Free Olura by Geoffrey Household Page A

arrange.’
    ‘You might have warned me.’
    ‘I couldn’t.’
    She replied coldly that Gonzalez must have known we were up to something, that she liked to drive her car herself and that she would not be treated as a sort of helpless Andromeda.
    ‘You’d look very well in the part.’
    ‘Does it ever stop raining in this damned Basque country of yours?’
    A thoroughly bad-tempered remark, but I picked up the association. A cold and wet Andromeda. And Perseus tactless enough to want to kiss the drops off? However, it was hardly the moment to
develop red-hot fantasies of the male imagination, even it they had rather more charm than usual.
    ‘If you want to take risks, it’s O.K. with me,’ I said, as she got herself boxed in behind a truckload of gravel.
    ‘With that in the boot?’
    But she passed the lorry on a blind bend with her horn screaming in the best Spanish manner. I did not have to ask her to do it again, for we could now swing left up the valley of the Nervion
towards Valmaseda. Of all the turnings we could have taken it was a hundred to one against the black Seat choosing that one.
    I must now give you some local colour if you are not to suppose that my plan was crazy and unworkable. Iron, I imagine, only begins to interest you after it has reached the smelter or the blast
furnace. Here it is part of our life and landscape. Between the limestone of the Cantabrian Mountains and the sea, where the colours of Vizcaya change from misty greens and white to emerald and
maroon, the ore can be quarried almost anywhere. The only problem is to transport it to the market at an economic price in spite of the steep, broken country of the coastal range.
    In the busy industrial valley of the Nervion the ore comes down by aerial cableways, much like ski-lifts, to the foundries and the quays. To the east, as far as the boundary between Vizcaya and
Santandér, any little estuary with deep water or any promontory beneath which a coaster can ride at anchor in calm weather serves as the terminal of a cableway. A chute is built out from the
cliffs, themselves of iron, and the ore goes roaring into the hold forty or fifty feet below. Why it does not go slap through the bottom of the ship I have never understood.
    The quarries carve away the hills, leaving a skyline of fantastic mounds and pinnacles above the distorted quadrilateral of a ravine, which, as the cut deepens, may become a massive shaft with a
squared entrance big enough to hold a house. When the workings are abandoned because of landslide or flood, these ravines, their brown sides melancholy with sparse scrub and weeds, their floors an
untidy maze of puddles, tips and rusty trolley lines, suggest a Wellsian picture of vanished civilisation whose last survivors took refuge in the dark tunnel, grand and sinister as the main gate to
the pit of hell.
    It was in one of these deserted galleries which always held a black pool of stagnant water at the end of the cut, that I proposed to sink our puppet. I knew it well, for there were pre-Roman
workings in the hillside above the shaft. That had been the limit of my interest. I did not know if there was any night watchman—it seemed unlikely—or how near one could approach the
quarry by car without arousing curiosity in the scattered miners’ cottages.
    Now free of all pursuit, Olura and I drove at leisure up and down hill as country roads led us from one little valley to another. There, among the roots of the mountains, where foreign tourists
might well lose their way but could hardly be engaged in any illegalities, we were safe from inquisitive policemen. I won’t say that we felt it. Each lonely figure we passed was a potential
danger.
    We crossed the main Santandér road outside Somorrostro, and headed down to the coast through the driving spatter of a Biscay squall which, while it lasts, is aggressive as a slap on the
face. When we came to the iron company’s road, leading to the old workings and the