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In Salta, on one of the corners of the very central Plaza Nueve de Julio, a museum is devoted to three mummies of Inca children. The kids, two girls and a boy, were found by an archaeological team led by Johan Reihard in 1999, near the summit of the Llullaillaco volcano in the Andes, near the border with Chile. The three children took part in an Imperial unity ritual in Cuzco, in which they symbolically marry other kids from different parts of the territory and then walk all the way back to where they came from. Home again, they were drugged and left to die in shallow crypts on mountain summits, where the cold kept their bodies in perfect condition. As if they were in a very deep sleep. The Museum of High Altitude Archaeology has tried to come up with balanced response to scholarly requirements, tourist sensation needs and the fact that you are dealing with departed souls. Only one mummy is exhibited at a time and they are all kept in climate-controlled environments, all the time. Visitors, in small groups, stay for a few minutes in the presence of the child that is in exhibition. And they are supposed to remain silent. I saw the eldest of the three, La Doncella (or The Virgin). Her hair is done in tiny beautiful braids. Her legs are crossed. Her feet are covered by very fine shoes. Her body is embraced by a beautiful woolen cloak. Her head tilts to one side. She looks bored, like a present-day teenager. As I left the room and then the museum towards the park, into the much higher temperatures of the Argentinian North, I wondered if there would be any possible way to remain respectful with the souls of mummies, let scientists touch them, and display them to tourists, all in the same place and occasion. I would later know that the local indigenous associations saw that the sacred Llullaillaco and those souls were violated and profaned. But before that, while walking through the park alleys towards the opposite corner I could not avoid feeling disgusted by the thought of freezing kids to death. I worried: what if they suddenly woke up cold and trapped? And then disgusted with myself for having placed judgement on an old culture that would not do that anymore nowadays. Or even if they would: is not white society as ruthless or even more in so many ways? I wish I could go back and show sympathy. But would the Virgin somehow quiet my heart? Still, I had practical concerns: I was going to collect prints of the pictures I took with an old film camera of the trip to the salt plains near the border with Bolivia. The job was to be completed by the time I finished my visit to the mummy. It was the last time I used film. I still treasure the artifacts; the mummified negatives rest in a velvet box on top of a bookshelf in my office. I carried the developed photographs to Plaza Nueve de Julio to place them in the cheap paper and plastic album provided by the laboratory. I sat on a park bench and started the job. Children interrupted their play and ran into my direction, to watch a messy stop motion documentary film of the past few days. In one of the pictures I stepped on a heap of salt; behind me, the white horizon. One of the kids was baffled by that snapshot. She asked, in awe: “did you go to heaven?! How was it up there?!" I had to be true. So I told her yes. I was in heaven. And heaven is a deeply baffling place.