Mexican Spanish Stories
Mar de arena
Sea of Sand
Her drone filmed the wrong plane.
Geologist Inés Robles comes to the Pinacate desert to study craters that look like Mars. Instead, her drone films a smuggling plane unloading totoaba buche, a fish bladder that sells for more than cocaine, and the man in charge shoots it down. Locked up at an abandoned ranch with a former O'odham ranger, she escapes into the lava fields and the sea of sand with seven liters of water, a memory card hidden in her boot and seventy kilometers between her and the sea.
- Languages
- Spanish & English
- Reading level
- B1-B2
- Length
- 12 chapters
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A short sample from the opening
Capítulo 1: El ojo de la Tierra
Chapter 1: The Eye of the Earth
A las cinco y media de la mañana, el cráter El Elegante todavía estaba lleno de sombra, como un plato enorme de oscuridad puesto en medio del desierto. Inés Robles lo miraba desde el borde, sentada sobre una piedra negra, con un termo de café entre las rodillas. Un kilómetro y medio de diámetro, doscientos cincuenta metros de profundidad, paredes perfectas. Los astronautas del Apolo habían entrenado aquí en 1970, porque esto era lo más parecido a la Luna que se podía encontrar en la Tierra.
At half past five in the morning, El Elegante crater was still full of shadow, like an enormous plate of darkness set down in the middle of the desert. Inés Robles was looking at it from the rim, sitting on a black stone, with a thermos of coffee between her knees. A kilometer and a half across, two hundred and fifty meters deep, perfect walls. The Apollo astronauts had trained here in 1970, because this was the closest thing to the Moon that could be found on Earth.
Inés no estudiaba la Luna, sino Marte. Era geóloga de la Universidad de Sonora, y llevaba seis años viniendo al Pinacate a medir cráteres, lava y arena, porque los volcanes de este rincón del desierto se parecían a los de Marte más que cualquier otro lugar del planeta. Venía sola, siempre. Le gustaba el silencio absoluto del desierto antes del amanecer, cuando no se oía ni un pájaro, y el cielo pasaba del negro al violeta y del violeta al color del durazno.
Inés didn’t study the Moon, but Mars. She was a geologist at the University of Sonora, and for six years she had been coming to El Pinacate to measure craters, lava and sand, because the volcanoes in this corner of the desert looked more like those on Mars than any other place on the planet. She always came alone. She liked the absolute silence of the desert before dawn, when not even a bird could be heard, and the sky went from black to violet and from violet to the color of a peach.
This is a short excerpt. The full novella has 12 chapters.
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