Nan Province, December 14, 2019

On the road that writhes in the palmy jungle, a tiger-striped snake lies stretched out on the asphalt. I yank the scooter’s handlebars, I swerve. I narrowly avoid it, the legless one, wondering whether it’s dead – or sleeping – or moulting.

I cross backwaters that all resemble one another. Teak houses, sheet metal roofs, disorderly yards and rooster statues – symbol of the family. Beside the temple two self-service pumps stand sentry. Gasohol 91, Gasohol 95. I slip bills into the ear of the machine. From the trunk flows the strong liquid.

And it explodes in the cylinders. We lift off toward the high strata. Something pushes from below. There are combats between the plates. There are chimneys of magma. There is the crust crumpled like a paper thrown away. Old oceans are bored under the rocks.

Way up there, in these mountains on the border of Laos, a thousand leagues from the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea, a water saturated with sodium chloride springs from the ground. Wells have been dug, full buckets of dead sea are hauled up from them. On hearths of baked earth, the brine is set to boil, then with a bamboo skimmer the salt that has settled is scraped off. It will be dried in the sun on big canvases.

Salt, friable diamond, cheap rubble, crunchy snow. It is age, sea and stratum. It is time crystallized.

The machines drink the petroleum. The living drink the salt. The snake skins dry in the sun.