A Long Walk in the High Hills Read online

  I want to leap out and hug Santiago Monserrat when he arrives on his bright red tractor later that day with a small six-ton water bowser behind him. Santiago is wearing a baseball hat set slightly back off his cheery face and with one hand on his hip, the other on the steering wheel, to this girl he is like a gift from the gods. Still or fizzy, he shouts over the fence as he begins pumping spring water into my deposito.

  ‘Will you come next week?’

  ‘Sí, sí, no problemas,’ he says as he pockets 2,000 pesetas and chugs off down the hill.

  I wonder if Emmy Lou and Lauren might come to an agreement about doing up the road now that we three are totally dependent on Santiago. ‘If the road was in better condition,’ I implore over the phone, ‘the large water tanker would make the journey. Surely this is vital for us all?’

  Neither, however, is remotely interested in discussing water or the state of the road again. They have no money and that is the end of that.

  Desperate days call for desperate measures so I phone up Gunther. Francine answers and goes to get him.

  ‘Gunther,’ I begin, ‘can you tell me who you got to drill for water?’

  ‘No, I don’t remember.’ Gunther still isn’t feeling neighbourly. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I’m thinking of drilling in my field. Is there plenty in your well?’

  ‘No. Water is in short supply and in any case it is contaminated.’

  ‘Contaminated with what?’

  ‘With arsenic’

  ‘Arsenic?’

  ‘Yup, and it is the colour of shit. Brown.’

  I try not to take this personally but it’s obvious I can’t rely on Gunther. I’m not sure of my next move. Drilling for water seems to be the only sensible option when everyone is at odds over how to care for the road. So if I am going to drill, I begin to reason, I’ll have to find water first. I’m going to need a water diviner.

  A bit of detective work later and I am in a restaurant in Andratx, which has a fountain spouting spring water in its courtyard. Not surprising then that the owner, a lugubrious little man, does a bit of dowsing on the side and agrees to come over to my place the next day. I just wish he looked happier about it. Nevertheless he turns up on time, kitted out in black wearing what I take are his best black leather loafers, a yellow duster-like cloth with two twigs under his arm. He manages a strangled ‘buenos’ to me and sets off through the long grass, twigs not yet twitching. I pad behind him, neither of us saying a word. He knows what he is looking for and I am completely absorbed in the quest.

  When he gets to a fig tree by the boundary of the field, suddenly the twigs, like poltergeists, get active. He moves in a small circle, round and round, his arms like metronomes. ‘You have lots of water here,’ he says, then quietly, ‘mucho, mucho’ as the twigs swing back and forth with great and remarkable energy.

  Soon I am deep in negotiation with a one-legged Swede who my dowser says is the expert hereabouts on the business of drilling for water. Erland is in his sixties and lost his leg putting a new roof on Emmy Lou’s house ten years back, but that is another story. He has branched out into delving for water and is telling me he will oversee the enormous drilling machine while I am away working. We get the financial side sorted straight off. It will cost the equivalent of five thousand pounds just to get the machine to the field. Then each metre drilled and each metre lined with pipe has a price. Plus, if I strike lucky, there will be a pump to buy. More importantly I have to decide if I am going to drill where the dowser’s twigs twitched and, if so, am I absolutely certain I want to gamble on them because finding water underground is notoriously difficult in Mallorca? I could lose the lot. Another long drag on his cigarette and Erland’s sorrowful blue eyes fix on me. I get the feeling he is itching me to throw the dice.

  ‘I don’t have much time to waste,’ I venture, thinking of my earlier encounter with the water haulier in Andratx and my travel plans later that year. ‘I have come this far, let’s have a go.’

  Erland eases himself on to his good leg and with surprising agility, hops off to close the deal with the drillers in Palma.

  I’ve had enough excitement for one day, so quickly, before anyone or anything else turns up, I grab the old key from its hook and lock the heavy front door. Secreting the key under a rock, I’m off for a walk. The earth is still parched, dust dances round my feet as I stride out through fields of almond and olive, up through the woods of sweet pine and holm oak to the track that will take me to the coast. The air is different here, with a movement and freshness that makes today’s trek a joy.

