Where they had come from, and who had first told them, mattered not. They resonated with the land and the land resonated with them. They were the earth-stories of Penyagolosa.
The Story of the Three Pieces of Advice
AFTER MANY YEARS away, a merchant who had become rich travelling the Seven Seas decided it was time to return to his wife and home. But before making the journey back, he went to see a hermit who lived in the mountains, to seek his advice. The hermit was known for his wise words and good counsel, but all he said to the merchant was:
Never leave a straight path.
Never get involved in other people’s affairs.
Always sleep on a decision before doing anything important.
Now the merchant was a bit disappointed when he heard this.
‘Fine advice that was,’ he thought to himself. ‘I could easily have come up with that myself.’
And he went on his way, heading for home.
Not long after he came across a group of travellers who were going the same way and he decided to join their company. After they had gone a few miles they came across a fork in the road. Up ahead stood a great mountain, the path winding up its slope until it seemed to disappear in the mists. To the right was another path, much flatter and going around the mountain instead.
‘Come on,’ said the merchant’s companions, looking at the alternative path. ‘Let’s go this way. It’ll save us an hour at least on our journey.’
Now the merchant was about to go with them, but at the last minute he remembered the hermit’s words.
‘Perhaps there was something in them,’ he thought. And he decided to carry on straight and up over the mountain.
He walked and he walked and he walked, and the path seemed to be even longer than it had looked from the bottom. But eventually, as all things come to an end in this world, he found himself down once again on the other side of the mountain. There he found his companions. But they were all sitting by the side of the road, their heads in their hands. Some were almost crying.
‘What ho!’ cried the merchant. ‘Why such long faces?’
‘We should have listened to you and gone up over the mountain,’ one of them said. ‘Soon after you left us a group of thieves attacked us and stole all our baggage, and they whipped and beat us all the way here.’
After picking themselves up and cleaning their wounds, the group were once again back on the road, and come nightfall they found an inn in which to spend the night. At dinnertime they sat down at a table and waited to be served.
But the innkeeper and his wife were having a terrible row that evening, and they were throwing pots and pans at each other in the kitchen rather than preparing the travellers’ food.
‘We should go in and do something,’ one of the travellers said. ‘Someone’s going to get hurt.’
They all got up to intervene, but the merchant stayed where he was, remembering the hermit’s second piece of advice: not to get involved in other people’s business.
When the travellers confronted the innkeeper, he got so cross with them that he forgot all about the argument with his wife, picked up a big stick and chased them all out of the inn. And they all had to sleep outside in the cold, with no dinner.
Sitting on his own, back inside, the merchant began to realise the hermit’s words were more valuable than at first they had seemed.
The next day the merchant arrived back at his home village, and he saw his old house. But before going up to meet his wife he decided to hide in some nearby bushes to see what he could see.
Shortly after, his wife appeared at the door with a young priest. And as she said goodbye to him she gave him a kiss.
Now the merchant was furious with rage and he would have run in there and then and killed his wife on the spot. But he remembered the hermit’s last piece of advice: always to sleep on something before making a decision. So he walked up to his house as though nothing had happened, and his wife received him with open arms.
His wife was so shocked to see him that she was speechless, and it was only the following morning that she found she could speak again.
‘Yesterday,’ she said as the merchant was waking up at her side, ‘was the happiest day of my life. First because Fate brought you back to me – you who I haven’t seen nor heard from for so many long years. And secondly because our son came to visit me from the seminary, where he is training to become a priest.’
Giving thanks once again for the pieces of advice, the merchant decided that the hermit must have been none other than King Solomon himself, whose wise words had brought him safely back home.
AUGUST
The month Augustus in Latin is called Ab in Syriac and Shahrivarmah in Persian, and is made up of thirty-one days. The dew begins to return, the heat lessens and mornings become fresh. This is the season for harvesting almonds. Peaches can be eaten now, and dates and jujubes start to ripen. It is said that wood will not rot if it is cut after the third day of this month. It is the time for sowing rice, and for harvesting carob, safflower seed, cress, coriander, sesame, melon and gherkin. In order to speed up the ripening of grapes, work up the soil around them and the dust settling on them will have this effect.
Ibn al-Awam, Kitab al-Falaha, The Book of Agriculture, 12th century
THE NIGHTS ARE very hot. Surprisingly, the older part of the house, with its thick stone walls, can actually feel warmer at night than the newer section. The stones seem to absorb the heat over the course of the day and then radiate it in the hours of darkness. Thank goodness for modern insulation: it seems to be doing the trick. I would sleep outside, where the air can be tolerably cool, but the very idea is enough to send Salud into apoplexy. ‘We’d get eaten alive!’ She’s probably right.
