I eased myself out of the car and checked myself over but apart from a slightly stiff neck I was absolutely fine. A brief inventory of the Porsche however revealed that the chassis was totally twisted out of shape, and along with three burst tires I felt this 911 had seen its final journey in Lanzarote or indeed anywhere for the foreseeable future.
Three hours later I had hiked almost two miles in increasing humidity to the outskirts of town and back where I’d managed to fill two jerry cans with fuel at an out-of-service filling station.
I was soaked through with sweat but feeling pretty proud of myself. I’d broken into the SPAR opposite where I’d crashed for a bottle of paracetamol and a glug of whiskey to ease the pain in my neck. In the rear service area I found two large stainless steel refrigerated canisters of milk, each with a long plastic tube poking out which fed into an automatic coffee machine (also out-of-service) within the supermarket. After removing the plastic tubing I set about trying to find a fuel dump. There was bound to be one somewhere but it was unlikely to be central to the shopping precinct. Instinct told me to walk north out of the town. The shops thinned out and the roadsides became emptier and, sure enough, after half a mile or so at the end of Calle El Veradero I spied the tell-tale canopy of a filling station on the horizon.
There was a small accompanying shop with a till and a few car related accessories, but most importantly two plastic jerry cans for holding fuel. None of the pumps worked of course, but lifting up the metal lid on the forecourt I was able to access two of the large underground storage tanks that held the fuel. One was only half full and the plastic tubing wouldn’t reach the fuel level inside, but the second was full. After some impromptu sucking I filled both jerry cans and headed back into town to find a suitable vehicle. I had no way of knowing whether I was transporting diesel or petrol, so figured I’d have to find two cars, one of each.
I spent an hour examining the row of cars outside Autos Sol-Y-Playa again, and identified a diesel Seat Ibiza and a Toyota Yaris that ran on unleaded petrol. They wouldn’t be much good without keys though, and more time was wasted matching up their number plates to the myriad sets of keys back in the rental store. After another hour spent sucking the spent fuel out of their tanks, I feverishly poured the ‘fresh’ fuel I’d collected into each car, one jerry can for each.
Perhaps it was wishful thinking; the fuel in the filling station had almost certainly been sitting there just as long as the cars on the roadside and was highly unlikely to have any incendiary properties either, but there was a chance it would work and I was willing to try just about anything at that stage to get some answers. I hadn’t thought far enough ahead yet to even consider what those answers would be even if I did get a car to work and was able to drive around the island.
What did I think I would find?
That the next town along would be bustling with holiday makers swilling beer and sunning themselves on the beaches? Hope does strange things to the mind. It anoints you with that willing suspension of disbelief, and then so quickly removes it once the reality hits home.
For one brief glimmering second of wonder I thought there was a spark of recognition from the engine of the Yaris when I turned the key in its ignition. Maybe it was the heat playing tricks on my mind but I could have sworn the needle on the rev counter moved a fraction of an inch as it registered the process of internal combustion in its lifeless engine. I was of course fooling myself. Nothing happened, nothing ignited, I would be driving nowhere on Lanzarote in either a Yaris or an Ibiza. It was like trying to strike a dead match.
I sipped some more whiskey and sat on the pavement. I smoked a couple of cigarettes and involuntarily emptied my head of all thoughts. I went into a kind of trance of disappointment. The wind was upping, and the dark clouds I had noticed when at the library seemed to be rolling closer.
A storm was coming.
I hadn’t really noticed it until now, but Playa Blanca sat in front of a large mountain range. The guide book called it Hacha Grande.
Big Axe.
The clouds that now rolled over the top of Hacha Grande were deep purple and very angry looking. The wind had picked up considerably to the extent that when I stood up from the pavement I had to steady myself by grabbing the door of the Yaris to stop from being gusted over.
A strange feeling had come over me, a sense of wooziness that was more than just the side effects of the whiskey. I felt weak at the knees, lethargic, almost as if all my strength were being sucked out of me by that wind. I felt like the clouds were growing in volume in direct proportion to the strength leaving my body.
More clouds of dust and dirt from nearby derelict spreads of land, cleared for future hotel developments, began to swirl and create mini cyclones that whipped around me and off down Avenue Papagayo. I needed to get inside and fast. I had never seen a storm grow so quickly. I considered the option of getting back to the Sun Royal. It was probably a good half mile walk, but the speed with which the wind was growing made me doubt I could get there in time. I broke into a jog.
The wind didn’t seem to be coming from one direction but was constantly changing, so that one second I was running directly into it and making virtually no progress, and the next I was being buoyed along by invisible hands that pushed me from behind. Salt spray lashed at my face, and glancing to my right I saw the sea raging in and consuming the beach. The waves were doing something very strange. Instead of rushing in perpendicular to the beach they were landing in totally random formation, as if controlled by some arbitrary force underneath them. They came from left and right, smashing into the wooden huts that usually served beer and ice cream to thirsty sunbathers, spray and foam hurling itself into the air almost to the height of the surrounding buildings. Once even it seemed that the waves that had already landed on the beach were reforming and hurling themselves back into the incoming deluge. Thirty or so meters off shore huge geysers spurted out of the surface and leapt skywards like reverse whirlpools. It was like a scene from Moby Dick, and I could hardly believe that this was happening so close to where I was standing. If I had been on the promenade I would surely have been washed in to that murderous sea.
I tried to pick up my pace to get to the turning onto Calle Janubio and thus start heading away from the beach instead of parallel to it. But as I did my situation became even worse. The clouds that had risen over the Hacha Grande had now slid down the side of the mountain and hit land, and were eating up the half mile or so of scrubland that separated the mountain and the Sun Royal. They actually seemed to be consuming the land as they came; great purple Pac Men swirling around each other and approaching with alarming speed.
Then something happened that made me sure I was hallucinating. The mountain, Hacha Grande itself, started to move like a wave. Its ridges began to rise and fall in peaks and troughs like the lines on a heart monitor. I had that distinctive disinfectant stench in my nostrils again, and the world around me started to fade to black. I deliberately barked my shin on a nearby tree stump and screamed in pain, but it kept me conscious and I started to sprint towards the Sun Royal with all the strength I could muster. I knew I had to get inside the grounds before those clouds hit me.
The clouds continued to swallow up the ground and were no more than three or four hundred metres away now, the same amount of ground I had to cover to get to what I hoped would be the safety of the hotel complex. The ground seemed to shake with the weight of the moving mountains (were they collapsing?) and I stumbled more than once on the perfectly flat tiled sidewalk. I felt like I was in the middle of the world ending.