  These footpaths will have been used for centuries by local people moving animals to graze on the mountains in the summer months, or to reach hill settlements further up the island. There are small huts, casitas, dotted around the slopes, their roofs broken but the stone walls still intact, now offering shelter for wild goats. Grey and white, brown and black, some with massive corkscrew horns, it seems there are goats claiming the heights round every crag. These inquisitive creatures who live off wild lavender and cistus know where spring water pours out of the rock and are very taken with strangers on their patch. I am told they are indigenous to Mallorca. They make me laugh with their sudden bursts of feigned surprise and flight.

  Without warning, the wide track turns tiny into a narrower path which splits off in another direction. You have to know – and remember – which one leads to where you want to go. There is no sign of the sea here, all around is a mountain-scape of dry scrub. I have been here before and know to take the path downhill towards a dry river bed, jumping from stone to stone to make progress, before climbing up the steep incline to reach the top of another hill and its sudden, spectacular view. Cliffs, hundreds of feet high, veer into the distance, on and on, almost to infinity, the blue Mediterranean crashing against the rocks as seabirds cruise-control the currents. It is a kind of primeval vista which must have caught and held the moment for so many people, millennia before.

  The track to the left eases me along the cliff top towards the old monastery of Sa Trapa another hour away An order of Trappist monks came here hundreds of years ago, loved the setting, and began irrigating and building a hermetic life overlooking the unspoiled island of Dragonera. Perched precipitously on the headland edge, the community dwindled at the beginning of the twentieth century until only a couple of old monks were left, hanging on until Sa Trapa fell into total ruin. Today it is a designated protected site and work has begun on its preservation. As it will add another hour to my walk if I step off the path and go down to Sa Trapa I decide to carry on, climbing higher to the mountain pass which tips me into a steep descent, down to the fishing village of San Telm below.

  After my long walk, I’m feeling a little less frantic about life back at the hacienda. Although I can’t believe I’m now engaged in drilling for something as basic as water so soon after buying the place, I have a horrible feeling hand-to-hand combat over electricity looms. The island gives the impression it’s up to speed. Heavy electric cables swing uglily yet practically along all the streets and water comes out of taps like other European countries, but local politicians make such heavy weather of everything I’m beginning to wonder if, as an incomer, I’m equipped for the challenge. When the sun shines from the heavens on a day like this, though, it’s hard not to convince myself, I am.

  Eight hundred years ago something that appeals to the bruiser in me happened here in San Telm. It was a similar sunny day when the great fleet of a hundred and fifty sailing ships of the Christian king Jaime I dropped anchor to face five thousand Muslims lined up on the shore. Jaime was just twenty-one years old, apparently a hunk, well over six feet tall with red hair and blue eyes, who had come determined to reconquer Mallorca and remove the Moors after three hundred years of Islam. Fifteen hundred Arabs were crushed along the coast that September day, changing the destiny of the island and San Telm. Soon after a protective castle went up which still guards the bay today.

  San Telm is o
ne of the few villages on the coast in Mallorca that Jaime would still recognise if he stepped ashore now. The tiny island of Panteleu, 250 yards from the beach, in Jaime’s words, ‘a long crossbow shot from the mainland’, remains unspoiled, a colony of shearwater sea birds mumbling and grumbling on it as night falls. I wish Jaime were around now. He could prove jolly useful.

  Lungfuls of mountain air and mighty fights have made me hungry and luckily there are plenty of cafés in San Telm from which to choose. So many restaurants on the island serve up hearty, heavy fare which palls very quickly. There is only so much calamari grille or paella a girl can handle. And the salads, which are universally uninspiring, arrive on a big platter covered in what looks like half a cabbage with man-size tomato slices and a tin of tuna dumped on top. Proper Mallorquín cooking is a rare find.

