Parrot in the Pepper Tree (29 page)

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.’

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 of 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.’

‘Oh, that seems a pity… it looks alright to me.

‘Well it isn’t, but it’ll do for the time being. I’m off to England tomorrow. I’ll sort it out when I get back.’

‘What are you going to England for?’

‘I’m going on a course.’

‘What sort of a course?’

‘Personal development — of a kind, said Trev with what I thought was just a touch of archness.

‘When will you be back, then?’

‘I’ll be gone for a month at least.’

‘A month! But you can’t, you haven’t finished the pool yet!’

‘It’ll be alright; it’ll do you for the rest of the summer.

‘And what if it doesn’t work?’

‘It will work. I know it will. I’ve done the calculations.’

‘Bloody hell, Trev, you’ve got a nerve, buggering off right in the middle of a job!’

‘Look, apart from anything else, it’ll be a lot nicer for you lot if you can have the pool to yourselves for the rest of the summer, without me hanging around the place all the time. Also I’ve got to go tomorrow or I’ll be late for the course, and I don’t want to miss out on this one…

‘Okay. So what course is it then?’

Trev looked fixedly at the bubble in his level.

‘Tantric Sex, residential,’ he said.

‘Aah… I see,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘No, you don’t want to be late for that.’
 

So Trev left to disport himself in Yorkshire, leaving us free to fool around in the crystal clear water of our new swimming-hole.

‘Look,’ I said to Ana. ‘You can even see the bottom!’

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘So you can.

But the next day the bottom had disappeared altogether. ‘You can’t see the bottom at all now,’ Chloë observed.

‘Yes, I know, but that’s only natural, and besides, I think a green tinge makes the water look even more inviting, don’t you?’

Chloë and Ana were unsure about this. And the next day a number of the lower steps had gone the way of the bottom.

‘I think it gives it something of the look of a woodland pool, which is rather nice,’ I suggested in response to the criticism.

But over the next few days the woodland pool became a thin miso soup, which thickened and greened up at an alarming rate. By the end of the week it had become an opaque sludge of mephitic green with a layer of slime floating on the surface. I was the only one left swimming.

‘Oh come on, Chris, you can’t — it’s disgusting.’

‘I admit, it doesn’t look terribly appetising, but unless I’m mistaken I think it’s just the tiniest bit cleaner today — you can almost make out the second step.’

All week I had been trying hard to remain positive. The slime seemed to mean the failure of the whole system, although as far as I could tell all the various elements were functioning properly. There was sunshine all through each long day to power the electric pumps, so the water was being lifted perfectly well into the sand-filter. Thence it was seeping at a proper rate through the sand back into the bottom of the pool, where it set up its circulatory current. Then it spilled over the top, where the sun was impregnating with its ultra-violet rays the sheets of water that coursed thinly down the stone channels. From there it poured into the fish pond where the fish eagerly glooped up the algae and other organisms inimical to the clarity of our water. All this seemed to be working… so what was going wrong?