The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (28 page)

The last box I looked at was entitled
Luz Eterna
, ‘Eternal Light’. It was arrestingly beautiful. The inside of the book was covered in gold leaf, over which had been poured a layer of pine resin, tapped from a Guadarraman pine and honeyish in lustre. The gold acted like the
tapetum lucidum
of an animal’s eye, doubling the passage of light through the resin. The gold reflected and the resin magnified, such that the box seemed to brighten the dim room. I closed the book, like turning off a light, and we left the library.

Early the next morning, Miguel and I went to the mountains. We drove north out of Madrid, whose suburbs give way abruptly to holm-oak scrub. We crossed parched-earth plains for miles. The land became disturbed by teeth and fingers of granite. Stone walls divided the landscape where previously there had been wire fences. The Guadarrama stood sharp on the hazy horizon, fine-ridged and implausible: born in the Tertiary and far older than both the Pyrenees and the Alps. Scots pines stood about in ones and twos, then groups, then groves: blue-green needles, orangey bark. We passed a junction where a drove road, the Cañada Real, crossed the highway: its route was marked out as a crossing point with barriers and signs, our new way respectful of the old way that met it at a slant.

Finally we reached the village of Cercedilla, at the mouth of the Fuenfría valley, and from there we set off on foot up into the pines and the high ground. Miguel was obviously delighted to be out, and so was I. The sun was already high and hot. The forest air smelt musky, antiseptic. ‘I have to walk each day, or else I feel lame,’ said Miguel. He stepped lightly, with a bounce to his stride. I had a heavy pack, and plodded.

We wandered through the valley, following routes that at times were perceptible only to Miguel. He led me along side-streams that fed the main river. One year he had walked and mapped the course of every waterway in the valley.

Mostly Miguel talked about trees, introducing me to individual specimens as if to old friends: to a white cedar, a pair of vast hollies, an infrequent oak subspecies,
Quercus petraea
, which was a relic of the oaks that once grew on the range. By an old stone bridge he dropped down to the riverside to show me where two yews had grown into one another. Their joint foliage was covered with translucent red berries, like half-sucked cherry drops. ‘These are the oldest living beings of the Guadarrama, along with the lichens,’ he said, patting the trunk of one of the yews. I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree.

Miguel’s favourite trees were the pines. ‘There is
pino piñero
. Over there is
Pinus nigra
, the black pine. There is
Pinus pinaster,
the maritime pine.
Pino vigía
, the sentry pine, the oldest wild pine of the Fuenfría, with its branches twisted. Also of course
Pinus sylvestris
, the Scots pine, which grows so straight that Columbus asked for them to make the masts of his caravels. Up on the high ground there you can see the
pino carrasco
, which grows like a cloud. The
carrascos
are dotted across the forest, and sometimes I walk from
carrasco
to
carrasco
.’

Later, we emerged out of the shade of the forest into a high pasture area grazed by patient cows with long blunt tongues. Their bells tolled an idle music. The turf, dried yellow by the sun, was starred with pink autumn crocuses, between which butterflies were picking paths. Miguel led me across the pasture and over granite boulders to a rock outcrop that ended in a small cliff. A dead pine leant away over the drop, stripped of its bark by wind and sun, down to pewter cambium. He reached out and grasped one of the pine’s low limbs, as though shaking hands. Then he rested companionably against its trunk.

‘This is my observatory,’ Miguel said. ‘I knew this pine when he was green, and still now he is …
seco
, dry; he’s one of my oldest friends.’ We looked out over the wooded bowl of the Fuenfría valley, its north-eastern rim jagged with seven bare granite peaks. Miguel didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t mind, the graffiti penis that had been scrawled in black aerosol on a nearby boulder, or the forty-foot-high television transmission aerial inside its barbed-wire cage that hummed a few yards away from us. The pine’s underskin was a fluid silver, currents of grain with ripples and eddies, the knotholes standing as rocks in the stream about which the grain-lines flowed. Wood beetles had been at work, and the tree was riddled with tunnels that extended and interconnected invisibly within the timber.

