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I was afraid that Petiso might go stiff with fear when darkness came, and I had awful visions of him giving up hope in the darkness and simply dropping over the side.

He was showing to me every sign again of passive acceptance. He squatted cross-legged on the ledge, gazing down in fascination at the froth and foam below.

When night fell at six, so intense was the white of the falls that we could see it against the blackness of the cliff face and the sky. Those creaming waters were the only horizon and they drew the eye hypnotically.

After a while a few stars rose above the cliff face. The waters acquired an almost phosphorescent gleam. Shielding the direct beam with my finger, I shone my torch to one side of Petiso’s face. His eyes had not yet acquired that glassy fixed look of total despair, but scarcely an hour had gone by. I could feel the chill creeping through my thin jacket, but it would be as nothing to the cold we would soon feel.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ I said haltingly in Spanish, trying to keep my voice steady and my teeth from chattering.

Even in the torchlight I saw him look at me oddly. Slowly he shook his head. As in a dream he repeated my last desperate words to him before we jumped, '
El jefe
, Senor Fitzgerald, will come.'

I breathed a sigh of relief, that was as quickly stifled. For scarcely had he uttered those seemingly confident words than he sprang to his feet, stood on the very edge of the precipice, threw back his head, and howled.

I had never heard a more terrifying sound. I folded my arms across my chest and shivered. On and on went the howl. I moved a little closer to the boy. I half expected, any moment, that the rhythmic howl would finish and he would simply head into the beckoning whirlpool. Three minutes must have ticked by. The howling stopped. Petiso froze, feet poised on the edge. Now, I thought. Now! I put a restraining hand on his arm. I opened my mouth to say something, I didn’t know what —anything. But he put his finger to his lips. He held his head on one side, then he began to howl again. This time I recognised the same mournful cadences. On and on for another three minutes, then the pause, and the stillness and the listening.

Half an hour went by; Petiso rested. This time when he howled, his face changed, he listened, alert, his lips moving. I came and stood beside him, as far away just distinguishable above the roar of the waters I heard a similar howl, then another. I looked at my watch. The bus would now have arrived at Quicha, but it was unlikely anyone would check we were on it. Perhaps Mrs. Mallenport might glance at the clock in the dining room and murmur, more to herself than H.E., that maybe they should not delay dinner any longer. Everyone knew about the Charaguayans' unpunctuality. No
hora inglesa.
Maybe Morag might get a bit fidgety, but she would be busy checking the rest of her brood. Maybe. James . ..

This time when Petiso sat down a piece of rock, then another, broke off from by his feet and disappeared into the darkness. What if that high-pitched noise could break rocks like a soprano could a glass? I thought, wanting him to stop and yet not daring to ask him to, lest this was the way he kept his sanity.

For my part, I kept mine by thinking of James. I was half petrified with cold and fright, but I let my imagination re-write all the scenes we’d had together only from the premise that he loved me. It was surprising how well they fitted in.

At eleven o’clock, the rock ledge was as cold as an iceberg. Petiso and I huddled together for warmth. When we moved side by side, more rock splintered. Sometimes I thought I could feel a shifting of it through the palms of my hands. Suddenly Petiso got to his feet again, and stood on the edge.

‘El jefe,'
he said, ‘is coming.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked him.

And then I realised that the feeling through the palms of my hands was the vibration of a heavy car engine. I couldn’t
hear
it above the monotonous roar of the falls. But somewhere along the road, a car was coming towards us like a bat out of hell.

Three hours later we were in the Land-Rover. Petiso lay sound asleep in the back and I sat up front beside James, just as a different me had done when I arrived in Charaguay, those few short weeks ago. Now the leather of the seat was cold to the touch, but something had begun to warm me inside as no amount of sunshine could ever have done. For a long time, as the mountain road whipped under our fast-moving tyres and the twin beams of the headlights leaped ahead over the rocks and boulders that lined our way, we sat in silence.

Gradually the terror and suspense of the last few hours receded.

