Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  ‘Cavanilles used to say he could only come up here to Penyagolosa between June and September,’ Faustino said. ‘Because for the rest of the year it was like midwinter up here. The top of Penyagolosa,’ he went on, pointing instinctively in the direction of the peak, invisible from where we were owing to the density of the forest, ‘was covered in snow all year round.’

  It was very different from today, when we were lucky to get one coating a year in midwinter perhaps. Two hundred years on, this was most definitely a hotter part of the world than it had once been.

  ‘It’s lucky for me the place is heating up,’ Faustino said. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to grow my tobacco up here otherwise.’

  We stepped from the shade of the forest and out into a field. We were in a kind of dell, and the heat seemed to have been trapped there. Bits of dirt found their way through the gaps in my walking sandals as we cut across dry, scratchy long grass.

  ‘Down here is the perfect spot for it,’ he went on. ‘It’s warm and sunny, as you can see. Look, it’s south-facing. There’s a constant supply of water. And, what’s more, no one else even knows it exists.’

  From somewhere below I could hear a trickling sound. Wherever his secret plantation was, it was probably somewhere close by.

  ‘Water’s important, you see,’ he said. ‘It always has been.’

  Many of the old oracles of the ancient world, he said, were next to natural springs or rivers: Per-Wadjet, Delphi, Siwa. All the old theatres in Shakespeare’s London as well.

  ‘You should know that: Holywell, Clerkenwell, Sadler’s Wells – all near sacred wells. And then there are all those folk tales about the fountain of eternal youth, etcetera. There’s often something making a link between stories and water.’

  I’d travelled to the Siwa oasis many years before as a student learning Arabic in Alexandria. It was strange hearing him mention it now. For a moment I was there in the Western Desert again, riding in the back of a rusty, baking old bus along the Egyptian–Libyan border to visit the place where they said the oracle had once named Alexander the Great the son of the god Amun. It had been a place of stories and mysteries, water simply bubbling up through the barren rock in places with names like ‘Cleopatra’s Bath’. The oasis was still unspoilt when I went there, with a unique Berber culture which up until a hundred years earlier had allowed homosexual marriage. The locals told me stories of incredible treasure still buried in the nearby hills from the time of Alexander and before, but the secret of finding it had long been lost. My visit, however, had coincided with the first forays of a tourism development team from Cairo, driving around the sand in a golden Mercedes with plans for hotels and golf courses where at that time stood ancient salt-mud ruins. I hadn’t been back since, but reports I’d heard suggested the place had changed beyond recognition.

  I was brought back to the present by the sound of Faustino’s voice.

  ‘The ancient oracles used to be sacred to the earth, or the earth goddesses,’ he said, ‘before they were handed over to Apollo.’

  He stopped the mule and turned to look at me. We were caught in the blazing sun; I rather wished we could find a shady spot before pausing in our walk like this.

  ‘There was a sacred laurel at Delphi,’ he said. ‘When the oracular power was transferred to Apollo, the god started chasing after Daphne, Gaia’s daughter. But she fled, and as she ran she called that her mother might save her. And so the earth opened up and swallowed her, leaving Apollo on his own. And where she had vanished a laurel bush stood. Apollo was angry, and he commanded that if Daphne wouldn’t be his wife, then the laurel would forever be his tree. And he plucked a branch of it there and then and crowned himself with it.’

  The thought came to me that if he knew about the stories behind the plants, he might know something about their supposed healing properties as well. The heat was beginning to make me dizzy and I could feel a headache developing at the back of my neck.

  ‘Headache?’ he said with a look of surprise when I mentioned this to him. ‘Take an aspirin!’

  And he turned and walked away. After a pause I followed after him. If we were indeed near the spring at least there I might be able to cool down a little.

  We skipped down some rocks at the side of the gorge, and suddenly there in front of us was a small field with bright green, unmistakeable plants growing in bushes, like a small wood. Next to them was an archway built into the side of the mountain, from which a steady flow of water was spilling out down a channel and into a small, round pool made of stone, perhaps ten feet across. At the edge of this another channel had been made and was carrying water in the direction of Faustino’s plants.

  I’d never seen home-grown tobacco plants before. It wasn’t anything a farmer in Virginia would waste his time with, but for one man’s supply it was nothing to be ashamed of. The plants were already almost as tall as we were and were branching out in thick bunches of leaves. There must have been about twenty or more of them, each giving off a heavy odour in the late afternoon sun.

  ‘They’ll easily grow another half a metre or more before harvesting,’ Faustino said. He looked serious all of a sudden, the farmer tending his precious crop. The mule started drinking from the pool while he got down on his hands and knees and started checking the irrigation channels running to the base of each plant. The whole thing was kept very neat, I noticed, as though he came down here quite regularly. There wasn’t a weed to be seen around the plants themselves, while the irrigation channels ran in perfectly straight little lines. I took a step forward to get a closer look.

  ‘Mind where you’re treading,’ Faustino barked without looking up.

