There are some things so strong you just have to share them —and those gentians were strong. As I picked my way down, I wondered how I could entice Ana and Chloë up the mountain. Like the locals, they both tend to regard walking strictly as a means of getting around, and not a pleasure for its own sake. Putting across the idea of a six-hour relentlessly uphill slog would test my powers of persuasion to the limits. But a climb up here to see the magical blue haze of the gentians seemed exactly what we all needed to shake off our worries.
Chloë, as it happened, was busy; she had an overnight stay coming up with a schoolfriend in Orgiva. But Ana seemed quite taken with the idea and, with Chloë away, was even happy to consider camping out for a night. There was nothing to prevent us setting off together the next day.
For all the splendours of the flowers and mountain scenery in store, I had a nagging worry that I might have underplayed the rigours of the day ahead. ‘It’s not really that far,’ I had assured Ana. ‘And it’s not as steep as all that, and anyway, when you get there it’s so wonderful that you forget instantly how far and how steep it was — which, of course, it wasn’t.’
Ana receives such pronouncements with an understandable suspicion, developed over some twenty-five years of knocking around with me. But I wondered if she had applied quite the right level of scepticism. Still, I really did feel it would be worth it once we were up at the meadows: for the pleasure Ana would take from spending time there, and for the pleasure I would get from her pleasure. There was also something symbolic about the whole trip, for the borreguiles are the source of the Poqueira, the river that waters our farm and supplies the springs from which we drink and wash and water the flowers of our patio.
We set out as soon as we had fed the dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons, horses and sheep. Porca the parrot set out with us, on Ana’s shoulder, until we reached the river and she sent him wheeling off. We climbed into the car and headed off for Pampaneira, one of the high Alpujarran villages, where our walk to the borreguiles would begin. Within the hour we were fortifying ourselves in the square with coffee and roscos — dry buns which look tantalisingly like doughnuts, but aren’t — and gazing up past the churchtower at the distant peak of Veleta, which was not where we were going, but was a similar distance away.
We made our way up through the cobbled alleys of the village and up the steep woodland path to the hamlet of Bubión. From there it was just a mile, still climbing hard, through the meadows to Capileira, the highest village at nearly 1300 metres above sea-level. When I reached the village plaza, wheezing like a rusty bellows, Ana was waiting for me, sitting serenely on a bench. This annoyed me a bit, as you may imagine. ‘You must learn to pace yourself,’ I gasped.
‘This is a nice place. Why don’t we spend the rest of the day here — we could do some shopping,’ teased Ana. I ignored her and, slinging my pack, marched resolutely out of the village in the direction of up. We climbed on, for hours, through pinewoods and along acequias. The sun was burning fiercely and the shade of the trees and even the sound of the water was a blessing.
Later, we sat beneath a pine tree and drank water from the bottles in my pack — just below the boil — and ate the usual stuff that you eat on a mountain picnic — ham and chorizo, olives, tomatoes, bread, and then halva, dates and about three kilos of cherries to finish. Then we slept.
The picnic pine tree was the last one; after lunch we were walking above the treeline. The sun had moved well down from its zenith, and was burning our left legs, our left arms and the left side of our faces. In the far distance we could make out the Refugio del Poqueira and, just beyond the hut, the steep river valley that we would climb to get to the borreguiles.
‘We’re not going all the way up there, are we?’ asked Ana.
‘You’ve done nothing but moan since we set off this morning,’ I baited her, without a shred of justification. In fact, Ana had cheerfully led the way almost all day.
There was a treat in store for us as we walked up the long steady incline towards the refuge: the thymes and puas of what botanists call the ‘hedgehog zone’ were in flower. The term is a good one, as the low-growing spiky plants do indeed look like a vast multitude of hedgehogs. The path and its borders were a mass of pink and white domes, made up of the most exquisite densely-packed little flowers. Ana had never seen the like of it, as she hadn’t been this high. I’d seen the plants and had dismissed them as rather dull, but now, in all their flowering glory, they were dazzling. The air was full of butterflies, too, some as big as your hand, and whenever we came to the tiniest patch of moisture, there would be literally clouds of Small Blues. They carpeted the ground as we approached, and as we passed they would lift in their thousands into the air, creating their own infinitesimal mountain breeze.