  In San Telm there are several restaurants that venture into tempting territory. The fish served at the oceanside restaurant at Cala Conills is one. It looks out on to Dragonera into the setting sun, a romantic venue reached by a sea-washed path up from the shore. Another is the family-run restaurant of Chez Janneau on the opposite side of the bay, which carves jamon serrano, ham from the black pig on the mainland, and other Spanish delicacies to locals dining under pine trees. The restaurants huddled together on the pier are also spectacularly sited, and with their home cooking and special cakes ordered fresh from a small bakery in Andratx, no wonder there is a constant coming and going throughout the day.

  Most of the cafés and bars along the bay are owned by families from my village who come each summer to make a living from the tourists. It is a source of wonderment to me how they have resisted the temptation to develop and wreck while all around others cave in and concrete over the beauty of the coast. I would love to have been here in the 1950s when the only road in to the resort was a dirt track through the hills and a few shacks and fishing huts lined the shore, but today, nevertheless, San Telm is charming with an end-of-season air as holidaymakers begin to plot their journey home.

  Normally I’d pop into Janneau’s café for a cold beer and sandwich but it’s his day off so instead I make for the café overlooking the bay further down the road where three middle-aged sisters from the village serve home-made food through the year. The café caters mainly for workmen and locals because its prices are reasonable. The oldest of the sisters, Caty, is leaning on a chair under the blue-and-white awning when I breeze in looking for a bite to eat. Caty’s speciality is arroz marinera, a rice dish eaten like a soup flavoured with a rich sea stock and cooked in the traditional way with mussels and cod and squid. For a few pesetas you can get this along with a flan (a crème caramel) and coffee. It is a dish to share so instead, I opt for a pa amb oli to go with my beer, a real filler: two large slices of wholemeal bread rubbed with ripe tomatoes, olive oil and layers of jamon serrano.

  Caty has a cheeky diffidence towards her regulars. She glides with a kind of theatrical absentmindedness, swiping her tables with a damp cloth as she gestures customers to their seats. An elderly American professor is having his usual fish of the day with his friend, a German artist from the village. They’ve taken the best seats in the corner under the canopy. ‘Caty, you’re looking particularly fetching,’ one of them shouts across to her, ‘what have you got for our lunch?’

  These two come each weekday to tease Caty and take the sea air and with their shiny tonsures could easily be mistaken for the last couple of monks to make it out of Sa Trapa. The American professor is, incongruously, sporting a thick padded vest on this very warm day. He obviously feels the cold. Caty treats them to a giggle and a dismissive wave of her cloth before calling their order to her younger sister slaving in the kitchen.

  The pair of them are here for the afternoon. I, however, have tons to do and although the beer is proving a bit of a break, twenty minutes later I’m off, back to the village, mindful of taking a shortcut round the hill by the cemetery so that I won’t have to pass Kendi listening for me in her kennel on the way up to my house.

  It has poured down overnight. Great crashes of thunder roll over the village followed by lightning, vicious and unrelenting. The dogs in the fincas higher up the valley fall silent as an unexpected rush of wind whips through the pine trees, pushing and bending the cypresses before suddenly dropping as the rain begins its drenching again. Storms in Mallorca often start with the slightest of changes, a few pale clouds in a clear blue sky, or a thin, warming breeze on a still day. Soon the deluge will begin, smashing into the red, parched land, which, overwhelmed, spills it straight into the nearest torrente along with what’s left of my track to the village.

  After the battering, it’s a joy to unlock the shutters and step outside, to smell the hot earth after its cooling. Sodden tendrils of vine litter the ground along with dozens of scarlet baby flowers blown from the pomegranate tree, but this morning I have no time to stand and stare. I have had a phone call from CBS who need me to fly to Kenya to check unsubstantiated rumours that elephants are being slaughtered for their ivory in a country which depends for its livelihood on safari tourism. It will be an international scandal if we can uncover evidence, so somehow I need to manage to manoeuvre myself down the washed-away track that morning to get to the airport and London, where I’m booked on an overnight flight for Nairobi.