  I’d been a smoker in the past, but had given up after picking up a nasty chest infection some five years before. Still, there was something jolly about this little corner of an illegal field: the sense of freedom and a complete lack of state or police interference. In a landscape so devoid of man it seemed churlish even to think of ‘laws’. Some other, deeper laws of behaviour and civilisation were the norm in this kind of environment: the very absence of the modern world seemed to call to a deep-rooted, more essentially human sense of right and wrong. And there was clearly nothing ‘wrong’ in an old storyteller growing a few plants to help him pass the winter nights if he wanted to.

  Once again, Faustino seemed to be reading my mind.

  ‘And to think they say it’s illegal,’ he said. ‘How can you make a plant illegal? Can you imagine making oak trees illegal? Or artichokes? Or parsley?’

  He scraped at the soil plug in the channel at his feet and the water flooded through to irrigate another one of his plants.

  ‘There ought to be a law against making things illegal,’ he said.

  I sat in the shade cast by a rock higher up the side of the gorge and sniffed at my hands where I’d rubbed them through the leaves of his precious plants. Could you tell something about the quality of a plant from its smell, I wondered, as you could with a wine? Perhaps there were tobacco ‘noses’ out there sniffing and sampling and discussing tasting notes as we spoke.

  Faustino finished with his plants and came over to the pool to rinse his hands. I watched as the water circled the base of each bush, bubbling and foaming a little before soaking gently into the soil. He would leave them like this for a few minutes to get a good watering before we set off again, he said. I put my hands into the pool as well: the water was cool and fresh, small eddies showing where the tiny current pushed it along and down towards the irrigation channels. Small-leaved plants grew in bunches at the edge, like moss, while flies and other insects buzzed about, catching the few precious drops that splashed out and landed on the surface of the rocks. I cupped my hands and brought the water up to my overheated face, splashing it on to my hair and letting it run in delicious streams down my neck and under my shirt to my shoulders.

  ‘You can drink this if you like,’ Faustino said. ‘Está muy buena – it’s good water.’

  One of the things I’d alw
ays loved about the Spanish was the way something as simple as water could be appreciated so highly. As a child growing up in the overly damp British Isles, water was simply something that fell out of the sky – usually too much of it. You certainly never heard anyone describing a particular type of water as being ‘tasty’ or ‘good’. It was just ‘wet’. Here, though, particularly if it came straight out of a mountain, and hadn’t passed through a bottling factory on the way, it was treated with an almost holy reverence. I took a few grateful gulps. Faustino was right: it was wonderful. No wonder his plants looked so happy.

  We sat on the edge of the pool enjoying the coolness of the spot and watching the water spilling out and on to the land below our feet. For a long while neither of us spoke.

  ‘Watering the land,’ Faustino said after a time, ‘is like gathering and telling the stories. They come from the land, but have to be poured back into it to make things grow. If we don’t take the water that’s coming out of the mountain here it will drain away. Some plants will be able to benefit from it, but not many. But if we take the water and use it to irrigate the land, then we can do a lot more.’

  The sun was finally falling behind the hillside at our backs, and the shadow crossed the small patch of the field by the spring as he spoke, slowly creeping up the other side of the gorge.

  ‘You have to find and look after the stories, otherwise they’ll be lost. And you make sure other people hear them, so that maybe one day they’ll tell them to someone else.’

  He leaned back and put his hand into the water again, making a whirlpool with his fingers.

  ‘It’s important to go out and find the springs,’ he said. ‘The land is drying up.’

  *

  I sat on the terrace outside the house looking out over the valley. The sun had passed behind the Picosa and a cooling breeze was blowing in from the sea. It was an exceptionally clear afternoon for summer, when the cotton-like haze tended to blur the outlines of the horizon. In the south, beyond the village and the hills that rose up behind it, the summits of the next mountain chain – the Sierra de Espadán – could just be seen, a purply, jagged outline that stretched from right to left. We had driven through the area and explored its tiny villages a number of times. It had been one of the last bastions of Moorish Spain, home to the Moriscos, the ‘little Moors’, who remained in Spain under Christian rule long after the fall of Granada in 1492. Forced to convert to Christianity and forbidden from speaking Arabic, they had become one of the forgotten peoples of history. After the fall of Granada the Moorish intelligentsia and nobles had mostly gone into exile, fleeing across the Strait of Gibraltar. Those they left behind were mostly farmers and artisans, tolerated by their Christian masters only for their skills and usefulness to the economy, and looked down upon as tainted by their co-religionists in the rest of the Muslim world.

  Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Moriscos were increasingly seen as a thorn in the side of Spain, a country that had already rid itself of its Jewish community and was doing its best to homogenise itself into a Catholic superstate. After a rebellion by the Moriscos of Granada was brutally put down, the Kingdom of Valencia became home to the most significant concentration of these hangers-on of Al-Andalus. Attempts had been made to convert them fully, even to join Islam and Christianity in some way, concentrating on the common themes of both religions in a manner that might be acceptable to them. But the Moriscos failed to assimilate en masse. They developed their own written language, Aljamía – Castilian Spanish written in Arabic characters – and built up a sub-culture based in part on the folk magic and customs they managed to keep from the eyes of the Inquisition.

