— Hey, what’s got into you? Del Solar finally asked him. Have you gone crazy?
The pipsqueak mumbled a few choice words in the night and concluded:
— That’s my business. Just thinking.
— Thinking, were you? said Franky. Assuming such a phenomenon is possible, what were you thinking?
— I won’t talk! growled Bernini resentfully. A while ago I wasn’t allowed to; I had to shut up, just when everybody else was running off at the mouth.
— None of that, Pereda joined in. Let him speak. Here everybody has a voice and a vote.
Franky’s laughter rattled in the darkness.
— That’s just what he wants! he exclaimed. I know that sly pipsqueak as if he were my own child.
— Fine, then, said Bernini, giving in to his buddies’ concern. I was thinking about how we’re walking across an ancient seabed.
— Hey, hey! shouted Franky. Watch out for the pipsqueak!
— The ground of the pampa, Bernini insisted, is a marine formation. The entire pampa is the vast floor of an ocean that at one time lapped up against the Andes, until it withdrew.18
Two or three indignant voices exploded in the blackness:
— Have an eye for the pipsqueak!
— That hasn’t been proven!
— The pipsqueak’s spouting nonsense!
— And it’s not merely the scientific aspect of the theory that interests me, Bernini concluded. It’s something else.
— What else? Schultz wanted to know.
— The voice of the sea will be present when the Spirit of the Earth makes itself heard.
Hostile shouts and Homeric laughter greeted Bernini’s latest sally.
— He’s coughed it up! Franky exclaimed in astonishment.
— What has our famous pipsqueak coughed up? Del Solar inquired.
— The Spirit of the Earth. He had it in his craw!
Whatever their purpose when they set out on their journey, the explorers should never have uttered, in that dark place and at such an hour, words with the magical power to spring open the invisible portals of mystery. Until that moment, despite numerous irreverent slips of the tongue, the expeditionaries had faced nothing out of the ordinary. But the extraordinary figure that suddenly appeared before them now was not of this world. Monstrous offspring of the night, it looked like the ghost of a giant peludo, an enormous armadillo radiating a vivid phosphorescent light. The excursionists might well have succumbed to incurable awe, if not for the pipsqueak Bernini who, thanks to his Anglo-Saxon side, identified the beast as the famous Glyptodon, a dinosaur indigenous to our prehistoric pampas.
The creature was paleontologically old. Its cracked carapace was encrusted with the salt of a thousand centuries that formed a second shell as tough as the original. Protruding from the carapace, four gigantic legs ended in dirty, bitten toenails. The Glyptodon’s ridiculously small head was held aloft with much dignity. But what most amazed the aventurers was the monster’s scar-filled face: a toothless mouth, nostrils scabby with antediluvian snot, and two little eyes peering out through fossilized rheum with a faraway look, as though adrift in memories of barbarous geological sorrows.
Asked by the astrologer Schultz whether it was mortal, immortal, or an intermediary being, the Glyptodon promptly self-identified as the selfsame Spirit of the Earth just summoned by the High Priest Bernini. Schultz inquired after the purpose of its advent. The Glyptodon replied that his sole object was to correct the error committed just now by the High Priest, whose theories about the pampa’s loess betrayed a macaronic erudition picked up from dime-store manuals. Vacillating between indignation and respect, the High Priest Bernini asked how he had erred. By inventing a marine origin for the pampa’s topsoil deposits, came the Glyptodon’s response.
— And what proof is there to the contrary? challenged Bernini.
— The absence of horizontal strata left by any transgression or regression of the sea.
— What about the fossil remains? insisted a stung Bernini.
— And the schistic-crystalline sediment? shot back the Glyptodon, unyielding.
Defeated and humiliated, the High Priest Bernini withdrew from the fray. Then Schultz beseeched the monster, by the god Erebos and the night, by the soul of Darwin and the shade of Ameghino,19 to reveal to us sad wanderers the authentic origin of the pampa’s loess. The Glypdoton muttered he’d have been spared the bother if his High Priest Bernini had read the work of Roveretto, Bayer, Richthofen and Obermayer,20 instead of wasting his time skulking around the shabby secondhand bookstores on Corrientes.21 After a professorial pause, the Glypdoton declared the Aeolian origin of that loess:
— In principium, he solemnely intoned, the pampa was a crystalline base formed by mountainous structures. Or better put: the peripheral relief pattern left by the metamorphic and eruptive activity of rock. Or, to make it even clearer: the pampa was a great plain of destruction.
— How so? inquired Del Solar, whose patriotic ears didn’t like the sound of the word “destruction.”
— Because, anwered the Glyptodon, thanks to a relatively warm and dry climate, the vertically outstanding rock structures of metamorphic, sedimentary, and crystalline formation underwent, in situ, a process of hydrolithic alteration or partial lateralization. Gentlemen, the topographical relief got flattened!
— What about the Aeolian origin? Adam Buenosayres wanted to know. The versifier’s ears were fondly anticipating the strains of ancient harps strummed by the god of wind.
— I’m getting to that, said the ghostly beast. A great wind then blew from the West, an implacable wind that tore at the disintegrating material, blowing it down from the mountains and depositing it in the valleys and plains. That’s how the pampa’s soil was formed. And since that sedimention, as its structure demonstrates, the pampa has suffered no more disturbances, neither aquatic nor aeolic.
— That must have been some phenomenal wind! exclaimed Pereda, struggling in the arms of doubt.