Instinct for survival

There are moments in life when the clock seems to pause as it waits for a life-changing decision. Some are benign: will this house be our new home? Shall we buy that little black-and-white puppy? Some are more perilous, inviting adventure and potential catastrophe.

Halfway down the slope, Janine hesitated for a moment, looked around her, gazed down into the valley far below, and sat on a rock. 'I'm not going any further.' A truly life-changing decision, in the sense of avoiding death.

Along with two other people - Tino, our Gomeran guide, and a friend from the village, an Englishwoman who had settled here long before we did - we had left the path above and were scrambling downhill through scrub and rocks. I was now faced with meekly following our friends further downwards or rebelling like my wife.

We were on a steep slope. I like my steep slopes to be of the variety that level out as they descend so if you slip you will glide gently to a halt further down, as on a children's playground slide. This slope was of the malevolent kind that gets steeper as it goes and would reward your slip with a free launch into space like a hang glider.

A short while ago we had climbed to the top of the ridge on a genuine pathway, wide and winding, which Tino informed us had in earlier days been a camino real, a royal path, a sort of motorway for donkeys. An elderly neighbour long ago told us his father was the local postman and used to deliver letters by donkey, climbing up this very path to reach the settlements further inland. As supplementary evidence our guide pointed to a large hollow in a rock face that looked like a rough-hewn horse trough, which is pretty much what it was, a water trough for donkeys.

Not far away he pointed out something that I would certainly have missed otherwise - a series of small hollows in the top of a low rock, each about the size of a saucer and not much deeper. If I'd noticed them at all I would have put them down to natural weathering, but no, they had been carved out many hundreds of years ago by the guanches, the pre-Columbian indigenous Gomerans. 'Probably to make offerings to the gods,' Tino told us. 'They would pour goat's milk from a bowl into the top hollow and it would flow along these channels to fill the others.' I'm sure he told us more about that but I've forgotten the details.

He also showed us, on an isolated boulder protruding from the high plain above the valley, some crudely scratched lines. They were clearly artificial, too geometric to be natural, another trace of the guanche culture. There are many more such inscriptions around Gomera and the other Canary islands but nobody knows what they were for, whether they served a useful purpose or ritual, or just meant 'Steve loves Monica'.

And then he offered to show us a guanche burial cave. There are lots of these around the island too, many of which originally contained mummies but those have long since been removed. The common feature of such burial caves is that they are almost completely inaccessible for anything other than a gecko. I can't imagine how the guanches managed to deposit a dead body in a hole halfway up a vertical cliff face.

However, Tino assured us that the chamber he had in mind was perfectly reachable on foot, with good boots and a steady nerve. This, from a Gomeran, is a statement to be considered carefully then rejected. Gomerans are astonishingly sure-footed, they're born to it, and have no fear at all of heights, but Janine and I at that time lived most of the year in the flat fenlands of East Anglia where our house stood on a hill one metre high.

I picked my way carefully down the increasingly steep hillside to try and catch up with our two friends. 'We're going to chicken out,' I called to them. 'Janine doesn't like heights.' Tino had already turned left to disappear behind a large boulder with nothing but blue sky behind it, occupied by a solitary kestrel hovering expectantly. 'And I'm not so keen either,' I confessed. Be true to oneself, fear is not something to ashamed of, it's a healthy animal instinct.

I turned around. Decision made. The clock started ticking again. Janine and I scrambled back to the top of the ridge and sat down to wait. Half an hour later we were still peering anxiously down the slope. 'Hope they're alright.' I tried to suppress the wild imaginings, those terrible 'what if...' images it's hard to quell when looking over a cliff.

We were seriously beginning to plan how best to call the emergency services (no mobile phones in those innocent early years) when we heard a long, warbling whistle from much further along the ridge. Our friends had traversed a gecko track along the side of the hill and climbed up by a different route. And in another perfect demonstration of guanche culture, Tino had alerted us by the famous Gomeran whistle, the silbo. I don't know what message he whistled at us but it was probably something rude.

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The guanches remain strangely mysterious. The most likely theory is that they were originally Berber migrants from North Africa but there are competing theories even for that. Their rock inscriptions have never been definitively decoded. It's known that they worshipped the sun, moon and stars as well as various minor deities, and their sacred sites tend to be in high places that offer a closer approach to the sky. But I think that's about as far as I should go in this discussion, being a leading non-expert on guanches.

However, I'm on safer ground in mentioning the other absent protagonists of this story, the donkeys, because I have personal experience of them. There used to be six donkeys in our village, each of which would greet any passer-by with that hilarious in-out bellow that donkeys make, like a bull elephant trying to clear a hamburger stuck up its trunk. They've all gone now, and I miss them.