I took this photograph in January. I’m amazed because I have seen the ship and the port in the same condition since I’ve memory, and now I’m 31… It’s in the harbor of Puno bay at lake Titicaca. From Juliaca, my city, it’s thirty minutes by bus and since kid I always loved to go to the old remains of a sea long ago disappeared.
I always have thought that every being, animated as a human or unanimated as a tool, has to fulfill its reason to be. A human has to love, to walk, to built, the mind has to think and be free; in this case I always felt since kid that the ship in the port (at the right) should be travelling across the waters and not just awaiting… I guess it’s due to reading when kid with a certain apprehension the punishment to Prometheus, lying chained for all the eternity being himself a creature capable to travel to the Sun (although in a funnier side perhaps he was punished for go to the sun instead to the innards of the Earth :D) The ship was built by Englishmen by nineteenth century, taken in parts with mules to the altitude of the lake at 3812 metres (12,507 ft) and today if it’s a museum in the next time I’m going to research it.
Time goes but the ship is still there, I guess someday I’d be happy to don’t see it in that place but unchained.
Post-Data: The title is based in a quote from an English phrase or a poet’s line. Mentioned in a conversation between Borges and Bioy, but I can’t remember the ownership of the original expression.
Qhapaq 