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to a few American scientists, and regarded as not of sufficient interest to the general public for books to be devoted to the subject, only one in fact having ever been published.
    In the end our decision to spend a night in the rainforest was seen not only as a mild adventure but a closer association, however brief, with the greatest and most awe-inspiring of all living things, in the shade of which creatures of the jungle were puny indeed. Faced with these towering oaks that had grown from seeds no longer than fingernails to dominate their environment for centuries—or even a millennium—one was encouraged to speculate over the possible duration of life itself. Centuries of leaf-fall had covered the primeval terrain with a deep palliasse of leaf mould with which we made our beds. In the depths of this sounds suggestive of animal life were detected and were inevitably hostile to sleep. Eugene, whose hearing, as well as his capacity for belief, was better than mine, shovelled away at the leaf soil for an hour before putting his ear to the ground and then reporting a variety of sounds. He had read somewhere, he said, of colonies of prehistoric creatures collected and supported by trees in their deep roots.
    High overhead a tide of birds had been swept in by the night, and began their sad hootings among the topmost branches. Until then we had heard little, the only sound being the clicking of stick insects hurrying along the twigs in search of their prey. Now there were only the owls to remind us of night.
    Beyond the last of the forest next day we discovered a cautious return of the human presence. There were plots of cultivated land, some with the scrawny remains of the harvest of that year, and the first isolated settlement. Here we encountered a plea from a lonely man. ‘We don’t see anyone here for days on end. If you live in this place you long for the sight of a fresh face. Couldn’t you stay a little and talk? I can’t tell you how much we long to hear the latest news. Why not stay until tomorrow?’
    The occupants of these tiny clusters of cottages lacked occupation and any form of creativity. Few crops could be induced to grow on this arid, sandy soil which normally supported little more than a kind of pampas grass. Such isolated communities were in the end bled dry, too, by the loss of the most energetic, intelligent and creative of their youngsters who were tempted to go in search of employment in the great Rioja vineyards, a day’s journey away to the west. Of those who went there in search of a new life, few wished to return.
    The feudal overlords of this area were the owners of the vineyards who lived, according to our informants, in palatial mansions a day or so’s horseback journey away. We were later to learn in Zaragoza that they liked, above all, to be considered patrons of the arts, and one had even written a book on the antiquities of the area, scattered largely through the fields. These had been moulded in some cases by ten thousand storms into more or less recognisable animal, or even human, shapes, and were collected by rich landowners who built them into the walls of their houses. The serf who found one might even be paid up to the equivalent of a year’s wages for it.
    Small, sluggish rivers trickled slowly in all directions across the plain, and cranes, carefully spaced out, possibly to avoid spoiling each other’s catch, waited patiently with a taxidermic rigidity in the shallows. Fish, however, remained plentiful, and finding a shop with fishing tackle for sale we equipped ourselves with rods and lines, and were repaid with a few sizeable fish, rescuing us from semi-starvation.
    The day’s long walk offered a rare moment of luxury when we came to its end at Tafalla, which had a hotel with a bar and even, to our amazement, the ghost of a paseo, with several crestfallen girls awaiting an invitation to display their charms. Next morning we set out early but had to take refuge from the rain