I chose a small house on the edge of the city. It was an ideal place for me, because I wanted fresh mountain air, space, privacy, a place where one could feel the presence of ancient gods and the spirits of nature. The house was merely an empty shell, but I chose it because it was on the sunny side of the valley, high enough to have a good view over the town, with sufficient breeze to diminish the occasionally stupefying heat. It took me a good year to make the place inhabitable.

The first thing that I did was to dig out the well at the side of the house, which had caved in on itself and was full of mud and rocks. I was helped in this by a Frenchman named Antoine, a man of considerable culture who had chosen to live here because he was attached to the people, with whom he had arrived in the original immigration. We repaired the walls and the roof of the house, and painted the rooms completely white so that they became suddenly clean, bright, and spacious.

Antoine and I managed, at some danger to ourselves, to install electricity by connecting up a cable to the faltering system invented by a teacher. This man was Professor Luis, who had set up a row of windmills to generate power; this was perfectly adequate for lighting, but was somewhat feeble when high amperage was required, so that the electric cooker that I had flown in by helicopter turned out to be more use as a storage cupboard.

It often happens when setting up a house that one finds quite suddenly that there is an urgent need for some item overlooked during the last expedition. The track down from my house was a deeply pitted one that served as a watercourse each time that it rained, and although I have stabilised it since, it was to begin with only negotiable on foot or by mule, or by Antoine's ancient three-wheeled tractor. This tractor had been half-buried in the mud of the flood at Chiriguana, but Senor Vivo's father, who is in fact General Sosa, governor of Cesar, had it dog out and brought in slung under a vast helicopter gunship, at his son's request. It is commonly said in this country that General Sosa is the only member of the military hierarchy who ever does anything useful.

There was, at the far end of the town, a tienda that sold goods brought in by mule-train from Ipasueno, and so every few days I would find myself rattling and bumping my way to it on Antoine's formidable old tractor. This shop was owned by a middle-aged couple who left the running of it to their daughter, a girl of twenty or so years whose name was Ena, as I discovered by overhearing the father asking of her the price of a bottle of Ron Cana.

Ena was small and strongly built; usually she wore a plain, faded blue dress, and her feet were always bare. Sometimes I used to think that her head was very slightly too large for her, but she had an appealing and serene face framed by her long black hair. She reminded me forcibly of a Greek girl with whom I had once been in love, for she had the same smooth and soft olive skin, and big brown eyes beneath eyebrows almost heavy enough to meet in the middle. On her forearms were the traces of soft black downy hair, which to be frank, is something that has always driven me crazy, and her fingers were slim and elegant.

The best thing about her, however, was her elfin spirit; she had an air of quiet amusement, an innocent devilry, that gave her the aura of having existed from all eternity, and of being able to see tbe funny side of everything. I perceived that she had a streak of mischief in her, as was to be revealed when I discovered how it was that she had kept me for so long in ignorance

The writer uses the phrase ‘served as a watercourse’ (Paragraph 4) to show

that the path