Still, we stay up late, adjusting our existence to the weather and the seasons. It’s too hot to do much through the day, and everything just slows down to a relaxed and gentle pace: more out of necessity than anything else, as any physical exertion in this kind of heat can be lethal. Builders are always the first casualties of any heat-wave, quickly followed by the elderly, despite the custom of taking siestas during the hottest hours. But there’s clearly something unhealthy about toiling away under the sun when it’s almost 40 degrees. So in the interests of my own longevity I have decided to join in the national tradition of doing precious little until it begins to cool down again – which shouldn’t be until mid-September at the earliest. I limit myself to watering the trees after sunset and preparing salads for dinner, our bodies, like the plants, craving fresh, watery food over anything else. The pomegranate tree has only given us half a dozen fruits after the heavy pruning I gave it in the spring, but the juice is sharp and refreshing in the morning, with just a teaspoon or two of sugar added to take away some of the bite.
It is the time of year of the Lágrimas de San Lorenzo – the tears of San Lorenzo, the spectacular meteor shower that falls through the night sky. San Lorenzo is actually 10 August, but the meteors have come a couple of days later this time. Still, they’ve coincided with a new moon, so there’s no other light to filter out the streaks of yellow, white and gold as these rocks from outer space hit the atmosphere and burn up. Why San Lorenzo should have been crying in the first place, I can’t remember. Ah, yes, he was the one who was barbecued to death by the Romans, famously telling his executors that he was done on one side and they could turn him over. Enough to bring tears to anyone’s eyes. Put on a nice show for it, though.
We stayed out on the patio for a couple of hours gazing up at the sky and trying to spot the meteors. It’s not exactly easy, as they’re so fast that the moment you say, ‘Ooh, look, there’s one’, it’s flashed and disappeared. After a while we stopped and just tried to keep our eyes on the section of the sky where they seemed to be most concentrated. Eventually, with practice, we saw some that did cut across the darkness at the very spot where we were looking. It was a relaxing experience: as though you had to empty your mind and let it happen rather than trying t
o catch them all the time.
It was late when we finally went inside. The anti-mosquito candles we’d placed around us like a barrier could only do so much, it appeared. Salud scratched at her arms as she closed the doors shut.
‘Malditos bichos – damn bugs.’
*
I went for a walk around our land at dusk one evening. Our first full year up here was almost at an end; had we managed to achieve much in that time? Everywhere I looked I was struck by all that still needed to be done: great tracts of land I’d wanted to clear but which were still under the tyranny of the gorse; walls that had fallen down and needed rebuilding, but so far out of reach it would take an effort of will and strength just to walk through to them; fields I had ploughed after a fashion with the rotovator but which were now once again awash with weeds. The sheer vastness of what we had up here, and the amount of work for just one man overwhelmed me once more. Was it absolute madness all this? How could I possibly have expected to ‘farm’ forty acres of rocky mountainside on my own? The idea was insane.
I skipped up the track to inspect my truffle-tree plantation. Only half of the two hundred I had planted up here had survived the boars’ onslaught. Those that remained appeared to have rooted in well enough, but were still little more than three of four inches high, while the wild flowers that had sprung up around them were up to my waist in some places. If I wasn’t careful the oaks and holm oaks I’d put up here were going to get choked and lost in the returning thicket. It was simply too hot now even to contemplate doing anything about it. It would have to wait till autumn, in between the almond and the olive harvests, if I had time.
I carried on walking up the slope, to one of the old pine trees, sitting down with my back against its trunk, sensing the temperature of the air slowly, slowly begin to fall as the sky darkened and the birds circled and screeched in the hollow below. Down to the left stood the farmhouses, where Salud was switching on the first lights. It no longer amazed me to think the power to generate the electricity came from the sun. You quickly grew used to it, then began to understand the intensity of the energy that beat down on us daily. Living with it, feeling it on your back, watching it bring things to life, then destroy them.
So much I had wanted to achieve, and so much still to do. It was a start, I told myself. We had done what we could. Perhaps we might have accomplished more, cleared more land, planted more trees, built up more walls, laid out a great irrigation network to make better use of the water coming out from the spring. All these ideas for transforming the mountains had been at the front of my mind when we started. Now I had come to understand what such projects entailed.
Yet despite this, despite looking down on the farmland and ticking off all the areas where I had seemingly fallen short, I noticed that an overall sense of failure was missing. I felt content up there, the scent of pine needles drifting around me in the heaviness of dusk. I had come with ideas about how I would change the land, how I would do things with it: great plans. And they were good ideas, ones that I might realise yet. But while I had managed to get some things done over this time, the direction of influence had always been the reverse. This land, this mountain, had done more to me than I to it. Working on it, touching it with my hands, feeling its pulse and rhythms, its cycles and transformations. I had put down roots of my own, had made contact with something I had barely known before, or perhaps had forgotten: a sacredness of the land; an earthing, strengthening, vivifying gift of this silent sierra, something that had existed in my childhood, standing next to my grandmother in the shadow of Pendle. This was the real story of my year on the mountain.
*
There was a sharp bend in the track.
‘Pull over here,’ Faustino said. ‘I want you to see something.’
