other and stood speechless. She wept, sobbed.
Demetrio stared in astonishment at his wife who seemed to have aged ten
or twenty years. Then he looked at the child who gazed up at him in
surprise. His heart leaped to his mouth as he saw in the child's
features his own steel features and fiery eyes exactly reproduced. He
wanted to hold him in his arms, but the frightened child took refuge in
his mother's skirts.

"It's your own father, baby! It's your daddy!"

The child hid his face within the folds of his mother's skirt, still
hostile.

Demetrio handed the reins of his horse to his orderly and walked slowly
along the steep trail with his wife and son.

"Blessed be the Virgin Mary, Praise be to God! Now you'll never leave
us any more, will you? Never ... never.... You'll stay with us always?"

Demetrio's face grew dark. Both remained silent, lost in anguish.
Demetrio suppressed a sigh. Memories crowded and buzzed through his
brain like bees about a hive.

A black cloud rose behind the sierra and a deafening roar of thunder
resounded. The rain began to fall in heavy drops; they sought refuge in
a rocky hut.

The rain came pelting down, shattering the white Saint John roses
clustered like sheaves of stars clinging to tree, rock, bush, and
pitaya over the entire mountainside.

Below in the depths of the canyon, through the gauze of the rain they
could see the tall, sheer palms shaking in the wind, opening out like
fans before the tempest. Everywhere mountains, heaving hills, and
beyond more hills, locked amid mountains, more mountains encircled in
the wall of the sierra whose loftiest peaks vanished in the sapphire of
the sky.

"Demetrio, please. For God's sake, don't go away! My heart tells me
something will happen to you this time."

Again she was wracked with sobs. The child, frightened, cried and
screamed. To calm him, she controlled her own great grief.

Gradually the rain stopped, a swallow, with silver breast and wings
describing luminous charming curves, fluttered obliquely across the
silver threads of the rain, gleaming suddenly in the afternoon sunshine.

"Why do you keep on fighting, Demetrio?"

Demetrio frowned deeply. Picking up a stone absent-mindedly, he threw
it to the bottom of the canyon. Then he stared pensively into the
abyss, watching the arch of its flight.

"Look at that stone; how it keeps on going...."

VII

It was a heavenly morning. It had rained all night, the sky awakene