Daytime in the Driest Place

Polly slept until late morning. The residencia kept windows blacked out for the night-shift astronomers, but a thin slot of brilliant white was visible at the curtain edge.

Camila was still asleep. Most of the staff would not be up until five in the afternoon.

A man in a green ESO polo shirt was reading a tablet in the cafeteria. His name was Diego Castro. He was the senior site engineer at Paranal. He had been here for eleven years.

"Want to see the desert?" he asked Polly. "I have a survey trip at two."

At two in the afternoon, Polly was on the dashboard of a white Toyota Hilux driving into the Atacama.

Diego pointed out things as they went.

A dry riverbed where, three times in the last century, there had been a flash flood. The Atacama gets rain so rarely that when it does, it has nowhere to go.

A rock outcrop the colour of milk chocolate, full of small dark gravel. The gravel was meteorite-fall debris. The Atacama is one of the best places on Earth to find meteorites. The dry climate preserves them. Some have been sitting on the desert floor for over a million years.

A salar, a salt flat, blinding white. "Lithium," Diego said. "Most of the world's lithium is here. Your phone battery probably came from within a hundred kilometres of this view."

A small white sphere on a distant hilltop. A microwave telescope. The Atacama has more than fifty separate observatories scattered across it.

The air was so dry that Polly's beak felt different after twenty minutes. Diego made her drink water carefully. "You don't notice you're dehydrating here," he said. "You just stop being able to think straight."

On the way back, the shadows of small stones were long across the desert floor. The Atacama has been a desert for one hundred and fifty million years. The shadows here were the same kind of shadows that had moved across this floor when dinosaurs were still figuring out feathers.