With the sun lying low in the west, burning out her drive in an overexposure of light, the dust billowing around her truck, on a track where rain hadn’t fallen for months. She suddenly, but too late, blinded by the dropping sun, her hand across her face behaving like a shield, collided with some cattle that had wandered unconcernedly into the road. It was not a full-on collision but enough for her truck to jackknife and roll to its right, hitting the high wall of compacted sand that stood as a carving by the side of the road. Her head smashed against the pillar on the right side of the windscreen; she fell instantly unconscious.

Rarely did traffic go along this road; the population was sparse, the dusk was descending and most of this area’s inhabitants were in bed by eight o’ clock.

Known as Baja midnight.

The blood poured out of her head wound. She was crumpled in a protective curl, nearer to the end by the minute as the red continued to leave her. After a time had passed, she was unaware of its passing, or that there was such a thing as time or breath, a man called Jeff Murphy was returning from San José back to his camp which he set up in the winter months; he was an Alaskan snowbird. He lived there between November and April, as everyone seemed to do, he knew the truck and Lomita well.

He carried her from the wreck, feeling life in her, but fearing she wouldn’t survive the thirty-minute drive. He lay her across the back seat of his truck, and turned it round to head back into San José and the one hospital.

She was put into intensive care, barely holding on to her life, a blood transfusion was needed if survival was at all a possibility.

Jeff stayed through the night as they transfused someone else’s donated blood to revitalise her depleted stock of liquid life.

Manita arrived, the process of communication in the Cape in those days, and even now, is slow. There was no phone service and physical message or radio was the only way.

She held Lomita’s hand, spoke to her as if she wasn’t in a coma, discussing the day’s events, not that there were many, and the weather, not that it ever changed, and what would she like to eat, her diet was consistently the same.

It was just Manita’s refusal to believe she would not be around anymore. She couldn’t go. And after prayer after prayer she didn’t.

Gracias a Dios.

After forty-eight hours of blackness – a mind travelling to a place of no memory or light – Lomita opened her eyes.