The Columbus Tree [antikvár]

Along the coast there's a town called Suelo, and west of Gibraltar you can see it from the water. There are other towns that follow the Spanish coast there that you cannot see. Suelo is a fishing village that stretches from the water's edge up into a small range of hills and almost makes it, as if it were trying to join the sea with the land. The last house is three quarters of the way up. All of the houses look like they are burning, so white you can't stare at them at noon, and always in the afternoon there are nets drying in the late shattered light. In the summer the white sky is fierce and hazy with a deep burning glow like silver and the air is cool off the sea. But sometimes a shaft of dry wind from the African desert crosses the thin stretch of water separating the two continents here and runs like a hot breath above the land. In December it rains and there are two months of winter with little ugly cold winds that ruffle the tops of trees and flatten the grass. But very soon it's hot again and over the blinding textured houses the white dust-ball sun makes the town shimmer. By three o'clock oh a summer's day you think the place is crowding out of the sea, shaking itself off in the light. The fishing village couldn't exist farther up the hills than it does, but you sometimes have the feeling that it tried.There are not many things to know about Suelo; but it was once destroyed. There was an earthquake somewhere in Africa that caused a seismic sea wave. The big wave came in the night at seven and a half minutes past eleven and left four hours later taking the town with it. There are those now living who remember that their great-grandfathers knew about it. They say that it was not expected because the earthquake that caused it had not been felt in Suelo, not even a tremor. There was another kind of warning more difficult to recognize. At fifteen minutes to seven in the evening the surf stopped. It was an omen of disaster a kind of foreshadowing of deathbut in the whole village only two people screamed. One of them was a child. The