The Fuenfría valley gathers towards a high pass over the Guadarrama – the Puerta de Fuenfría – which for centuries has been a key crossing point of the range. As a result, the valley is woven with old paths from different eras. There is a Roman road, the Calzada Romano, whose building was commissioned by the Emperor Vespasian between 69 and 79
AD
. There is a branch-line of the Camino leading from Madrid to Compostela, which largely follows the route of the Roman road. And there is the Calzada Borbónico, constructed in the eighteenth century to transport the Spanish monarchs from their hunting palace on the north side of the Guadarrama down to Madrid. The two main paths meander uphill like partnered streams, crossing and recrossing. The cobbles of the Bourbon way have been heavily polished by the traffic of centuries, like the shining steps of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem.

Miguel and I picked up the Roman road at the valley floor and followed it up towards the Puerta in diminishing shade and among pines of diminishing height. The path wandered like no Roman road I’d ever before known, drifting back and forth over the riverbed, passing among granite boulders fleeced with green and grey moss that was as soft to the touch as jewellery-box velvet.

‘The monks of the nearby monasteries would gather pillows of this moss,’ said Miguel, pressing it with his fingertips, ‘and sleep with their heads on them. The moss drew away bad thoughts from the mind, and soaked up dark dreams.’ I liked the sound of that: moss as nightmare-proofing absorbent, a dabbing cloth for ill feelings.

Minutes later, upon the path, I found what looked like a large jay feather, far bigger than any I had ever seen in England, bar-coded in lapis and black along its upper edge.
*
‘You see, I don’t need to walk thirty miles to find things out,’ Miguel said, suddenly. ‘Six paces will do well for me. There’s a Spanish saying,’ he added with a broad smile, ‘ “
Caminar es atesorar!
”: “To walk is to gather treasure!” ’

Miguel left me at a crook in the track, an hour or so short of the pass, walking back downhill with his quick step until the path folded him out of sight. I sat for a while in the shade, drank water, then shouldered my pack and walked on up. The heat was drowsying. I was already looking forward to finding somewhere to sleep the night, and perhaps before then a good siesta site. For the night, I had in mind some sun-baked outcrop, which – like a stone left in the fire to heat – would then release its day’s warmth into me once dark had fallen.

I was now into the pine forests of the upper range. The cherries and oaks that dotted the lower reaches of the valley had disappeared. Through a gap in the canopy I glimpsed an eagle with white wings; far above it in the blue, the glint of an aeroplane. I felt happy there among the trees, glad to have had Miguel’s company but glad also now to be alone in the forest. My feet crunched through drifts of red-gold bark. Great tits and crested tits made quick flits between branches.

From a clearing I looked across to the hill slope on the facing side of the valley, two miles or more away. Gliding above the canopy was a bird so big that its shadow slipped over the treetops beneath it. Light glanced from its mantle and wings. It was a black vulture, the emblematic bird of the Guadarrama. The big females easily reach a nine-foot wingspan; the biggest, ten feet. Among birds of prey, only the Andean condor has a greater wingspan than the black vulture. It was to the Guadarraman pine forests that the soldier and egg collector Willoughby Verner had travelled in the late nineteenth century to take eggs from the nest on the summit of a Scots pine (a near-legendary feat in bird-lore, possessing something of the epic quality of Sinbad’s ascent to the Roc’s nest).

I reached the Puerta de Fuenfría around two in the afternoon, and rested in hot shade. I ate the smoked ham, fresh bread and ewe’s cheese that Miguel and Elena had packed as provisions for me; drew cool water from a spring and drank deeply. Then from the pass I pushed north-east up through steeply forested ground, towards the summits I’d spotted from Miguel’s observatory – the Siete Picos; the Seven Peaks. The path zigzagged, its route marked by little cairns of white granite which were perched anywhere available – on the ground, on flat-topped boulders and even in the crooks of young trees: a path-marking method I hadn’t ever seen before. As I climbed, the pines thinned in number and then failed altogether, having reached the limit of their range.

I passed from their care out into open granite fields. Shattered boulder heaps, sparse scrub, the sun pressing down like armour on the head. Juniper bushes grown into arrowhead shapes;
jara
, a scented and sticky scrub bush. Groups of little birds burst apart like shrapnel when I approached, then regrouped again several yards ahead of me. Miles away on a high peak was an industrial ski centre; it looked like a lunar station, with a vast rocket identical to the red-and-white one in which Tintin blasts off in
Destination Moon
.

