Macchu Picchu

For the poet Pablo Neruda, the Latin American continent took form from the heights of Macchu Picchu. The Incas abandoned that “high reef of the human dawn” during spanish colonization and for centuries it remained a “shovel lost in the earliest sand.” The poet recounts his ascent up the Andean ladder of the earth:

I felt infinitely small in the center of that navel of rocks, the navel of a deserted world, proud, towering high, to which I somehow belonged. I felt that my own hands had labored there at some remote point in time, digging furrows, polishing the rocks. I felt Chilean, Peruvian, American. On those difficult heights, among those glorious, scattered ruins, I had found the principles of faith I needed to continue my poetry.