I grinned at Ana and she smiled back, a smile of pure delight and happiness. It was already worth it, though I knew that there was still one hell of a haul to get up to the borreguiles, where we planned to spend the night. The Spanish have a saying: ‘If you would feel like a king, take your friends to a place of beauty that you know.’ It sounds better in Spanish — and it’s true.
Hours later the sun had dropped behind the peak of Veleta and the valleys were full of shadows. Ana and I were trudging on in a ponderous silence, having climbed for nearly six hours and more than 5,000 feet. I was determined that we should reach the borreguiles by nightfall.
This final valley, where the new-born Poqueira river tumbled among the rocks and the grass, was as steep and difficult as the first hill of the morning, only now there was not much energy left in us. However, at long last we crawled up and over into the lowest of the meadows. It was almost dark and the few gentians that were in this meadow had gone to sleep, with their petals tightly wrapped against the cold of the coming night.
Ana and I slumped on a rock, warm still from the hot sunshine of the day, and there we lay until the icy cold of the night air moved us. I set about unpacking the backpack. Sleeping bags, sweaters, bottles of water — now icy cold — food, a torch, sticking plasters, moisturising cream… ‘Moisturising cream! What the hell do you want with moisturising cream?’
Ana said she wasn’t going anywhere without moisturiser.
‘That’s all very well, but I’m the poor goon who has to carry the stuff!’
‘Well, if you like I’ll carry it down,’ she offered.
We found a soft bed for the sleeping bags and laid our aching limbs down to get what rest we could. An hour or maybe two hours later, after endless rollings over and wriggling and other attempts to get comfortable, the full moon rose over the black rocks to the east. Our little valley flooded with the cold silver light. I rolled over again and looked at Ana.
‘Are you asleep?’
‘No, of course not.’
We got up and peered over the rim of the meadow. Below us lay the Alpujarras, bathed in moonlight. There was a mist that swirled in the valleys like a sea of milk, and the hills like dark islands, the Isles of the Blessed, so it seemed. The scene was cloaked in deep silence, until a dog, somewhere in the vastness of the night, started to bark. The call was taken up by a dozen other distant dogs, and for a little while the valleys rang with the sound; then the silence stole back over the night.
We watched without a word, hardly breathing for fear of breaking the spell. Then Ana shivered a little.
‘God, to think that we live down there, in that.’
I grunted. When you’ve known one another a long time, sometimes a grunt is all you need.
‘It’s amazing, a privilege,’ she continued as we pulled our sleeping bags around us.
I grunted again and re-arranged an arm that was losing circulation across her shoulder.
The valleys of the Alpujarras were immediately beneath us, then to the south, rearing dark from the mists, lay the great mass of the Contraviesa and the Sierra de Lújar. If we raised our eyes above the coastal hills, we could see the moonlight on the distant Mediterranean.
‘Chris,’
Ana whispered.
I paused.
‘You know they’re going to go ahead and build the dam in the valley, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I answered into the darkness. ‘Yes, I do.’
For the first time since we’d heard the news it seemed somehow bearable. We talked into the night, liberated by saying the unsaid, and found we had drawn much the same conclusions. We wanted to stay, even if the water and silt ate away at the farm, and so did Chloë, as far as we could tell. Whatever happened we’d first try and adapt our lives around it. We had roots here now and upping and leaving wasn’t the option it had once been.
Also, we felt a sort of responsibility to stay and keep an eye on what was happening to the land — not just our own farm, but the valley, and the wider canvas of the Alpujarras. We might have lost the battle over the dam but maybe we could live with that, and use what we had learnt in battles to come.
