etly for a long while.

Thus Martin Hillyard fared in those days. He played with life and death,
enjoying vividly the one and ever on the brink of the other, but the
deep, innermost realities of either had as yet touched him not at all.

CHAPTER XVII

ON A CAPE OF SPAIN

The great cape thrusts its knees far out into the Mediterranean, and
close down by the sea on the very point a lighthouse stands out from the
green mass like a white pencil. South-westwards the land runs sharply
back in heights of tangled undergrowths and trees, overhangs a wide bay
and drops at the end of the bay to the mouth of a spacious, empty
harbour. Eastwards the cape slopes inland at a gentler angle with an
undercliff, a narrow plateau, and behind the plateau mountain walls. Two
tiny fishing villages cluster a mile or two apart at the water's edge,
and high up on the cape's flanks here and there a small rude settlement
clings to the hillside. There are no roads to the cape. From the east
you may ride a horse towards it, and lose your way. From the west you
must approach by boat. So remote and unvisited is this region that the
women in these high villages, their homes cut out of the actual brown
rock, still cover their faces with the Moorish veil.

There are no roads, but Jose Medina was never deterred by the lack of
roads. His business, indeed, was a shy one, and led him to prefer wild
country. A high police official in one great town said of him:

"For endurance and activity there is no one like Jose Medina between the
sea and the Pyrenees. You think him safe in Mallorca and look! He lands
one morning from the steamer, jumps into a motor-car, and in five
minutes--whish!--he is gone like the smoke of my cigarette. He will
drive his car through our mountains by tracks, of which the guardia
civil does not even know the existence."

By devious tracks, then, now through narrow gullies in brown and barren
mountains, now striking some village path amidst peach trees and
marguerites, Jose Medina drove Martin Hillyard down to the edge of the
sea. Here amongst cactus bushes in flower, with turf for a carpet, a
camp had been prepared near to one of the two tiny villages. Jose Medina
was king in this region. The party arrived in the afternoon of the
twenty-sixth day of the month, all of the colour of saffron from the
dust-clouds the car had raised, and Hillyard so stiff and bruised with
the intolerable jolting over ruts baked to iron, that h