Sacred Sierra (22 page)

‘They got the bones out just in time,’ El Clossa said. ‘They’re down in Castellón museum.’

I handed him back the photograph.

‘No water this winter,’ he said as we set off on our walk along the dirt track that ran along the side of the riverbed. ‘This should be full at this time of year.’ He nodded down at the dry, moulded rock, empty pools laid bare like cupped hands pleading to receive nourishment and refreshment. ‘If it doesn’t rain …’

He hobbled on. The butt of his crutches made their familiar
TOK, TOK
sound as he propelled himself forward with each step in a complex, whole-body motion, powerful hands pushing against the well-worn handles. The veins stood out against his thickened wrists, a delicate gold chain nestling in the dark hairs of one of his forearms.

There was little more than twilight down at the bottom of the valley: the low, late winter sun couldn’t penetrate down here, and we walked in heavy shade while catching odd glimpses above of a crystal-blue sky filtering through the pine trees. The only colour came from the pink sand of the track beneath our feet, while the green of the oleander bushes lining the banks of the riverbed contrasted with the sharp white rocks of the mountains rising up on either side. Every so often I caught sight of yellow gorse blooms pushing through, but the landscape felt as
if
it were on hold down here, waiting patiently, desperately, for the rains to come and restore things to their natural state; to flood the hillsides and send gushing torrents of clear, healing, life-giving water down this parched channel, scratched, like a wound, into the flesh of the earth.

I had only ever driven up this part of the track – just beyond the turning up to our mountain. After a few miles it ended at a small quarry where a man in a truck came once a day to dig out some chunks of low-grade marble for use in road building. I’d been to have a look once, out of curiosity, but had found little of interest and so had never returned: the village lay in the other direction and this was a dead end; there was nothing else up here. Or so I had thought until El Clossa had informed me otherwise. There was much, he’d said, to be discovered. And so we’d fixed a date to spend the day walking around the area. At least, I walked; what El Clossa did was closer to flying.

El Clossa had insisted on an early start: there was still little daylight at this time of year and we would need every hour available to complete the route he had in mind. After meeting him down at the chain at the bottom of our road, he’d set off as usual like a rocket: the able-bodied just had to keep up: there was no time for loafing about.

Crossing the riverbed for a second time as it curled around the track, I wondered aloud about fossils in this area. I’d come across strange forms and shapes in the rocks I used for building dry-stone walls and during the restoration of the house, things that seemed to hint at ancient life, now petrified, buried inside them, but never anything a layman such as myself could identify as a ‘fossil’.

‘There are some marine animals around,’ he said, ‘but not a huge number in this particular valley. Some a bit further up, closer to the peak of Penyagolosa.’

I bent down quickly to pick up a stone at the side of the track that caught my eye – deep red lines running through pale white. It felt good in my hand as I turned it over, rubbing my thumb over the contours, warm and pleasing. Today it lay at the foot of pine trees and gorse bushes, but what else had this rock seen through the millions of years of its life?

‘This area is Cretaceous,’ El Clossa said. ‘As most of the province is,
except
for the south, which is mostly Jurassic and Triassic. There’s some Jurassic rock not far from here, but the Penyagolosa massif – what we’re at the edge of and just about to climb – is Cretaceous.’

I tried to remember something from my primary school classes about the dinosaurs, and anything else I’d picked up on the subject since. We were in the Mesozoic era, I seemed to remember, made up of the Triassic, then the Jurassic and finally the Cretaceous periods. But when exactly had all this been?

‘About a hundred million years ago,’ El Clossa said. ‘Roughly. Give or take thirty or forty million years. That’s when all these rocks around us would have been formed.’

I tried, but simply couldn’t get my head around the figures. He could have pulled any number out and I would have believed him. A hundred million years?

‘Not that old if you think the earth is about four billion years old,’ he said.

For a moment I felt I could understand the creationists and their simple stories about how all this had begun. It was so much more emotionally appealing to think some bloke had just made the world by snapping his fingers over the course of a few days virtually within human memory, than to take on board timescales that were beyond our ordinary imagination.

