Reading samples

Yet the Canary Islands were never a place that liked to be shaped. On Lanzarote, neighbours came together, organised building materials, carried stones and timber, and raised small communal rooms with their bare hands – half official, half defiant. The state provided the television set, sometimes also a telephone line – an invaluable luxury in villages where many households had neither telephone nor electricity. But what grew out of this soon had little to do with the ideas conceived in Madrid. The people turned the teleclubs into their own project, into their living room, into a place in which they recognised themselves.

At first, everything was strictly regulated. The television was allowed to run only at certain times, and alcohol was forbidden. The village teacher or an appointed supervisor decided when the button could be pressed. In the early months, people sat reverently before the flickering black-and-white screen, listening to educational programmes and watching news from a world as distant as the moon. Yet even within this discipline, something of their own began to take root. They sat together, laughed, commented, began to argue – and, without meaning to, created a space that fostered community more than control.

Children pressed their faces to the windows because there was no room left inside, and anyone who arrived late had to listen from outside. Old men explained to the boys what they were seeing, women brought bowls of stew or roasted almonds. Slowly, the place of instruction became a place of closeness. The programme came from Madrid – but the laughter, the conversations, the life that pulsed within it, came from here.

They say that whoever arrives on El Hierro arrives at the end of the world, and perhaps that is not so far from the truth. There are islands that are loud, that show themselves, that want to dance. El Hierro is not one of them. It is quiet, angular, patient. It waits. And in that stillness lies a force one feels the moment one sets foot on its ground: here something ends and, at the same time, begins anew.

Centuries ago, the island was far more than a remote speck in the Atlantic. It was the outermost boundary of knowledge. The old seafarers believed that beyond its black cliffs there was nothing but the "Mare Tenebrosum", the sea of darkness. Behind it, so they told one another in the taverns of Cádiz and Lisbon, dwelt sea monsters, and even the sky would plunge into the depths there. Whoever sailed on past El Hierro, it was said, never returned.

And yet they sailed. Not all, but some. The daring, the desperate, the seekers. They ventured out, and of some it was later said that they had seen an island floating in the mist: San Borondón, the phantom land that lived between dream and map. From here the legend was born, and it was so powerful that the old navigational charts made El Hierro the navel of the world. The prime meridian, the imaginary line against which all others were measured, ran exactly here, across that crag called Punta de Orchilla. In the studies of the cartographers of Antwerp, Florence and Seville, the small island thus became, unintentionally, the centre of the world, though it lay at the farthest edge.

Whoever stood there, by the Orchilla lighthouse, saw the horizon stretch out infinitely, and in those days that must have been like a glimpse into the unknown. The sea was thought to be a mirror between the worlds, and whoever gazed into it too long would forget which way was up and which was down. Even today, when the sun goes down and the sky burns in purple fire, the idea does not seem so far-fetched.

El Hierro was the end, and became the beginning. When Columbus set out, he stopped here to take on water, bread, wine and courage. The ships lay at anchor in the sheltered bays, and the sailors looked upon the black mountains and knew that, if they now put to sea, they would cross the point beyond which there was no return. The island blessed them, in silence, like a mother who knows she cannot hold her child.

Here the reading sample ends.

How the people at this farthest edge still live today, what makes the sky above El Hierro clearer than anywhere else, and a secret about the prime meridian that almost no one knows – the full story, and many more, await in the book.

Some things fall into place at night. Quietly. Above the rooftops of the villages, above the black fields of lava, above paths that by day seem dusty and unremarkable.
Here, the moon is more than a light in the sky.
It is timekeeper, calendar, confidant.
And sometimes the only witness.

The nights on Lanzarote do not follow chance. They have their own rhythm, older than any road and more reliable than any clock. Those who live here long enough begin to feel it. Not consciously, more in passing. In the way the light falls differently. In the stillness that grows denser. In conversations that end earlier or last longer.

The moon does not merely stand above the island, it arranges it. The old ones knew when to plant, when it was better to wait, when the sea remained deceptively calm. Fishermen looked up before putting out to sea, farmers searched the sky with their eyes as if expecting an answer there. And sometimes they received one.

There are nights when the light lies hard upon the lava stones and every edge becomes visible. Then the island seems awake, almost restless. And there are nights when the moon shines milky and soft, as if someone had drawn a veil across everything. In those hours, people speak more quietly. Doors close more gently. Even the wind seems to listen.

Those who are new to the island take this for romance.
Those who stay realise it is order.
For the moon changes not only the landscape, but also the people beneath it. It shifts moods, stretches time, turns an ordinary evening into something that later cannot be clearly named. One remembers only: it was a good night. Or a restless one. Or one that lingered for a long time.

Thus a quiet agreement comes into being between sky and earth. Without rules, without explanations. One lives with it as one lives with the wind. One adjusts to it without speaking of it.
And sometimes, when the moon stands high and the island lies almost black beneath its light, one has the feeling that someone up there is counting. Not days or years, but something else. Something that escapes the quick glance.

This is where the excerpt ends.
What follows belongs to the sky. And to the reader.