![a tale in the desert 2017 a tale in the desert 2017](https://media.resources.festicket.com/www/admin/uploads/images/MonegrosPoster.jpg)
The Atacama Desert is a conflicted prospect-unflinchingly flat in parts, yet fringed by the last, westernmost outriders of the Andes a 49,000-square-mile (78,850 square kilometer) pocket that sits at an elevation of 7,900 feet (2,408 meters) yet manages to be one of the most persistently dry corners of the planet (receiving only 15 millimeters of rainfall a year), an inhospitable context for human life that’s sustained busy settlements for millennia-barren and yet beautiful. This is a realm of sand and rock, baked by the arrogant forcefulness of an unfettered sun. And yet, all around me, orange dust is swirling, cloaking my boots, sticking to my face-the first reminder that this is not a place of shirt-soaking humidity or deep jungle foliage. But for a vague rumor of snow around the volcano’s pursed summit mouth, I would swear my position was somewhere stormily tropical-some verdant mid-Pacific island or other such enclave where magma-born krakens typically rise from the ground.
![a tale in the desert 2017 a tale in the desert 2017](https://www.clare.fm/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/31421595683a3b20ec.jpg)
I’m so entranced by its majesty that, for two minutes, that crucial word "desert" loses its meaning. It rears to an astonishing 19,420 feet (5,919 meters), a geographical god among mortals, the rest of the Atacama Desert praying at its broad feet. Licancabur returns my stare, a peak of such conical perfection that it might almost be the model volcano-an idealized poster image to which less symmetrical fire mountains can aspire. It’s there as soon as I emerge from El Loa Airport-a vision so colossal that I find myself taking an unconscious step backwards, as if this will somehow help me to fit the entire thing into my field of vision.