‘Cretaceous comes from the Latin for “chalk”,’ El Clossa went on. ‘All this rock would originally have been seabed. That’s what makes limestone, and sometimes chalk.’

‘And that’s why you find marine fossils round here,’ I said, putting the pieces together.

‘There are mussel shells at the top of Penyagolosa,’ he said. ‘Almost two thousand metres above the current sea level.’

I liked the way he used the word ‘current’. El Clossa lived not in the fixed world most of us saw, but one in a state of flux. The earthquakes and shifting plates that had churned those sea creatures up and lifted them into the sky were part of the landscape he inhabited.

He talked more about the geology of the area as we walked on. The Cretaceous period had been when the first bees had appeared, co-evolving towards the end of that time with the first flowering
plants
. It had also seen the appearance of ants and grasshoppers, as well as leafy trees such as figs and magnolias. Meanwhile, these mountains around us, as most of the mountains in the country, had been formed at the same time as the Alps – the Alpine Orogeny. It was at a time when the Iberian Peninsula, on a minor tectonic plate of its own, semi-detached from the rest of Europe, had crashed into what was now southern France, creating the Pyrenees as it merged with the mainland.

‘Geologically,’ he said, ‘we’re not really part of Europe and we’re not part of Africa either. We’re on our own, almost like an island.’

In an instant so much of the Spanish character seemed to be explained: the controversial ‘difference’ of Spain, its insularity and strong sense of independence; its wanting to join Europe but never quite being a part of it. It was no mere country: it was a mini-subcontinent. Could the geology of the place, events that had happened a hundred million years before, really have played a part in the formation of a national character?

We reached the end of the track, the quarry just ahead of us, an empty space with piles of dark-grey rock piled up here and there waiting to be picked up and carted away. Occasionally we had heard the explosions from this spot up at the farm as they blasted away at the stone to loosen it. It was a curious place, this tiny vein of black marble surrounded by the white and pink limestone of the rest of the landscape.

‘Marble is metamorphosed limestone,’ El Clossa explained. ‘Lime that’s been transformed by heat and pressure of the years. There’s not much of it round here, but where there is they get at it and dig it out as best they can.’

‘But you haven’t just brought me to look at the quarry,’ I said.

‘There used to be an ancient fortress here,’ he said. ‘But it was destroyed by them digging all this out. Iberian, probably.’

Now there was just a big hole.

‘We,’ El Clossa said with a grin, ‘are going up here.’

And he was off again, charging off the track, across the riverbed and disappearing into some oleander bushes at the bottom of what looked like a steep slope. I followed as fast as I could: blink and I might lose
him
altogether. There didn’t seem to be any path in sight, though. Perhaps he liked engaging in a bit of off-road hobbling. Did they make four-wheel-drive crutches?

I pushed through the oleander leaves trying to figure out where he had gone. I could hear him further along, cracking at the ground as he flung himself upwards. Just which track was he walking on? Then, as I scanned the land ahead, peering through the thick foliage, I caught sight of what looked like steps, built into the rock. For a moment I felt like an explorer in the Amazon suddenly discovering a trail in the jungle to a long-lost city. I must be seeing things, though. We were in the middle of nowhere. Why would there be steps here? I moved closer in and poked at the ground with my foot, clearing away some of the undergrowth. Smooth, worn stone steps glared back at me. With a deep, sudden longing I knew nothing but the urgent desire to find out where they led.

‘Come on!’ El Clossa called from higher up. ‘We have to keep moving.’

Five breathless minutes later I caught up with him, fighting my way through the bushes and trees as I attempted to follow the almost invisible path. The steps seemed to vanish and then reappear at times, while broken twigs and flattened plants showed me where my companion had passed only moments before. The climb was steep, but I found him standing by an ancient juniper tree, waiting. We had climbed high enough now to feel the first rays of sun on our faces. Behind, the bare mountain rose up in a kind of bulge, black smoky stains on the overhang underneath. There was a flat area here, with signs of it having once been used as a shelter by humans.

