When I got up – they had been careful to let me sleep – the council of war was over, but a dozen of them remained round the table and very courteously rose to greet me as I walked into the central hall which, I swear, still held the tenuous ghost of the perfumes of the sweating chorus. This council of the revolution let me eat my breakfast in peace and then Felipe Montes said that there was one point which it was essential for a raiding party to know: was the Punchao hidden in the forest or buried in the open? ‘Near the edge of thickest forest,’ I replied, ‘and you will need a light ladder. While you are at work you cannot be seen from anywhere. The danger will be when the party is escaping with the Punchao. I don’t know if there are any posts of Heredistas covering the edge of the forest, but there could be. Sir Hector’s former camp may be under suspicion and the Punchao is only about half a kilometre from there.’ They were so obsessed by the tactics of recovering the Punchao that they had not considered the difficulty of holding it.
