![]() She reminded me forcibly of a Greek girl with whom I had once been in love, for she had the same smooth and soft olive skin, and big brown eyes beneath eyebrows almost heavy enough to meet in the middle. Sometimes I used to think that her head was very slightly too large for her, but she had an appealing and serene face framed by her long black hair. This shop was owned by a middle-aged couple who left the running of it to their daughter, a girl of twenty or so years whose name was Ena, as I discovered by overhearing the father asking of her the price of a bottle of Ron Cana.Įna was small and strongly built usually she wore a plain, faded blue dress, and her feet were always bare. There was, at the far end of the town, a tienda that sold goods brought in by mule-train from Ipasueno, and so every few days I would find myself rattling and bumping my way to it on Antoine's formidable old tractor. It is commonly said in this country that General So sa is the only member of the military hierarchy who ever does anything useful. This tractor had been half-buried in the mud of the flood at Chiriguana, but Senor Vivo's father, who is in fact General Sosa, governor of Cesar, had it dug out and brought in slung under a vast helicopter gunship, at his son's request. The track down from my house was a deeply pitted one that served as a watercourse each time that it rained, and although I have stabilised it since, it was to begin with only negotiable on foot or by mule, or by Antoine's ancient three-wheeled tractor. It often happens when setting up a house that one finds quite suddenly that there is an urgent need for some item overlooked during the last expedition. This man was Professor Luis, who had set up a row of windmills to generate power this was perfectly adequate for lighting, but was somewhat feeble when high amperage was required, so that the electric cooker that I had flown in by helicopter turned out to be more use as a storage cupboard. We repaired the walls and the roof of the house, and painted the rooms completely white so that they became suddenly clean, bright, and spacious.Īntoine and I managed, at some danger to ourselves, to install electricity by connecting up a cable to the faltering system invented by a teacher. I was helped in this by a Frenchman named Antoine, a man of considerable culture who had chosen to live here because he was attached to the people, with whom he had arrived in the original immigration. The first thing that I did was to dig out the well at the side of the house, which had caved in on itself and was full of mud and rocks. It took me a good year to make the place inhabitable. The house was merely an empty shell, but I chose it because it was on the sunny side of the valley, high enough to have a good view over the town, with sufficient breeze to diminish the occasionally stupefying heat. It was an ideal place for me, because I wanted fresh mountain air, space, privacy, a place where one could feel the presence of ancient gods and the spirits of nature. I chose a small house on the edge of the city. Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet. ![]() For questions 1-8, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text. You are going to read an extract from a novel.
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