‘That’s an
abrigo
,’ El Clossa said pointing to the area with a crutch. ‘Open caves in the rock. Farmers used to shelter in them during rainstorms.’

‘And light fires to keep warm, by the looks of things,’ I said.

‘This used to be an important route we’re walking on,’ he said. ‘They’d bring their produce down from the mountains, then meet up with the river we’ve just left and follow it down all the way to the coast. It was a main road linking the sea and the mountains.’

And now it was a lost path winding up an overgrown, abandoned
mountainside
. For a moment I saw trains of donkeys and mules trekking up and down past where we were standing, wicker baskets thrown over their backs filled with wheat, figs, grapes, almonds. What did the
masovers
bring back with them from the towns and villages where they sold their produce?

‘Ironware – knives, tools,’ El Clossa said. ‘Material for making clothes. They were strongly independent folk. It was a hard life for them: they had to be tough. Most of them just dreamed of earning enough money to buy a little flat in the village to live out their last days. You couldn’t survive up here with arthritis or a dodgy hip. If you weren’t fit to be out working and climbing mountains all day you had to jack it in. No comforts back then. Effectively they didn’t even have the wheel until about a hundred years ago.’

I knew the wheel hadn’t reached the New World until the Spanish invasions, but we were definitely in the Old World here, despite my earlier Amazonian fantasies.

‘The first proper road to the village from the coast wasn’t built until the end of the nineteenth century,’ he said. ‘Before then you could only travel up here on horseback. No roads, no wheels. And up here where we are now the wheel probably never made it at all.’

Once again I had the sense of time-travelling, of having been transported, unwittingly, to an ancient land, one that existed on my very doorstep.

‘Okay, they probably
knew
about the wheel here,’ he said, ‘but it was something other people had, not them. They had animals, and their own legs to carry them.’

There was a pause: no bitterness in his voice or expression. He picked up his crutches and launched himself back on to the path.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

We continued upwards, past a few burnt out stumps left from the forest fire years before, where the greenery had for some reason failed to re-establish itself. Exposed limestone pushed through the earth; strange, wave-like erosion patterns formed on the surface. From a few metres higher up we were able to look down at the overhang where we had just been. Black and orange streaks cascaded down the rockface above it where water filtering from above had left mineral deposits. In
some
places weird rounded shapes had formed over the years, faces and dragons staring out like gargoyles.

Slowly, the climb began to ease as the path reached flatter land. We were high up above the valley here, and the surrounding mountains felt more like friends now, less imposing, as the sky opened up over our heads. Stumpy holm oaks lined the path, dense and prickly, the ground beneath them covered in a very similar looking oak bush –
coscoll
. There would be plenty of wild boar up here, I felt sure, and I started looking for telltale signs of their burrowing in the soil for acorns and roots, bitter memories of the damage they had done to my own small attempt to plant a forest bubbling angrily inside me.

There were no more carved steps now, but I noticed a low stone wall running along the side of us as we walked on. Rather than marking a field division, it actually seemed to be there to show the route we should follow. Was this one of the ancient transhumance trails El Clossa had mentioned to me before, the day we saw the dinosaur bones?

Just then I heard him call out. I looked up and saw him pointing forwards. Up ahead of us was a white abandoned
mas
standing proudly on a flat area of land.

‘The Mas Roig,’ he said. ‘Your neighbours.’

We walked closer, over open fields of thick, short grass. The
mas
was like a little village or hamlet, a group of four or five houses grouped around in one corner, while another house was set apart, perhaps three hundred yards away. They were built on a horizontal tongue of land jutting out from the slope of the mountainside, the land cascading away steeply on three sides. Behind the farmhouses, cut into the earth, terraced fields curled away following the contours, almost completing a semi-circle so that it looked not unlike a gigantic Greek theatre. Above, a bulbous, red-faced mountain loomed large.