[1] I had not wanted to come. The old jeep had climbed for six hours into thin, cold air, grinding up a rutted track that seemed to lead nowhere at all, and by the time we reached the rim of the salt flats I was tired, irritable, and utterly certain that my parents had carried me to the emptiest place on the whole earth. There was no signal on my phone. There was no shop, no cafe, no other living person in sight, only the wind and a vast pale glare stretching away ahead of us. There was, as far as I could tell, nothing at all.

[2] Our guide was a quiet man named Tomas, who had lived beside these remote, far-flung lakes his whole life and seemed to carry some of their stillness about with him. He eased the jeep down the loose grey slope with the patience of someone who had done it ten thousand times, reading the shifting stones beneath the wheels by feel alone, never once raising his voice over the rattle of them.

[3] ‘People think there is nothing here,’ he said, catching my eye in the mirror. ‘They are looking too quickly.’ I said nothing. I was looking at the battery icon on my dead phone.

[4] Then we came over the last ridge, and I forgot to be bored. The flats opened before us like a sheet of beaten silver, mile upon endless mile of white crust that shimmered faintly beneath a colourless dawn. A thin film of water lay across it, so still and so perfect that the whole sky had lain down inside it; the clouds drifted below our wheels as surely as above our heads. I had never seen the world doubled like that, as if the earth had quietly become a mirror while no one was watching.

[5] We climbed out. The silence was so complete that I could hear my own heartbeat, and the cold air tasted faintly of salt. Tomas crouched and pressed his palm flat against the crust, the way a doctor listens to a chest. ‘Vital,’ he murmured, almost to himself. ‘It is vital that you remember this. The lakes are shrinking. Each year I park a little further down the slope.’

[6] As if to answer him, a flock of flamingos lifted from a distant channel — a sudden pink wound torn across all that white, beating upward in a ragged, joyful panic. They wheeled once, twice, trailing their long legs like loose threads, and then settled again, and the great mirror swallowed their colour whole. I realised my mouth was open. I realised, too, that I had not thought about my phone for almost an hour.

[7] On the drive back I asked Tomas more questions than I had asked anyone in months, and he answered every one. My mother watched me in the mirror and said nothing, but she was smiling. I am still not sure what I want to do with my life. I am sure, now, that whatever it is, it will have something to do with places like this — and with making certain they are still here for the next bored, ungrateful child who does not yet know how to look.