End of the piece: 305,428 uninterrupted steps (quite a precise estimation); 4 days, 5 hours and 38 minutes; 244 kilometers. In all this time I have not drunk, or eaten (or I am not conscious of having done so; or I have not wanted to be, to avoid distractions). Starting from Punta de la Plata, through the Vicuña Mackenna pass, until my feet grazed Miñiques lake, the works have been performed “as slowly as possible”, a decision that has turned out to be fundamental to their correct development, and which was inspired in that piece by Cage that is still being performed in the organ of some german church. As slowly as possible… That is, after much thinking, the cadence of a sedate pace (25 minutes per kilometer, and a lot slower in steep slopes and in sandy terrain) showing, better than any other, the true dimension of things, or at least of our capacity to correctly perceive them, our capacity to feel during the periods a man has for feeling the pulse of the planet, or whatever it is that we feel when we look deep into the ground below our feet and what surrounds it. At that pace, without pause, without distraction, the desert’s subtle landscape develops prodigiously before our eyes, manages to completely overwhelm us and advances, slow, magnificent, full, with spaces sometimes eternal, invariant for half or sometimes a whole day’s journey, maybe with the promise of a restless end, something enough to accelerate the pulse; but, oh! some other times it shuts before us like a wall to, suddenly, after crowning a hill, in a very rapid movement (after the slow pace to which it has habituated our senses) change so abruptly that we might lose our breath and we have to be careful not to lose our pace to let the works continue their development according to what was planned. I can say now that, once finished according to my simple instructions, the piece seems perfect.