VI.
One afternoon she emerged from the “heladeria” with a small scoop of pistachio ice cream on a huge, brittle cone and ran directly into Alana and Aaron. They were taking provisions to Eben, they said, and asked if she would like to hike out into the hills with them. Though she tried to answer nonchalantly, she felt her cheeks burn.
They took a little-used road out of town—so stony that it twisted her ankles and quickly wore her out. After an hour she stopped to empty her shoes of the pebbles that had gotten in through the holes in the toes and took a long look behind her. Cadaques appeared no bigger than a pile of bleached shells beside the ocean. Even a few miles out of town, civilization seemed eerily remote. The steep hills were uninhabited, terraced in stone from bottom to top—for growing olive trees, Alana told her, a thousand years before. Still, arid, and hot, they were covered with sparse, thorny vegetation and stood like overgrown pyramids, anachronisms from another age.
Eventually the three left the road and stumbled along the winding paths that crisscrossed the dusty, monotonous slopes, each like every other, until Seely knew she would never be able to find her way back alone. When she’d just about given up hope of ever reaching any destination, she rounded a bend, lagging behind Alana and Aaron, and saw a green corn patch growing between two olive trees. A moment later she spotted the hut: tiny and square, the barest of shelters, it was only as tall as a man, built of the same stone as the terraces, so that it was camouflaged by the hills all around.
She ducked into the chest-high entrance and found to her surprise that the interior was dome-shaped, like an igloo, the flat slabs of rock spiraling up to a hole in the middle of the ceiling. The opening was glutted with cobwebs, and sunshine filtered through it in a dusty shaft. Below it hung a pot, apparently to catch the rain. In the dim light she saw that the reed mats that covered the dirt floor sloped up to a shelf of rock displaying some dubious treasures—a turtle shell, fox’s skull, and jug of dried grasses. Candles sprouted from jags of stone, the hardened paraffin dribbled down to the ground. In one corner was a hearth—an area set off with stones—where a teapot rested on a tripod. In another, a dark cloak loomed like a specter above a loosely folded sleeping bag. When she emerged, Alana and Aaron were already far down the hill.
She found them in a tiny vineyard, Aaron pulling ferns from around the grapevines, which were thigh-high and spring-green. Most of the bracken had already been cleared away and raked into piles. Pausing by a diminutive garden, she fingered a burst of white flowers on a smooth stalk. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Onions,” said Aaron as he shed his shirt and vest and set to pulling up the remaining weeds. His sinewy dark torso looked as hard and impervious as the stone all around, made of nothing so mutable as muscle and bone, she thought.
She and Alana sat on boulders by a tiny stream, watching the clouds crowding over the hills to the west. It was quiet except for the intermittent whoosh of the wind, like the sound inside a seashell, and the occasional croak of a frog or chit-chitting of a bird. Soon flies began to circle and settle on them in droves, drowning out wind, frogs, and birds with their buzz. At first they tried to whisk them away but eventually surrendered lazily to the raucous intrusion. Half an hour passed, and still there wasn’t any sign of Eben. “We’d better get back,” Alana sighed. “It looks like a storm.”