Las Alpujarras
When I was in Spain at Christmas, I bumped into the guide who had led the walking tour of the Sierra Nevada that I’d been on nearly a decade ago. I met him and his wife by chance in the narrow street. He recognised me and invited me to join them at a nearby bar for café con leche, where he told me his news.
He’d had to give up the walking tours because he’d been ill with shingles behind the eyes. But he was better now. He’d finally been persuaded to have a consultation with a white witch living in his village who specialises in curing herpes and shingles. All the witches around here specialise. There are black witches too, he said. These also specialise, he understands, in perpetrating certain kinds of evil.
What this white witch had done was lightly brush his eyelids with her fingertips and mutter some incomprehensible words under her breath. Then
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