Irvine Hunt - A Spanish Diary


	A SPANISH DIARY

At the Sun's Edge
A Spanish Diary

For seven months a long-held ambition realised, a trek round Spain and Portugal. It was the l960s and the adventure, for adventure I hoped it would be, started badly. At Lourdes still on the way to the Spanish frontier I stumbled in the main street and broke a rib. A miracle in reverse, said a Lourdes doctor examining the X-ray. Days later, as I reached Spain two unpleasant looking men tried to grab my camera and nearly got it.
I tried writing it into a book, never of course published, but Spain was wonderful . . .

A lonesome creature . . . . Chapter 10

After the bustle of Peniscola, the road south out of the fortress town trailed through lonely olive groves. From across the water the noon bells rang out from a church at the edge of the sea.
Little stirred. The world had become hushed as siesta arrived, and yet one creature was at work. I found it a little away from the road, large eared and heavily blinkered in the brightness of the sun, a lone donkey trundling round a stone well, turning a waterwheel.
It was impossible to pass by and not pause. It was tethered first by a chain to its collar and then, more crudely, by a long branch which arched from the centre driving post of the waterwheel to the creature's noseband. Fat clay pots strapped to the wheel swished into the well and when they reached the top of the turn, released the water noisily into a trough to run away along channels into the thirsty fields.
As I squatted in the dust and watched, the donkey stopped walking, halting under the only tree close enough to afford shade. Surprised, I wondered who had commanded it to pause, and who, moments later, urged it to start off again round the well. The process was repeated, the clever beast pausing again in the shade of the tree. Was it counting how many times it must walk round the well? Of course not, then how did it know when to stop?
Those large ears were all the dumb creature needed. For eventually I too detected that tiny give-away gurgle, the faintest of sounds as the last of the water drained out of the trough, so softly that at first I had missed it. There was, too, the distinctive splashing as the trough filled and overflowed. This lonesome creature knew exactly the right moments to stop and to start walking.
Its blinkers stared like large blind eyes as I left it plodding round the well, on a lonelier journey than my own would ever be.