I found a space at the side underneath some ivy dripping off the trunk of a tall pine tree. The road continued steeply down the side of the mountain and was lost in the greenery. In front of us, just visible through the trees, the peak of Penyagolosa soared into the sky. We were on its north face now, and a coolness encircled us, wrapping itself around my limbs, bringing delicious relief from the heat. This was where I needed to come when it all got to me, I thought. I would remember this spot, when my head seemed to boil and my body ached from the sustained overheating of late summer, and I would just sit here in the shade of the trees, enjoying, revelling in the sensation of feeling … not quite cold, but cool, yes, definitely cool.
We were high up now, at well over a thousand metres, but there was something unique about this little corner, as though the sun never actually reached here at all. It felt like a miracle at such a scorched time of year.
Faustino was walking away from the track and into the forest. I followed behind him, wondering what it was he wanted to show me.
‘There,’ he said proudly, stopping and pointing up ahead. I saw nothing: a small clearing, perhaps, but nothing noteworthy. Pine tree after pine tree stretched in all directions. There was nothing else there.
Faustino had been acting strangely since I’d arrived at his house an hour or so earlier. I’d come to expect sudden changes in mood in him, but this time he seemed dulled, somehow, as though weighed down by something he was unable to talk about. We’d chatted for a bit, but it had seemed forced, and I’d been on the point of leaving, feeling uncomfortable there, when he’d suggested we go for a drive.
‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll fall into the Avenc and end up dying on this mountain after all.’
If that was his plan I wasn’t too happy about him taking me with him, but we’d come in my car, and as we cut our way through the forest higher up the slopes of the mountain to the north side and into this cooler, lighter air, he’d seemed to cheer up a bit.
And now he’d brought me here, to this edge of a small clearing, and was pointing for me to look at something where there was nothing but a grassy mound. For a moment it seemed as though the moment I had always feared with him had finally arrived: the moment when, having walked a fine line between being some kind of a visionary and some kind of nutter, the barminess would win the day. What did he expect me to see? A golden bull protecting some long-hidden treasure? Some vision from one of his stories?
‘Don’t look at me as if I’m some kind of lunatic!’ he said. ‘Come closer. Look.’
I came out into the clearing. The trees around looked normal, the grass was normal, up in the sky the odd hovering clouds looked normal. My eyes turned back to the ground. Something down here? I climbed up the side of the mound and scouted about. Something caught my attention: a branch was lying at the top. I went over to take a look and found myself staring at a small hole in the ground. The edges were made of cut stone. I knelt down and peered into it: all was darkness, as though a great cavern opened up beneath.
‘What’s this, the Avenc?’ I said. It was the strangest thing: a square hole about the size of a football, clearly man-made, leading down to some kind of cave, and it was here, lost in the middle of this forest. It was too small to crawl through, but it seemed someone had placed the branch there to stop people falling into it. It needed a marker, otherwise you would walk past it and never notice it at all.
Faustino was smiling, and started to laugh. But the laugh caught in his throat and he started coughing, great wheezy gasps echoing from deep in his chest as he almost bent double and his face turned purple. I ran down towards him, but he managed to stop by the time I reached him. He spat something on to the grass, then looked up, his eyes bloodshot and watery.
‘This,’ he said, pointing at the mound and the hole in the top, ‘is the ice house of Penyagolosa. And it’s one of the best preserved in the country.’
He started walking down the edge of the mound and into the forest again.
‘This way,’ he said. ‘You’ll be able to see it better from here.’
I followed him, past a honeysuckle bush to the other side of the hillock. We were ten or twelve feet lower down here. The air felt even colder.
‘Through there,’ he said. ‘Can you see that gap?’
I looked at a thicket he was pointing to and saw there was some kind of way through. I crouched and lowered myself in. The ground was soft and slightly muddy, as though it had rained recently. Pushing my way through I came out into a vast stone hall. The sight of it almost took my breath away. A double-barrelled vaulted ceiling rose to around fifteen or twenty feet above my head, light streaming in through what was presumably the hole in the ground I’d seen above just a couple of moments before. The walls were made of perfectly cut, smooth limestone, the crossed archway of the vaulting in a perfect straight, white relief, like a hot cross bun in reverse. The hall was square, each wall roughly seven or eight yards long. The floor was of mud, although whether there were stone pavings underneath was difficult to say: I picked up a stick lying around and pushed it in to see, but it just sank until it broke in my hand. The place was in very good condition, and had obviously been built by master craftsmen: this wasn’t the rough and ready workmanship of the mas builders. But it was clear it had received little attention since it had been abandoned. For a moment I was grateful for the lack of tourist development round here: an architectural gem was buried underground on the very slopes of the highest mountain in the area. Anywhere else the place would have been plagued with tour buses and mobile cafeterias selling tea in polystyrene cups to day trippers up from the coast for a bit of relief from the monotony of their beach holiday. Here, though, you would only find the place if someone actually brought you to the very doorway.
Faustino walked in behind me and looked up at the ceiling, and the beam of light shining like an arrow through the hole at the top.
‘That’s where they used to throw the snow in,’ he said. ‘Then it would be compacted down at the bottom.’
Sacred Sierra Page 32