Free Face to the Sun by Geoffrey Household

away from thick cover. When I suggested that she was wasting ammunition, she nearly
added ‘the bastard’ to her bag of mosquitos.
    At last there was silence except for occasional pot shots. I, utterly inexperienced in war, was inclined to believe that there was no longer any reason why I should not change position and
stretch my legs. I was saved from that suicide by an almighty bang from the left front. The leg of my sympathetic major, trailing a strip of the priest’s black cassock, skidded in from the
sky. They had brought up a mountain gun which steadily and inhumanely wiped out our posts. Our men charged it but met the same fate as the Heredistas.
    From our position there was a possible route into a little waterfall. It gave no real cover but if we squatted down and leaned back against the rock there was a chance that we should not be seen
while the enemy was engaged in despatching the wounded. The Punchao appeared to have rescued itself, for the major had returned it to his valise which remained a little below his post. I could see
the top of it above the grass whereas to the enemy it must have appeared as just another piece of baggage abandoned by the Retadores. I told Teresa that if the enemy would do us the favour of
remaining more or less where they were I would try to reclaim it and drag it with us under the fall.
    ‘But we shall never see it again,’ she whispered.
    ‘Why not? At least we shall know where to look for it. Heredia will not.’
    ‘You think we can get away?’
    ‘After nightfall and by swimming, we have a chance.’
    Rather to my surprise, she agreed. It was not, I think, the danger of death which influenced her but the prospect of falling wounded into enemy hands. The civil war had no mercy on women
captured in arms before they were killed or abandoned.
    I found no difficulty in crawling up to the valise but as soon as I tried to slide it down to the water the movement in the grass was spotted and drew a shot. Teresa immediately gave me covering
fire – which was decidedly more dangerous – and I was able to reach the veil of falling water with the Punchao and myself intact.
    Teresa joined me after I had buried the valise under a slope of gravel and we sat side by side in the shade of the rockface with the water over our knees. It warmed up a little at midday but we
still shivered. The Heredistas splashed downstream within feet of us but without looking closely at the fall.
    We waited till dark when all was quiet. It seemed that the enemy, after searching the sandy bay and killing the badly wounded, had retired, withdrawn their gun and camped somewhere on the
reverse slope.
    I tied my shoes round my waist and followed Teresa into the water, swimming out to the north headland in the hope of getting round it to a possible landing place. So far as we could see there
was none, and after resting on an isolated rock we struck out again along the coast to the north-west. Nowhere was there a landing place, but fortunately no sea was running. At last we came to
another seepage of water from above and followed it up the cliff over giant pebbles, mostly on hands and knees, to a rough path where we collapsed and waited for the dawn. When the sun at last
poured down on us, Teresa spread out her swimsuit to dry and when I hesitated to discard shirt and trousers – males being rather more modest than females – told me sternly not to be a
fool. We slept for five or six hours by which time all clothing was dry and we could face an empty and unknown world without immodesty. I was careful to avoid any comment on her extraordinary
beauty.
    Empty and unknown I wrote, and so it seemed to us; but in fact it was merely the end of modern civilisation. Inland was something of a village with the outlying houses of small peasant
proprietors. We watched the early morning movements out to the fields, wondering how on earth we were going to explain a young woman appearing from nowhere without any