Later on, when darkness had fallen, the two men drove in a motor-car southwards round the bay and through a shallow valley to the fishing village of Torrevieja.  When you came upon its broad beach of shingle and sand, with its black-tarred boats hauled up, and its market booths, you might dream that you had been transported to Broadstairs—­except for one fact.  The houses are built in a single story, since the village is afflicted with earthquakes.  Two houses rise higher than the rest, the hotel and the Casino.  In the Casino Hillyard found Jose Medina’s agent for those parts sitting over his great mug of beer; and they talked together quietly 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