Spring has already arrived in the Sierra Nevada

THE DARK figure trudging along the river bed straight into the dust storm turned out to be a woman, bent almost double against the wind, barely staying on her feet.

She had a bedroll and haversack on her back; she desperately stuck out a thumb to hitchhike us as we passed. We stopped.

I couldn’t catch what she said as I helped her load her rucksack into the boot. She was the colour of the dust itself, her dreadlocked hair writhing in the wind like snakes, her eyes narrowed against the sand flying at us. At the best of times, she’d have looked wild; there, in the brown light and the sand-paper air, she looked like a figure from the apocalypse. The whole scene was apocalyptic, beat-up trucks and vans lurching and bumping over the gravel of the broad riverbed in procession, an open-back flatbed jeep packed with wild-looking people, dogs and didgeridoos. It was the unscheduled end of a vast New Age music festival held annually in the broad bamboo-grown bed of the Rio Guadalfeo at Tablones, south of Órgiva, in the Alpujarra region of the Sierra Nevada in Spain.