” On the way, I detoured to a place I had wanted to see from up close for a long time. Picture a rock butte standing straight up a thousand feet above everything around it, with vertical walls of crumbling granite and an acre of ground on top. No way to go up, unless you were a rock climber with a genuine death wish or had a helicopter: the sides were completely vertical if not slanted slightly outwards and there wasn’t a landing zone that was free of rocks or deep crags, except off to one side. I had seen a picture once of a small cabin on top of a similar butte. According to the footnote, it was in the American state of New Mexico and the guy that built it used to spend the night when he helicoptered between south Texas and another oil refinery he owned in California. It was so unreal looking, even fantastic, these days one would suspect it to be fake, but this was in the late 1980’s, long before Photoshop, and it was probably real enough. At any rate, it caught my eye and I never forgot it.
But it was not to be. Since there was hardly any wind, I wanted to land and walk around, but the first words I heard over the intercom as I started my approach were, “Estas loco?” Are you crazy? “Como se te ocurre?” How can you think of that?
I adjusted the cyclic to eliminate drift and hovered, then I looked at her. Tatiana had turned white and there were beads of sweat on her forehead.
I pulled up, turned and headed to the estancia leaving the butte behind us. I knew of people that faint going up in a glass elevator but have no problem hovering at a thousand feet inside the bubble of a helicopter. I diagnosed her condition as vertigo aided by no small amount of a mother’s fear for her kid’s walking around in a place such as that butte. I had no intentions of letting anyone get out of the helicopter and look around, not when I saw how dangerous it looked, but she didn’t know that.”
From the sequel to In the Land of Fire (unpublished).