Sacred Sierra (43 page)

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.’

There had once been scores of these
neveras
, or ice houses, dotted over the hills and mountains. The Romans, then the Moors, had a tradition of gathering and storing snow and ice for use in the summer, but it had really taken off from around the sixteenth century.

‘This one was built in the seventeenth century,’ he said, tracing the round arches in the air with his finger.

The ice-men,
nevaters
, would work through late winter and early spring shovelling the snow from the mountainside and dropping it in from the top. Then it would be compressed by foot, like the pressing of grapes, until it turned into ice. Different sections were made by placing a layer of straw and soil as a kind of packing, before more snow was placed on top and the process would start again. Once the summer came the
nevaters
would become transporters of this precious material down to the cities and the coast. The Valencia area had been one of the biggest consumers of ice in the past, as its doctors, once the most famous in all Spain, had used it to treat all kinds of ailments, from inflammations to haemorrhages and fevers. The ports had also been a place of great demand for the ice, to help preserve the fish brought in in the mornings, while the rest of the population enjoyed the frozen drinks and sherbets to cool themselves down in the summer sun.

‘The
nevaters
would set off from here after sunset and travel by night so as to lose as little ice through melting as possible,’ Faustino said. ‘The boxes were packed with more straw and felt to stop the heat from the mules ruining it. They used to follow the
camí dels nevaters
– the ice-men’s route. Passes down very close to your
mas
before connecting with the river and ending up down on the coast.’

Some of the ice hadn’t even finished up there, he said. Much of it was taken to the port and exported in special ships to the Balearic Islands, or North Africa.

I looked up at this great man-made cave. It felt like a crypt of a church or cathedral: the last thing on earth I would have expected to find here in the middle of this underpopulated land of abandoned farmhouses and empty pine forests. And here thousands of tonnes of compacted snow must once have sat, a great refrigerator serving the people of the coast. The ice that had cooled an overheated brow, or been drunk in the shade of a patio flavoured with lemon and sugar and cinnamon, wouldn’t have been plucked from a nearby freezer plugged into a wall. It would have started its journey right here, trekking through the night on horseback, past our farm, heading for its final destination, perhaps even on the other side of the Mediterranean. All this water, travelling so far.

‘It’s an amazing thought,’ said Faustino.

It had all come to an end towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when artificial means of creating ice had been introduced. No one had use any more for the ice from the mountains: they could make it themselves. And so the ice-houses had been abandoned one by one. Many had been lost or forgotten, some had fallen down, but a number were still to be found around the mountains in good condition, a testament to a different, distant way of life.

We stepped out through the small entrance and into the forest again. It had grown quite chilly in there and I was almost thankful to come out to a more normal temperature.

‘The sad thing is,’ Faustino said, ‘that even if you wanted to go back to those old ways, there wouldn’t be enough snow to make it viable any more. Yes, it snows up here in the winter, and how. But not like it used to. Not enough.’

He coughed again, and spat.

‘Think of all the ice that they could gather and store up here back then. Keeping it safe until it was needed and then taking it out and distributing it, pouring it out like rain. The land needs more of it, more than ever, but we’re running out. We have to look after what we’ve got, use it well.’

It didn’t need saying, but I knew that by talking of ‘water’ and ‘ice’ he was also referring to his stories. They were what moved him most, even if he would never have admitted it. If there was a link between stories and water, then this ice-house would mean much to him. I imagined the trail of the ice-men, trekking over the mountains and down to the coast, like ancient camel routes or the Silk Road, streams of stories, legends and folk tales rushing under the feet of the merchants with their wares as they crossed the land. This place had once been a fountain, a source, for the people in the cities, a direct link between themselves and the mountains that rose in the west. The connection had been lost. Now the fountain itself had all but dried up.

Faustino walked back to the top of the mound and sat down near the hole. Fishing into a pocket he pulled out a hip flask and took a swig.

‘It’s not a good idea to have a smoke out here,’ he said looking around at the dead, dry wood and pine needles on the ground. ‘Not at this time of year.’

He handed the flask to me and I sat down next to him. It was odd to think there was a bloody great vaulted hallway right underneath us. But for the hole in the ground, which was almost covered in grass anyway, there would simply have been no way of knowing. I lifted the flask to my mouth and drank. Truffle-flavoured brandy powered its way down into my belly: it felt like smoke was pouring from my ears.

Faustino stared out into the trees. Something was on his mind, but it seemed best to let him be for the time being. He was the kind of man who only ever said what he wanted to say: there was no point trying to push him at all. We sat like that for some time, watching the occasional bird dart in and out among the trees, listening to the breathing of the forest as the sun moved overhead, lengthening the shadows that crossed over us, protecting us from its rays. It was a good place to be, to sit and do nothing. So much could happen by simply keeping still. My mind wandered, dreaming of the ice-men and their watery trails. Where else had they gone from here, I wondered. Inland, perhaps? North and south, as well as east to the coast? It felt like a hub of some sort. My imagination flew, and I could see trails spreading out in all directions from where we sat, crossing the landscape like a vast spider’s web, droplets of water like dew glistening along each path. And each droplet
was
a story, the stories spreading out, soaking into the land to give life, then slowly joining together again like beads of mercury to form a lake, a sea. And there the water stayed, waiting, waiting … until the process could begin once again.

After a time Faustino stirred a little and I was brought out of my reverie. He shuffled where he sat, then took another drink. I could hear the brandy sink through him as he gulped, his Adam’s apple twitching down his long, fragile throat.