Knowledge of Angels
Page 25
When dusk fell and the evening softened, the people of Sant Jeronimo came out of their houses, linked arms, and walked for an hour round the squares and streets of the town, calling to each other, talking and stretching their legs, eyeing each other’s sons and daughters, matchmaking, striking bargains and taking the air. Jaime and his brother and his young wife walked with Amara and named her to as many people as possible. Then in the morning Jaime loaded a string of four donkeys, and they began the ascent.
They climbed all day, at first through the woods of pine and holm oak, and then on narrow ledges zigzagging across the face of the bare rock, through rags of thin cloud, and into a region of scrubby thyme and bushes of thorn and rosemary, and then still higher, to the towering platforms that the mountain thrust up towards the sky. They passed a solitary charcoal burner somewhere halfway up or so, and then saw nobody moving on the precipitous face of the mountain except themselves. Towards evening they reached the snow-pits, which in winter had been on the melt-margins of the snow fields but now were some six hundred feet below the shrunken summer extent of the mountains’ winter mantle.
Jaime unloaded the donkeys, opened the hut, and showed Amara her quarters – one tiny room with a shelf for a bed and a stove. He busied himself making a fire for the night and setting out the food his mother had packed for them. There were already stooks of reed in rows behind the hut and Jaime’s donkeys had carried up more of them. He showed Amara how to spread them in a conical fan over the top of the ice-huts, and told her how thickly she must keep the ice covered. He showed her how to throw wet straw on her stove to make a smoke column to summon help if she needed it.
She hardly answered him, only nodding and copying when he asked her to do so the tasks he showed her. Between them they repaired the coverings of the three pits; then as darkness came down on a blazing sunset, they slept, Amara on her bunk, Jaime rolled in a blanket outside. He did not sleep deeply, in the biting cold and under the bright stars, and in the morning he took his leave.
‘You won’t mind being alone, Amara?’
‘No,’ she said, and stood and watched him out of sight.
Once he had descended over the shoulder of the nearest bluff, and could no longer see or be seen from the place where he had left her standing, she turned and began to climb the other way, ascending. Almost at once she scrambled, moving on hands and feet on the steep inclines, to a dizzy viewpoint commanding a wide prospect of the island across the inland plain. She saw without curiosity a thread of smoke, white in the clear light of morning, rising far off in the direction of Ciudad, ascending and expanding like a flower on a narrow stem. She turned her back and climbed higher.
Some hour or so later she was skirting the persistent snow which cloaked the uppermost crests. In the valleys the warmth of summer lingered into a balmy autumn, but here it was sharply cold. A recent snowfall covered the grey, glazed, older surface lightly, and she could see clearly, making a diagonal across the face of the slope above her, the footprints of a clawed and four-footed creature – a wolf-spoor. She clambered onto the cold white carpet and began to follow it.
When the light glorified and enriched at evening, she was still climbing. In the fine air she moved slowly and breathed rapidly. A western prospect opened out, across the whole range of lesser jagged crests and out to sea. The sea shone golden in the descending sun, and she saw, likewise without curiosity, dark specks on the expanse of water, spread out all over the plains of the sea – ships under sail. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, darkening the dimpled water like bees swarming on a honeycomb, as though a great nation had embarked in fleets and was bearing down on the island.
Amara looked at the approaching host for a moment only. It was already too late to return to the snow-keepers’ hut before darkness, and the wolf-spoor had petered out some way below. Only the last of the summits still rose above her, but she continued to climb, further into the unbroken solitude of the inviolate snow.
THE END