And when, after the long trip, I arrived in Patagonia I felt I was nowhere. But the most surprising thing 
of all was that I was still in the world - I had been travelling south for months. The landscape had a gaunt 
expression, but I could not deny that it had readable features and that I existed in it. This was a discovery - 
the look of it. I thought: Nowhere is a place.
Down there the Patagonian valley deepened to grey rock, wearing its aeons' stripes and split by floods. 
Ahead, there was a succession of hills, whittled and fissured by the wind, which now sang in the bushes. 
The bushes shook with this song. They stiffened again and were silent. The sky was clear blue. A puff of 
cloud, white as a quince flower, carried a small shadow from town, or from the South Pole. I saw it approach. 
It rippled across the bushes and passed over me, a brief chill, and then it went rucking east. There were no 
voices here. There was this, what I saw; and though beyond it were mountains and glaciers and albatrosses 
and Indians, there was nothing here to speak of, nothing to delay me further. Only the Patagonian paradox: 
tiny blossoms in vast space; to be here, it helped to be a miniaturist, or else interested in enormous empty 
spaces. There was no intermediate zone of study. Either the enormity of the desert or the sight of a tiny 
flower. In Patagonia you had to choose between the tiny or the vast.

From "Patagonia Revisited" by Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux