From Granada, she took the mountain road rather than the main route south, thinking she would meet fewer people that way. Though it was February and the snow was still thick on the mountain tops around her, she had taken off her thick woollen coat. She walked for five hours that day and, but for the extremities of her gloveless fingers, she was almost too warm. For a short distance between Ventas and Alhama a farmer gave her a lift on his cart. He had just sold two dozen chickens at market and now had space to accommodate a passenger.The smell of livestock hung heavily about him, and Mercedes tried hard not to show her revulsion at the odour of him and the mangy dog that sat between them. There was a comforting normality about riding along next to this weather-beaten man whose hands were raw with cold and crisscrossed with deep tears and scratches. Mercedes had regularly spent part of her summertime in the countryside outside Granada, and visits to her aunt and uncle in the sierras had been a happy aspect of her childhood.
