Down the road, and to Mount Tecolote, we set camp between lava flows and headed out into the miles of black flows and dunes, examining the hollow cave-tubes of pumice. Later, we returned to camp in the dark, and fried quesadillas, which a kangaroo rat had found considerably alluring. I jumped every time my headlamp caught him charging for the cheese, so I found refuge on top of the cooler.

"Its just a rat, what harm can a rat do?" Hans said.

And then it bit him in the toe, and he stopped telling me, 'It's just a rat.' But it was the sand flies and the horse flies and the flying beetles that started to get to us, so we turned off our headlamps and played Spanish style guitar under the moon and the giant craters of Pinacate.

I woke at 4:45, and broke camp. "We need to get to the wash before sunrise," I told Hans, and in the truck, we played psycho computer music, blaring with the windows open and Hans flying across the dunes at forty miles per hour, engaging the twists and turns and lava flows. At the wash, we walked out into the flats, our figures casting shadows that continued half way to the horizon line. It was strange, this place. Surreal. And crazy. And beautiful.

Hans had said that the fundamental law of thermodynamics...of everything in the universe was entropy - the amount of disorder is always increasing. This was the Pinacate. Chaos. Life somehow surviving in this intense heat; breaking out of the black ground.

I realized then the link between it all. It is chaos. Nothing else matters in the long run. All monuments to politicians will fall in the end, all institutions will get buried or become defunct. All egos and reputations will fall to the 'so what?' of history, all power will dissolve. All order becomes meaningless.

The greatest component of our universe is its anarchy, and anarchy exists in everything - it is the Bindings relationship of each galaxy, of each universe, packed like bubbles in some form that is surprisingly similar to the shapes of atoms and molecules. It is like fractals...chaotic, but with chaos comes a veil, a tube of order, a central order that works over all attempts to create it.

I thought about nature, and how it too was the result of chaotic movements - of the randomness of evolution, of the tube of order maybe called God, but certainly the most beautiful of anything.and for one reason, because it was the beauty of chaos. And the beauty of chaos is in humanity as well. It is without doubt that what makes civilization is the chaotic exchange of peoples - whether in free markets or by the exchange of information and knowledge over time and through the generations.