To the north, over pine-forested slopes, I could see the
mesa
– ochre plains stretching to the horizon – and rising out of the
mesa
was Segovia, standing like an imaginary city, complete and close-knit within its high medieval walls, illuminated by the orange sun. There was a low heat haze on the plains, shivering out of the base of the walls, and briefly but intensely I experienced the illusion that the city was itself floating aloft from the plain. It made perfect sense when I later discovered that Segovia’s best-known miracle is one of levitation: on a November day in 1602, a bright light was seen shining over the convent of Santa Cruz, and the crowd that hurried to its source found a Dominican theologian called Melchor Cano, ‘
lost in prayer
upon his knees, but suspended a good four feet above the ground’.

I reached the first of the seven peaks, and found that I’d stepped into a Zen rock garden. The ground was covered in a fine white quartz gravel, out of which emerged wind-stunted juniper, thigh-high pine trees and granite boulders. Alpine succulents, plump-leaved and audacious, crammed the rock cracks. And from the gravel also reared the peak itself, a granite castle sixty or seventy feet high. The rock had been rounded by water erosion into a tumbling drapery of swathes and ruches, fulsome and pillowish – pure Henry Moore.

Although it was only late afternoon, I was already sure that I wanted to spend the rest of the day and night here, up in this magical ridge-garden with Madrid glinting far to the south and Segovia orange to the north. I slipped off my rucksack, socks and shoes, left them all in the shadow of the first peak, and set off to investigate the ridge and scramble its rocks. I followed the white-quartz paths that curled between the boulders and trees. The second peak from the west was a castle of granite even bigger than the first. I climbed its slopes to its summit. Lizards skittered away in sudden darts and stops, pausing face down on overhangs as if to show off their adhesion.

I found a wide grooved channel in the rock, like the gutter of a bowling alley, and lay back in it, my shoulders comfortably cupped, the soles of my feet buzzing from the rough hot stone. The granite extended thousands of years below me, and thousands of feet above me two black vultures gyred slowly on the peak’s thermal. The warmth of the granite soaked up through my body, and I dozed off.

I woke to find a vulture about fifty feet away from me, flying inquisitively past. It was the size of a hang-glider, and had a tortoise-like neck and head, baggy with skin. It passed on creaking wings. It appeared to be trying to decide if I was carrion, or at the least some version of Prometheus, chained to the rock and vulnerable to inquisition. I sat upright, making vigorous signs of life and freedom, and it veered away. I don’t need any help damaging my liver.

Late in the afternoon, between the first and second peaks as counted from the west and the sixth and seventh as counted from the east, I came across a natural cave in a subsidiary granite outcrop, big enough to hold two people lying side by side. It had been part adapted as a shelter. One end had been blocked up with piled stones. There were two tea-light candles, and a half-full water bottle. I couldn’t have asked for better accommodation, combining as it did shelter and remoteness. I moved my belongings to the cave, and when dusk came I lit the candles, and my shadows flickered off the rock interior.

The night: a milk-white half-moon, cool air. Owls in the forests below, their hoots pushing through the dusk. The light soughing of wind in the pines. Sound drifting, two shooting stars.

Dawn was dewless and dry. When the sun came it was a storm of gold, rich on the face, Miguel’s
luz eterna
pouring through the air. I ate apples, bread and cheese, and watched the light flood the land. Where it reached the dark pines across the valley they appeared to shake. I felt uncomplicatedly happy to be in that place and at that time.

Those good spirits stayed with me all that long and lazy day, which was spent tramping some of the forest’s many paths under a slice-of-lemon daytime moon and a hot-coin sun. A shiny cricket sat in a patch of shade by the path’s side. An owl hunched high in a pine, brown and round-shouldered as a beehive. I found the ruin of a royal palace in which kings and queens would spend the night when crossing the range. A female falcon rose on a
gyre
, then fell away on a shallow stoop; I tracked her as she dropped, and as she passed from sky-backed to tree-backed she took colour and became brown.