Anyway, nothing would happen for a while, we agreed. Nothing ever happens quickly in Spain.
However beautiful it is, you don’t sleep too well in a sleeping bag in a mountain meadow. We rolled and wriggled and tossed and turned and shivered, and tried not to be dazzled by the moonlight, but it was only when the sun rose that we finally got to sleep. There we remained, until the sun climbed high enough to start heating up the bags.
We crawled-out, blinking at the sunshine. All around us, the gentians had opened, and all the grass was hidden beneath a haze of deepest blue. The sky was clear blue, then there were the dark rocks and the deep blue carpet of the meadow with its clear lake in the middle. It seemed that we had woken up in a quite different world.
There was nothing you could say; we just gasped. It took some time to get used to the phenomenon, and then, little by little, we came back to earth, and breakfasted on cherries and springwater. All that pain, all that relentless, sweaty climbing, it had all been worthwhile, just to wake up on one morning of your life in a place like this. Ana thought so too.
As we sat enjoying the warmth of the day, we heard a rustling, a slithering of rocks, and then the unmistakable clong of a sheep bell. There was a sheep slithering down the shaly slope above the meadow. It caught sight of us and stopped, squatted and peed, looking at us blankly. It was joined by another sheep, which did exactly the same thing. Sheep always do this for some reason; when they see a person, they squat and pee — unless of course they happen to be rams, in which case they just stand around and dribble.
The pair were joined by another and another and soon there was a flock of several hundred sheep bowling down off the rocks into the meadow, bleating and bongling with dozens of bells. They spread out, filling the valley from one side to the other. They drank deep from the lake, and then set about eating the gentians. It took them about half an hour, and when they had finished there wasn’t a single flower left; the meadow had returned to its green.
Ana and I were the last to see the gentians that year. We headed back down the hill wondering if there were some philosophical point we had just seen demonstrated, but unable to establish what it might have been. Perhaps it had something to do with grasping the fleeting moment before some damn herbivore comes along and grasps it first.
It took us most of a long hot day to get back down to Pampaneira and the car. We were exhausted and silent as we trudged downward, every jolt a burning pain in knee and thigh muscles. As we drove on to the valley, we noticed a plume of dust rising from the riverbed and heard what sounded like the roar of heavy machinery.
When we reached our bridge we had to wait to allow Domingo’s sheep to come across. Domingo himself was on the other side, counting them as they passed.
‘There’s a machine in the valley, he announced. ‘Down by El Granadino. They’ve started on the dam.’
POND LIFE
WE SET OFF THE NEXT MORNING FOR EL GRANADINO, TO SEE FOR ourselves what the machine was up to in the riverbed. It was a still, fiercely hot day, but near the gorge there is always a breeze, and as we approached its tall red cliffs, the cool air fanned our faces. We clambered up over a heap of stones. ‘Oh my God! Look at that, will you!’ Ana exclaimed. A huge yellow earth-moving machine was asleep beneath the cliffs. Beside it the cliff-face was laid bare, reduced by the voracious gnawing of the machine to its skeleton. The very roots of the mountain lay picked clean, gouged out like cavities in a tooth.
We looked at the gruesome scene in silence; there wasn’t much you could say. It seemed such an intrusion, such an act of wanton violence perpetrated upon the quiet valley and its untidy, boulder-strewn riverbed. This had been a place of perfect peace. We would come down here on summer evenings to enjoy the breeze and sit and watch the swallows and bats skimming and dipping to drink from the water. We walked slowly back up the river, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
When we reached the farm, we came upon Trev. He was busy hauling hosepipes about the place. It had been so long since we had done any serious concerted work on the pool that it took a while for the implication to sink in.
‘Morning, Maestro,’ I said, rather more breezily than I felt. ‘Don’t tell me you’re actually going to fill this pool with water…’
‘I can’t think what else I’m going to do with these hoses,’ he answered dryly as he wedged the end of the pipe between two rocks by the fish pond.