Not the terror of being on the ledge with Petiso, wondering if anyone would find us, but contrarily, when rescue came. My memory of that long hour was fragmented with horror and misery. I know I bit my lip till it bled, in case I screamed hysterically, as James began that agonising rope descent, slowly down over the jagged outcrop, swaying and swinging as we had done.

Except that it was dark now, and there was only the pale glimmer of the last rim of the moon, and my small pool of torchlight to guide him.

I didn’t know how he had secured the rope, and if there was anyone to help him, and I kept wanting, to shout to him to go back and leave us till morning.

I kept thinking, the way one does in moments of stress, that I’d never be able to tell him that I loved him. I know that at one point, I was so afraid for him that I closed my eyes. And the next moment there was a slither and thud and a scuffle and the sound of that awful crumbly rock crackling down, and then, like a mirage, the feel of his strong warm arms round me.

‘Are you all right, darling? All of a piece, love?’ There was for once a note of fear in the aloof Head of Chancery’s voice. I couldn’t do anything but nod. I wanted him to go on asking me and calling me darling. I wanted to hear again that faint break of intolerable anxiety in his calm voice.

When I did open my mouth, I meant to thank him. But the words that came were not thanks. They were the ones that expressed what I felt above all else …

‘I couldn’t have borne it,’ I stammered, ‘if anything had happened to you. If you’d fallen.'

James Fitzgerald looked at me keenly for a moment. He obviously noticed the tears that I tried to dash from my eyes with my fingers.

He began to treat me like a child half crazed with fright, when in fact I had never felt more calm and certain of what was really important in my life.

He actually forced a smile, and after enquiring from Petiso how he was, said I’d probably feel differently once we were safe and home and dry.

It was a long time before we were home and dry. Petiso would not embark on that terrifying rope climb unless James went with him. Oblivious of the shale, I paced up and down the narrow ledge, my fingernails digging into my clenched hands. I can remember dashing the tears from my eyes with my knuckles, then hearing that curious howling of Petiso’s, a different triumphant note this time, and the message faintly being taken up by that faraway listener in some distant hidden village. They had safely reached the top. But it seemed hours before James came back again, and this time he didn’t take me in his arms.

He simply said, exactly like a master to a schoolgirl, ‘How are you at gym, Madeleine?’

Calming, antiseptic, unromantic word!

‘Quite good.’

‘Right, then. You know how to grip the rope. Up you go. I’ll come behind you. You’re light enough for it to stand the pair of us.’

Perhaps he still thought I was hysterical, liable to stiffen with fear and cold and vertigo. And he was going to be there to try to catch me if I fell.

I think my mind has what they call a merciful blank over those painful dragging footholds upwards. Or perhaps James’s presence actually robbed it of much of its fearfulness, because I can remember almost nothing.

What I vividly remember is reaching safety, and standing on that rocky cliff top. I can remember the night sky arching over us, and the fragile glimmer of the moonlight. I can remember the expression of James’s face as he put his hands on my shoulders and said softly, ‘You’re home and dry. I love you, Madeleine.’

I buried my face weakly in his chest, but he lifted my chin and stared into my eyes, waiting patiently for me to say the words that make any place magic.

‘I love you, James,’ I whispered. Then my lips were closed by his. His arms were round me, hugging me, lifting me off my feet, while I kissed him back. Once again I tasted that unforgettable sweetness of the evening at the Hacienda. My bones melted. I felt weak.

‘But then I always have loved you,’ James said when he let me go.

‘Not always.'

'Always.
Since the moment I first saw you on Don Ramón's arm.' He tilted up my chin again. ‘And you must learn not to contradict your
jefe.
Petiso has just told me ...’ He looked round. But, exhausted with the strain of the last hours, Petiso had curled up on a bank of moss under James’s coat and was fast asleep.

He hadn’t wakened when James carried him into the Land-Rover. I parted the flaps and looked back at him. His small face bore a contented expression.

‘What did Petiso tell you?' I asked James suddenly, surprising on his face a look of such tenderness that I would not have needed words to assure me of his love.

‘Enough,’ he replied, smiling.

