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By Christopher Howse

An appointment with fear is always better when you have made it yourself. In controlled doses fear is a game. Take heights. For a traveller, seeing some old town from a high lookout is memorable, but getting there is risky for anyone given to acrophobia, the fear of heights, or vertigo as Hitchcock called it.

 

Last year in Bologna I was soon defeated. I’d paid my money to go up the tallest of the medieval leaning towers in the centre of the city, the Asinelli, 320ft high and leaning by seven feet or so. There are 489 steps to the top. That’s fine. What is not fine is the construction of the wooden steps: on beams attached to the square interior of the tower, with a well left in the middle, protected only by an openwork wooden handrail. I retreated. It was worth the €3 (£2.50) to be back on solid ground.

 

I thought I was doing pretty well later in the year by conquering the spiral stone steps to the top of the cathedral tower, the Miguelete, in Valencia. Going up was all right. The 207 steps bring you to a broad stone platform with view to the mountains and the sea, over the narrow ancient lanes and art nouveau boulevards. Getting down was trickier. Beside the central stone newel the steps dropped sheer. Their surfaces sloped downwards, too narrow for a foothold, smoothed to a shine. Part of the iron handrail had sprung from its fastening – so could any other parts be trusted? Would I freeze, crouched on a step unable to go up or down, no more able to stand than in a rocking boat?

 

I did get down, of course, and was beginning to think I was getting the hang of the fear game. But nothing prepared me for an incident at Daroca.

 

 

Daroca is a strange town inland from the Spanish port of Tarragona. Tarragona has its own challenge: a Roman aqueduct over which visitors can walk. The 2,000-year-old water channel spans a valley 200 yards wide on graceful arches of golden stone at a height of 90ft, only a little lower than the famous aqueduct in the centre of Segovia. Walking across Tarragona’s gigantic masonry arches instils respect for its builders. The catch is that the dry water channel is only knee-deep, and there is nothing to hold on to. It seems like being a wirewalker between distant tall buildings. More carefree souls, no doubt, feel on top of the world.

 

Walking over the aqueduct gave me a sense of achievement as I took the bus to Daroca that September day. Daroca itself has a weird aspect. The bus had climbed more than 2,000ft from Tarragona, and the medieval township sits between two mountains inside a loop of walls stretching two or three miles along the connecting ridges, punctuated by thin, square towers.

 

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That night it rained. A meteorologist counted 1,800 lightning flashes during the short storm, the local paper reported next day. From my window beneath the wide eaves I watched water running down the street. It deepened to ankle-depth in three minutes. When the rain stopped, the water still grew deeper, and walnut-size stones rolled down in a torrent like liquid mud.

 

Since the main street of Daroca is built along a natural barranco, a dry watercourse given to flash floods, something had to be done. Often in Spain, as elsewhere, nothing is done, and people die in periodic disasters. But in 1555, the prosperous town dug a tunnel to let floodwaters escape beneath the mountainside into the river Jiloca. It was finished in five years: 700 yards long and eight varas high. A vara is a measure of three Castilian feet, in other words 33 inches. So the tunnel is exactly 22ft high.

 

Philip II himself rode through this wonder of the world in 1585, and the morning after the storm I went to explore. In England it would be securely fenced off and hung with health-and-safety notices. In Spain there were notices but no real barriers.

 

There was light at the end of the tunnel. It looked quite near. The tunnel mouth had none of the usual flies and excrement that in Spain characterise accessible caves. The floor was of broken stone and sand.

 

At first it was light. Progressively the floor became invisible, as if the sun had set. Soon, only shiny stones could be seen throwing back the light from behind me. The little glare of light at the far end actually made the floor less visible. On this warm September day it became cold. The rock walls were smooth, but football-size stones had fallen from the roof.

 

A feeling of loneliness grew. There was no one else there – or was there? In the dark and cold there was a compulsion to look behind every now and then, as if sitting in a room with one’s back to an open door. Then came the thought that perhaps there was a hole or well somewhere in the invisible floor. Once, at Chinchilla castle near Albacete, I had been about to jump down into a patch of shadow only to realise just in time that it was an open void.

 

Each step was a ginger move. Each footfall crunched on the sand. At the entrance it had been possible to try out the echo. Now the silence was too still to break. What was this?

 

Not the irrational fear of acrophobia. Nor claustrophobia. It was like the irresistible fear that the ancients knew, of a mortal alone in a forest. Panic, they called it, after Pan, the goat god of lonely valleys. Though it meant a detour around the mountain, I did not return to Daroca by way of the tunnel. Telegraph