  But the threat of war and of invasion by other Muslim powers – principally the Ottoman Turks – meant the tide was turning against the Moriscos. In 1609 the decision was finally taken to expel all 300,000 of them from the country. After a nine-hundred-year presence in Spain, the last of the Moors were given just three days to pack their bags and leave. Ships were chartered to take them to Oran and into North Africa. Anyone not complying with the order would be killed.

  They said the expulsion had started right here, in the Sierra de Espadán, in Argelita, the next village along from ours as you headed south. Four hundred years ago, the land I could now just see from my terrace was the last home of one of the greatest cultures in history: Moorish Spain. There were hardly any masos in that area: the Moriscos had always preferred to live in or near the towns and villages. The cultural differences between one valley and the next, between Moors and Christians, had been left like an imprint on the land itself.

  I wondered how much of the Morisco traditions had seeped into the local folklore. Theirs had been a mostly oral culture, so it was probably impossible to say. But it seemed fitting that they, too, should once have been hiding out in these hills. It was as if a local theme were developing: the last Cathars, Papa Luna, Juana la Pastora, the hermaphrodite anti-Franco guerrilla leader. All these people had been fighting rearguard actions, trying to survive against the mainstream and the tide of history. And they had all found temporary sanctuary up in these hills, while the rest of the world went on its way. All of them with beliefs they held dear, that they wanted to protect and safeguard. I remembered Faustino’s tales about the Moors burying treasure just before they were expelled from their lands by the Christians. It was a running theme, a template of a story you found all over Spain. Perhaps here in these mountains there really was treasure of some sort: the memories and legends of the past, buried deep in the land: the earth-stories.

  Something stirred in the back of my mind: a blurred memory long forgotten; a connection. I dashed inside and started rooting around my bookshelves. Somewhere in there was a tattered old Arabic dictionary from my university days, held together now with sticky tape. Within a second it leapt out at me, and I started flicking hurriedly through the pages. There was a word there, a word that had caught my attention many years before but that had long since slipped from my memory.

  Arabic was a fascinating, if devilishly hard language. One of the most interesting things about it was how words were grouped around a triliteral consonantal root. For example, words with the sounds K, T and B were all about writing in some form. So KiTAB meant book, maKTUB meant written, maKTaBa was a library, etcetera. Quite often, though, words which on the face of it had no connection at all were also grouped around the same root. Usually you had the sense that there was no link there. The word LaBaN, ‘milk’, for example, seemed to have nothing to do with LaBiNa, ‘brick’ or ‘adobe’. But occasionally you stumbled on examples where the consonantal link between the words had a deep resonance, as though there were a hint of a code, with some poetic truth buried deep in the language, like a puzzle, to be explored. One example was the root HBB, which formed HuBB, ‘love’, and also HiBB, ‘seed’. AYN produced ‘eye’ and also ‘spring’ or ‘fountainhead’. Another echoed Faustino’s story about Apollo, Daphne and the laurel tree: the root GhWR had the sense both of falling, a cave, swiftness of running and ‘laurel’. There was another one of these curiously linked words, though, one that had always seemed to speak of a truth I couldn’t quite grasp.

  The dictionary opened on the page I was looking for, and there it was: the root RWY. I glanced down quickly at the meanings of the words made up of this combination.

  RaWiYa: to drink, be irrigated, tell a story

  RiWAYa: a tale, story, novel

  RiWa’i: a writer, storyteller

  RaYYan: well-irrigated, lush, verdant

  taRWiYa: reflection, consideration

  Faustino’s words of a couple of days before back at his tobacco plantation came back to me: gathering and telling the local stories was a way of watering and irrigating this dry, endangered land. He might not have been the first to perceive the link, but here there seemed to be proof of some kind of the truth of what he had said.

  I thought of the work we had put into the land over the past year, the scrub we had cleared away, the tre
es we had planted and tended: hours of sweat to try to make a small change in this abandoned landscape. There was magic here: people had always said so, but now it was as if I could see it properly for the first time myself. Not the magic of Marina and Concha, with their rituals and witchery, nor even the fairies and duendes that had seemed to make an appearance in our lives over the past months. The life that seemed to vibrate from the rocks and earth round here came from the stories that flowed through it: stories that were a vital part of the landscape, and without which it would be impossible to understand the area to which we had come to live. Learn to read the land, as Faustino said, and you started to get a sense of how the land and the stories that came out of it were one: neither could properly exist without the other. And in a world where we lost our understanding of the land, where we abused it, where we built golf courses and airports and miniature Eiffel Towers, the tales dried up: there was no one to gather and nurture them, no one to listen to them. Crowd it out with so much other noise and you would fail to hear the earth-stories as they were whispered by the stones and the trees, the rivers and mountains. They needed silence; for men to sense their presence, then to weave them into legends and folk tales to be passed on, and on. Some were living stories, such as the Pelegríns of Les Useres. Others came from the history of what had happened here: the Cathars, the Moriscos, Papa Luna. Some seemed to explain the world around: the colour of rosemary flowers, why clefts and gorges appeared where they did. And then there were others that just seemed to exist of their own, inexplicable; perhaps the better for it. Yet they were as much the part of the landscape as the others, more so, even.