My Invented Country Read Free Page A

and milky fogs, a labyrinth of fjords, islets, canals, and water on all sides. The last city on the continent is Punta Arenas, wind-bitten, harsh, and proud; a high, barren land of blizzards.
    Chile owns a section of the little-explored Antarctic continent, a world of ice and solitude, of infinite white, where fables are born and men die: Chile ends at the South Pole. For a long time, no one assigned any value to Antarctica, but now we know how many mineral riches it shelters, in addition to being a paradise of marine life, so there is no country that doesn’t have an eye on it. In the summertime, a cruise ship can visit there with relative ease, but the price of such a cruise is as the price of rubies, and for the present, only rich tourists and poor but determined ecologists can make the trip.
    In 1888 Chile annexed the Isla de Pascua, mysterious Easter Island, the navel of the world, or Rapanui, as it is called in the natives’ language. The island is lost in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, 2,500 miles from continental Chile, more or less six hours by jet from Valparaíso or Tahiti. I am not sure why it belongs to us. In olden times, a ship captain planted a flag, and a slice of the planet became legally yours, regardless of whether that pleased itsinhabitants, in this case peaceful Polynesians. This was the practice of European nations, and Chile could not lag behind. For the islanders, contact with South America was fatal. In the mid-nineteenth century, most of the male population was taken off to Peru to work as slaves in the guano deposits, while Chile shrugged its shoulders at the fate of its forgotten citizens. The treatment those poor men received was so bad that it caused an international protest in Europe, and, after a long diplomatic struggle, the last fifteen survivors were returned to their families. Those few went back infected with small pox, and within a brief time the illness exterminated eighty percent of the natives on the island. The fate of the remainder was not much better. Imported sheep ate the vegetation, turning the landscape into a barren husk of lava, and the negligence of the authorities—in this case the Chilean navy—drove the inhabitants into poverty. Only in the last two decades, tourism and the interest of the world scientific community have rescued Rapanui.
    Scattered across the Easter Island are monumental statues of volcanic stone, some weighing more than twenty tons. These moais have intrigued experts for centuries. To sculpt them on the slopes of the volcanoes and then drag them across rough ground, to erect them on often-inaccessible bases and place hats of red stone atop them, was the task of titans. How was it done? There are no traces of an advanced civilization that can explain such prowess. Two different groups populated the island. According to legend, one of those groups, the Arikis, had supernatural mental powers, which they used to levitate the moais and transport them,floating effortlessly, to their altars on the steep slopes. What a tragedy that this technique has been lost to the world! In 1940, the Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl built a balsa raft, which he christened Kon Tiki, and sailed from South America to Easter Island to prove that there had been contact between the Incas and the Easter Islanders.
    I traveled to Easter Island in the summer of 1974, when there was only one flight a week and tourism was nearly nonexistent. Enchanted, I stayed three weeks longer than I had planned, and thus happened to be on the spot when the first television broadcast was celebrated with a visit by General Pinochet, who had led the military junta that had replaced Chile’s democracy some months earlier. The television was received with more enthusiasm than the brand-new dictator. The general’s stay was extremely colorful, but this isn’t the time to go into those details. It’s enough to say that a mischievous little cloud strategically