronomers were still asleep.

A man in a green shirt was in the cafeteria. His name was Diego. He was the chief engineer at Paranal. He had worked here for eleven years.

"Want to see the desert?" he asked Polly. "I have to inspect a cable."

At two in the afternoon, Polly was on the dashboard of a white truck.

Diego pointed out things.

A dry riverbed. "It rains so rarely that when it does, the water has nowhere to go. There have been three big floods here in the last century."

A rock area with small dark gravel. "This is meteorite-fall debris. The dry climate keeps meteorites in good shape. Some of these have been here for over a million years."

A huge white salt flat. "Lithium," Diego said. "Most of the world's lithium is here. Your phone battery probably came from near here."

A small white ball on a distant hill. "That is a microwave telescope. The Atacama has more than fifty observatories."

The air was very dry. Diego gave Polly water from a bottle. "You don't notice you're getting dehydrated here. You just stop being able to think clearly."

On the way back, the shadows were long across the desert. The Atacama has been a desert for 150 million years. Those shadows were the same kind that moved here when dinosaurs were alive.