‘Well, it’ll be interesting to see if the pool fills with water before the valley fills with river-sludge,’ I said darkly.
Trev looked at me closely. ‘It’s not like you to talk like that.’
‘You can’t really blame me. Ana and I have just been down looking at the work on the dam. There’s not much doubt that it’s going ahead now.’
‘Chris, you can’t seriously believe that the huge area of the valley is going to fill up in your lifetime. To reach even the stable there’d have to be a tailback halfway to Torvizcón.’ Torvizcón is a village at least six kilometres upriver.
‘Do you really think that? Because that’s exactly what I think, only I find it hard to take my own opinions seriously.’
‘Look,’ said Trev, sitting down beside me. ‘Just look at the size of these river valleys. I’ve been doing some calculations on my computer. They’re meaningless, of course: nobody can come up with real figures for this kind of thing. But I reckon the volume of silt you’d need to reach the level we’re sitting at now would be several billion cubic metres. The likelihood of your losing even the river fields in your lifetime is pretty remote. You really shouldn’t worry, you know.’
Trev’s pronouncement was nothing new. He’d been saying more or less the same for months now, as I fretted away over the dam. Yet somehow his words resonated this time — bringing with them a reassurance that took me by surprise. I grinned at Trev. ‘Maybe you’re right — we shouldn’t worry,’ I said and turned back to look at the pool. ‘So we’re really going to get to swim in it at last… I can hardly believe it.’
‘I wouldn’t get that excited if I were you…
‘Why? When will it be full?’
‘Well, taking into account the elliptical shape, the progressive broadening of the steps and the angle of incline between the shallow and the deep end — and then allowing for a sluggish flow of, say, eleven litres a minute, and some evaporation — it ought to take about nine days.’ Trev paused to rub his nose. ‘That’s providing you don’t use the water for anything else.’
We looked at the trickle of water spreading across the tiled floor of the eco-sphere. The rate of flow was so feeble that it was difficult to see how it would ever reach the top.
As. Manolo had pointed out at the onset, people who build swimming pools in these parts expect them to be ready for a dip within a fortnight. Not so our eco-sphere (for swimming). It had been twelve months in the making and even now it was not complete. Trev still had the waterwheel to create, though for the moment he had rigged up a much less aesthetically pleasing, and rather less efficient, pump.
As so often, both Chloë and Ana had been a little suspicious o
f my enthusiasm right from the start of the lunatic project. As the months dragged on, and great gaps appeared in the schedule as we awaited delivery of one or other vital part or material, they began to suggest I might be foolishly in thrall to the Arquitecto and his schemes. Then we got the news of the dam and — even to me — the eco-sphere pool began to seem a frivolous, and costly, distraction. There were weeks when I would skirt past the seemingly abandoned site, unwilling to confront the idea that it might all be some grand white elephant. But then Trev would reappear and we would sit, legs dangling, above the concrete hole while he explained for the hundredth time the calculations of volume and lifting-power, and the exquisite complexity of the actual form of the pool. I maintained a kind of faith in the project and took comfort from the simple beauty of the filtering pond with its fish, its rocks and reeds, its lilies and velvety black dragonflies, its water-boatmen and tadpoles, and the slender little water-snake that had decided to move in.
Every morning I would cast a furtive look to see whether or not the water-level had actually risen. It looked no different, though Trev, who would be fooling around somewhere with a level and a tape-measure or a slide-rule, assured me that it was all coming along according to his calculations. And then one morning, nine days later, there was the water, brimming over the top and slopping right over the edge, coursing down the stone runnels and cascading over the rocks into the fish pond — to the consternation of the fish. Trev was looking at it pensively, massaging the side of his nose.
‘God, Trev!… It works! Look, it’s full of water and it’s working. It’s amazing!’
‘No,’ said Trev. ‘It’s not quite right; the water is moving too fast along the runnels for the ultra-violet rays to be fully effective in the purification process. We’re going to have to raise the levels a touch.’
A Parrot in the Pepper Tree Page 20