The grandioseness washed away, the derelict churches, shantytowns across the hills, those hungry, those thirty, those lying in those dirt filled streets

I ask one of them, veins popping out, life sucked out of him

He responds the tide changed from the words of ancestors, the good and the evil lies in the Cerro Rico in its silver veins

The beauty Pedro says is that a sILver road, the sun radiating across the bridge, spanning to the heart of Madrid could be build, the vastness of silver that lied here

The disgust is that the journey back could be on bones and skulls; a testament to those who died there and those who die as we speak

The city has changed from a small Spanish colonial town to a city, shantytowns across the edges but inside those mines, deep under the skin of Cerro Rico clocks never spin, only the silver veins now bleed aluminium but the men still bleed blood so much they rarely see past a half century

I leave Pedro, the lucky one

I walk in the rain, in the cold. I look to right and see Cerro Rico but my intuition leads me astray into the city’s Grand Cathedral away from that vicious cycle that plagues the city, the tide that will never arrive.