  Erland now knows he’s in charge of water drilling while I’m away. The rig has been booked for this coming week and we cannot cancel. ‘I can handle it,’ he assures me, ‘have a good trip and keep fingers crossed’, as the car and I go free fall, slithering through the mud, lurching in and out of the newly exposed potholes, to somehow reach the bottom of the hill before the car stalls – right outside Kendi’s kennel. In that small moment, in the time it takes to turn the key and re-start the engine, I have glimpsed what I feared: a creature in utter misery. Wet to the bone, still anchored by a short chain to the cold damp concrete, she is looking up at me as if to ask ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ What’s worse, I know more torrential rain is forecast for her later in the day. And because I know there is nothing I can do, just then, to release her from this hell, I’m afraid I begin to cry as I pull away.

  At the airport, thousands of holidaymakers are arriving from all over Europe. Private jets ferry owners of luxury yachts to sail from up-market marinas round the coast. Mercs and Audis queue for parking space. This is becoming one of the wealthiest islands in the world but not a single peseta leaves the government purse to help care for its hundreds of abandoned and cruelly treated cats and dogs. There is no animal rescue organisation that has the power to come and release Kendi in my absence. As I board the plane for London, I begin to realise that it will be down to me to deal with her release on my return.

  The film made in Kenya over the next ten days leads to a dramatic change in the international CITES law on poaching as footage of elephants, mothers and babies, hacked to death for whatever minuscule amount of ivory they possess, sickens America. In the northern hills of Kora, the Born Free conservationist, George Adamson, old and sinewy, but passionate still, finally found us the evidence we were seeking. Through the bush near his camp, he took us, on foot, to a clearing where the noise of thousands of flies round the headless, swollen carcasses of a small family herd soundtracked, prime time, across the States a couple of weeks later.

  George Adamson lived long enough to witness the world’s revulsion that brought about a ban on the ivory trade but confronting poachers early one morning after hearing shots outside his camp, George Adamson was murdered.

  It is a grim weekday afternoon. I’m in my office in New York, under pressure to get the film cut and ready for airing on West 57th that Saturday night, when Erland phones. The weather has been so bad on the island, he tells me, that the drilling rig couldn’t get up the road, but the men have now arrived, he declares, and are ready to begin. I had quite forgotten the drilling in my rush to get the hard-fought-for footage back to the States and here is Erland urgently needing to know if I want a rig to start on my lan
d first.

  Did I hear him right? ‘Where else would a rig be drilling first if not with me?’

  ‘Well,’ Erland hesitated, ‘Emmy Lou’s.’

  ‘What? Emmy Lou is drilling? I thought she had no money?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Erland diplomatically stalls for time, ‘but Emmy Lou found out you were going to drill so she’s going to have a go too. So is Lauren. They’ve had their own diviners up here. They’re both drilling for water.’

  ‘Both drilling?’

  This means three of us are using money to find water which we may or may not discover when we could have clubbed together and had tankerloads of fresh spring water delivered for evermore if we had done up the road instead.

  Out of frustration I tell Erland to get the driller to start on Emmy Lou’s land first. If she can’t find water, I threaten, then I won’t bother going ahead. It will serve her right if there isn’t any. Erland says he’ll report back.

  When Erland eventually phones again he’s in a bit of a state. ‘The good news,’ he starts off, ‘is the driller tackled Emmy Lou’s and Lauren’s land first, although they’re mad at you, and at fifty metres they found lots of water . . .’ he pauses. ‘But I’m afraid we’ve gone down a great depth on your land and there’s no water.’

  ‘No water? But there must be water. Emmy Lou and Lauren have found it, haven’t they?’

  An image of we three women like the witches in Macbeth, hubbling and troubling, flickers across my mind.

  ‘What do you want me to do now?’ asks Erland.

  ‘What on earth do you suggest?’ I counter.