Pilgrimages Through Time: Geology Meets Narrative

Pilgrim Tales: The Connection Between Geology and Story

When two pilgrim tales crossed paths on the road
Or how I came to understand that geology and literature obey the same laws of time

Drs. M.P.T. Chin-A-Lien, MBA, M.Sc., Ing. — Geologist
Certified Professional Geologist (AAPG) Nr. 5201-1996 · Chartered European Geologist (EFG) Nr. 92-1996 · Energy Negotiator (AIEN) June 2021
Principal Founding Partner & Chief Architect — Golden Lane Investments Advisory Group N.V. (GLIAG N.V.)
Zoetermeer / Delft, The Netherlands · Paramaribo, Suriname · petroleumenergyinsights.com

The mechanics of Bujaraloz kept my car for a week and would not say why, and it took me twenty-six years to understand that they had been right not to explain.

The accident happened at the hour of the morning when the road belongs to nobody, on the old N-II, where a Fiat coming the other way formed the opinion that our lane was the more interesting of the two. Nobody died. Nobody even bled. The Citroën 2CV folded the way a 2CV folds, with a kind of apology, and afterwards it sat in the yard behind the workshop looking less like a wreck than like an animal that had decided to lie down.

The mechanics walked around it twice. A week, they said.

I asked what precisely would take a week.

They looked at each other with the expression of men who have been asked to account for the weather. One of them said that a 2CV, like a man, cannot be hurried back to life. The other said nothing at all, which I have since come to regard as the more complete of the two answers.

The car was mine, so I stayed. Jan Willem, Ray and Herman went on to Blanes in the Volkswagen, and we said goodbye at the edge of town with the lightness of people closing a parenthesis, none of us aware that a parenthesis is where a book keeps the sentence it cannot say out loud.

The pension had four rooms and a landlady who never once asked my name, having evidently decided that a young man delivered by a broken car requires no further documentation. The water ran warm at midnight and cold at noon, in open defiance of the boiler and of physics, and when I mentioned this she said only that the house had always done that and that I would be used to it before the week was out.

I was used to it by Tuesday.

This is the part I would ask to have understood. Not the water. The getting used to it. That is how such things arrive. Not with wonder. With a shrug, and then with habit, and then with twenty-six years of silence.

There was, I established on the first morning, nothing whatever to do in Bujaraloz. So I walked, without a map, which is the only honest way to enter a landscape that has already decided what it intends to tell you and is merely waiting to see whether you are the sort of person who interrupts.

Los Monegros is not a desert. It is an ocean the Earth drank millions of years ago and has never confessed to. The hills are waves that were told to stop and obeyed, and are still standing there, holding the position, waiting to be told they may continue. The gypsum burns without giving heat. It does not reflect the light so much as leak it, slowly, from somewhere underneath, the way a house gives back in the evening the warmth it took in during the day.

I went into churches where the air was four centuries older than the air in the street. I stood in monasteries where the stone had the serenity of something that has outlived every argument ever conducted in front of it. I already knew, at twenty, that rock has memory. It took that week to make me suspect that roads have it too, and that some roads do not lead anywhere at all but simply lead to a different version of the man walking on them.

On the fourth day the silence became so complete that I heard a thought I had not yet had.

It arrived whole, in my own voice, in the future tense. I am not going to write it down here, because I did not understand it for another twenty-six years, and neither would you.

I told no one. Not my friends, when they came back sunburned and loud and full of the sea. Not my family. Not, in any sense that counts, myself. I filed it where a young man files what he cannot yet use, which happens to be the same place the Earth files everything.

Underneath.

The car started on the seventh day, exactly as promised, and ran another eleven years without further comment.

Then I became a geologist, which is a profession consisting largely of being patient with things that are in no hurry to be understood. I read the subsurface of half the world. I found basins. I negotiated licences in rooms where the air conditioning was the loudest voice present, and signed contracts in languages I had begun to dream in. I learned that the Earth never tells its story at the moment it writes it; that a bed of sandstone will lie a hundred million years beneath everything that came after it, keeping perfectly still; and that when erosion finally opens it, the sand is not old. It is exactly as young as the afternoon it was laid down. It has only been waiting for someone with the right eyes.

Bujaraloz went where such things go. Down. Quietly. Under Venezuela, under Hungary, under the Soviet Union, under Africa, under thirty years of other people’s oil.

---

On the first of August 1997 I went down into the Metro at Altamira, in Caracas, with no intention beyond arriving somewhere else.

There was a bookshop on the platform, of the kind that exists only in stations: three metres wide, lit like an interrogation, selling crossword magazines and dictionaries and, for reasons known to no one, literature.

I have thought about what happened next for twenty-nine years and I can report it accurately but I cannot explain it. My hand closed on a book. Not I. My hand. It went to a shelf I had not looked at, at a height I had not chosen, and came back holding twelve stories that had spent eighteen years travelling the world in their author’s luggage before anybody agreed to print them.