I told him then about our outing and Petiso’s great-grandmother and Petiso’s difficulty in understanding the difference between
jefe
and
esposo.
‘You see, I didn’t know then that you loved me,’ I finished.

‘How very unobservant,’ James drawled in his most Head of Chancery manner. ‘Didn’t you notice I took a special interest in everything you did?’

‘Was that why you knew we were missing?'

‘I did just happen to stroll round to meet your bus in.'

‘And then you came to find us.’

I felt very touched. I looked down at my grazed hands. ‘I didn’t think anyone would ever find us down there,’ I shivered.

‘I’d have searched till I did.’ It was a matter-of-fact statement of unassailable truth. Then teasingly, ‘I knew roughly where to come—thanks to everyone’s compliance with the rules.’

‘But in the dark? And we were hidden from view...?’

‘About fifteen miles before I got to the bridge, I was flagged down by an Indian. He told me precisely where you were.’

‘Petiso’s call,’ I murmured.

‘Like dialling 999,' James smiled.

‘Or the twilight bark.’

‘It’s thousands of years old. And they only do it in moments of danger.’

Silently we pondered this strange phenomenon of communication.

‘But then,’ James said gently, ‘there are many ways of communicating without words.’ He planted a quick kiss on my cheek. ‘That, for instance. I thought I’d told you then at the Hacienda—and that you’d told me. Until,’ he added drily, ‘you called me Don Ramon.'

‘Yet you were always so severe with me ’ I began to say. Then I remembered Petiso, and his information that in his village a man only beat the woman that he loved.

‘Everyone thought you would marry Hester or Eve,’ I told him instead.

James took his eyes off the road for a moment. He looked genuinely appalled. ‘Did they now!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, I can assure you I hadn’t the slightest desire to marry either of them. In a small community you always get rumours. And you girls gossip too much.'

I smiled but said nothing.

‘I always regard Hester as a somewhat wayward younger sister. Besides, as a family friend I knew about the Don Ramón affair.'

I didn’t tell him that on occasion Hester had used James’s name as a cover-up for her forbidden outings with Don Ramon.

‘As for Eve, she’s simply the perfect secretary.’ Then he obviously remembered something. ‘Or
almost
perfect.’

I thought again of those safe numbers. Had they been the effect of pain or a niggle of jealousy? Had she the desire to be absolutely irreplaceable? I would never know. I didn’t even want to know. After all, no one is perfect, as James had said.

‘You’ll soon have Eve back,’ I reminded him.

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Won’t she return after this convalescence?’

He looked mysterious. After he’d swung the Land Rover carefully round a hairpin bend, he asked me, ‘Do you know where she’s just flown off to for that convalescence?’

‘London?’ I guessed.

‘Yes,’ he nodded, then smiled. ‘But London, Ontario.’

I thought for a moment. I remembered the Canadian doctor at the Clinic. ‘With him?’ I asked.

‘So I’m told.’

I said roundly, ‘You men gossip too much!’

He stopped the Land Rover then. Not just because he had, as he said, to take appropriate action to stop any more impertinence, but because we were now on the outskirts of Quicha, and dawn was about to break.

He took me in his arms and kissed me, and then with his arm round my shoulders and our cheeks resting against each other, we watched that tremendous spectacle of the sudden rosy dawn.
Madruga.
A great round sun rose like an orangey red balloon into the clear sky, silvering the towers and the spires, gilding the windows and the terracotta roofs below us. All around in the blossom trees the
chingolos
burst into their full- throated song.

‘What will happen to their bridge?' I asked suddenly, reminded of the
chingolos
picking up the last of the grains on the old lady’s sand pictures.

‘No doubt Morag and H.E. and Mrs. Mallenport and Hester and Don Ramon and you and I will have some fund-raising to do. And we’ll end up building them a bridge that Isambard Kingdom Brunei wouldn’t disapprove of.’

‘And everyone will be happy,’ I said.

‘Not quite.’

I looked at him questioningly.

‘I won’t be happy,’ he tilted my chin, ‘unless you say you’ll marry me.’