Atacama Desert

What will stay with you most powerfully are the words, “God was with us,” etched by the miners on the wall as they get ready to board, one by one, the ascending capsule-on-a-pulley; a kind of moon-landing capsule-recovery, in reverse. It was certainly a moonscape, 2,300 feet down under, that these men inhabited for an unthinkable 69 days.

A journey to the beginning of the universe lurched forward Monday with a trek over just a few hundred feet.