How One Man's Obsession with Shiny Things Led to a Load of Coal
Mariano, a cattle farmer in Coahuila, chases a mysterious light and finds a hole with a vase. Convinced it's treasure, he digs like a madman. Ghostly horsemen appear, he faints, and wakes to find coal. Undeterred, he keeps digging.
The northern reaches of Coahuila is a place so rugged and remote that only the truly mad or magnificently stubborn would think to make their fortunes there. It’s here, among the desert sands and thorny chaparral of the Cinco Manantiales region, where our protagonist—a man of cattle and grit by the name of Mariano—was destined to become either a legend or a fool. You see, Mariano wasn’t just another cowboy wrangling his herd in that desolate expanse; he was a man possessed by ambition, cursed (or perhaps blessed) by a gnawing, relentless need to reach for something beyond the dust and dirt of the cattle corral. And so, his story begins on a night when the only thing more numerous than stars were the cows bellowing in the distance.
Mariano, alone in the night, surrounded by his beasts and the vast emptiness of "El Llano." It’s the sort of landscape that makes you feel small, like a speck of sand in the cosmic storm, and if you stay out there long enough, you start to wonder if maybe the whispers in the wind aren’t just in your head. Suddenly, out of nowhere—a light. Not a flickering lantern or the embers of a campfire, but a strange, ethereal glow hovering just beyond the reach of his cattle pen, the sort of light that seems less like it belongs in Coahuila and more like something that would show up in an X-Files episode. Naturally, Mariano, being a curious (if somewhat reckless) man, decided he had to investigate.