I paid. I put it in my bag. I flew home. I read it in the Netherlands, in an armchair, in the rain, in the entirely ordinary way.

The fifth story begins with a woman whose car breaks down on a Spanish road.

I did not stop reading. That is the part that still unsettles me. A man who recognises something usually stops. I read faster.

Nothing that happened to her had happened to me. Not one event, not one person, not one hour. It was not the plot. It was the road. It was the being-stopped. It was the week that refused to behave like a week. It was the specific loneliness of a person suspended outside his own itinerary, discovering by accident that the itinerary had never been the point.

I closed the book and sat for a long time without moving, doing the only arithmetic that mattered.

My week: 1971.

His book: published 1992, twenty-one years later.

My reading: 1997, five years after that.

Three separate times. Three sealed compartments. No possible communication between them.

And yet.

Two beds laid down in different epochs can be lifted to the surface side by side by a fault that has been working the whole while — without hurry, without announcement, without asking anyone. When you finally stand in front of them in a single exposure they look as though they had always been neighbours. They were not. Something moved them. Something had been moving them since before you were born, and it finishes its work on an afternoon it does not bother to tell you about in advance.

Which is when I remembered, at last, what the silence had said to me on the fourth day in Los Monegros, in my own voice, in the future tense.

It had said: someone is going to tell you what this was.

In 1971, in a village in Aragón, in a silence so complete that the century seemed to have stepped out for a moment, I had heard the sound of a book that had not yet been printed.

And a Colombian I never met, who had no way of knowing that I existed, spent eighteen years carrying it across the world in a suitcase and then left it on a shelf in a station on another continent.

And waited.

---

The mechanics of Bujaraloz were right not to explain.

Some repairs take a week.

Some take twenty-six years.

You are never told, at the time, which one you are in.

---

Outcrop

A companion poem

There is a Citroën stranded forever
in a street in Bujaraloz that no longer exists
except in the exact stratum of my memory
where it is still 1971
and the gypsum of Los Monegros
goes on burning with the same ancient light,
the light that does not warm, but reveals.

I was twenty years old
and had the wrong kind of patience — believing
that a week is merely a week,
that a parenthesis closes where it opens,
that time walks in one direction only
like a river that has never been told
about faults, about folds,
about the things the Earth bends
when no one is watching.

I walked without a map across a dry ocean.
The hills were waves the sea
forgot to take with it.
The silence had the density
of a sedimentary rock:
layer upon layer upon layer
of everything I did not say,
of everything I did not yet know
I was already saying.

•

Twenty-six years.
That, say those who know, is the time
it takes certain water to cross the rock
and be born again as a spring.
I knew nothing of aquifers that day
in the bookshop of the Altamira Metro,
only that my hand — not I, my hand —
closed upon a book
the way a fault closes
that has waited far too long.

Twelve stories.
A man alone.
A telephone that does not connect
with the world he believes to be his.
And suddenly Aragón was there,
inside a page written
before I knew
that I would need that page
to name what I had carried
for twenty-six years without a name.

•

Geologists read strata.
Poets read the same stone
but ask it something else.
And sometimes — rarely,
with the rarity of an eclipse
that only its generation remembers —
the stone gives the same answer
to both questions.

•

Do not go looking for the book you lack.
Wait.
The books that truly matter
are not found:
they return.
They walk alone for decades,
cross borders without a visa,
change language without losing the accent
in which they were written for you,
and wait, patient as a stratum,
on the exact shelf
of the exact bookshop
on the day when at last
you will be ready to recognise them.

•

Today I no longer say: there was an accident.
I say: there was an invitation
disguised as a setback,
the way they always disguise themselves,
the genuinely important invitations.
The Fiat that crossed the lane,
the Citroën that demanded rest,
Los Monegros burning without haste,
the hand that chose a book
not knowing it was choosing a date
to return to myself —
none of that was chance.
It was time, folding,
until two strata
that should never have touched
cropped out together,
under the same light,
before the same astonished eyes
that now, at last,
know how to read what the Earth
— and the book, and the road —
had been trying all this while
to say.

Marcel P.T. Chin-A-Lien
Geologist, strategist and writer

“Geology taught me to read the layers of the Earth. Life taught me to read the layers of time.”

From The Earth Remembers, a memoir in layers, in statu nascendi.

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© 2026 Marcel P.T. Chin-A-Lien / Golden Lane Investments Advisory Group N.V. (GLIAG N.V.). All rights reserved. This essay and the accompanying poem are original literary works. No part may be reproduced, distributed, republished or adapted in any form without the prior written consent of the author. Quotation for review or scholarly purposes is permitted with full attribution to the author and to petroleumenergyinsights.com.

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References to Doce cuentos peregrinos / Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez are made for the purposes of commentary and personal reflection. No text from that work is reproduced here.