Manolo and Belinda had decided to drive the entire day through the country, while studying mathematics, Geography and Literature, the three subjects that Belinda liked the most.

After several months on the road, they stopped on a gas station, where a teacher called Ilma recriminated Manolo for his enterprise.

“Don’t you know that Belinda should be at School?,” she said.

“I’m her teacher,” answered Manolo unwilling to start a discussion about his private life, “I’m sure that my daughter gets a better education from me than any of your pupils.”

That was an impertinence that Ilma, who also happened to be a witch, could never forgive.

She decided then, to send Manolo to the road that ends in the sea, a bewitched track from where no one had ever returned.

“You should go westwards,” Ilma said smiling, “we have beautiful cliffs near Rosewood, about twenty miles from here. There is nothing as amazing as seeing the waves bursting against those rocks.”

“Will we go, Dad?” asked Belinda with sparkles in her eyes.

“Perhaps...,” muttered Manolo.

“You must go!” the teacher insisted, “but before allow me to offer you a cup of tea.”

Manolo accepted with a shy gesture. Alas! He was unaware that Ilma had a dangerous potion in her purse able to recall demons to her aid - this, said in less spiritual terms, meant that she was ready to give to Manolo a powerful and expensive drug able to sharpen his most stubborn genes. Belinda, on the other hand, was going to be put to sleep with a cheaper narcotic.

 “It tastes funny,” said Belinda as she finished her tea.

“Now you should have a nap,” said the teacher.

“No, thanks,” replied Belinda.

“Would you give us some directions on how to get to the coastline?” asked Manolo.

“With pleasure,” said the witch displaying a worn-out map.


II

Minutes later Manolo was driving through an unpaved road.

Belinda was feeling her eyelids loaded with iron.

“I don’t see other cars!” said Belinda in an effort to keep her eyes open.

“We must arrive before three!” Manolo exclaimed.

Belinda started to cry as she realized that the road was becoming narrower and steeper.

“I feel dizzy,” she muttered.

“We are almost there!” said Manolo, “Look at the sea! It’s just before us!”

Belinda saw a deep blue savannah flicking off and on from the distance.

“The road is too dangerous...” she said before falling sleep.

Overtaken by the witches’ tonic, Manolo was unable to grasp how dangerous their situation was. The edges of the road track were now fading off over a rocky ground. He could see an abysm before him, and further down the rocks where so many men and children had died under the malign influence of Ilma.

“We are almost there”! he repeated unable to stop, but then, suddenly remembering the patience of the Lord in the cross, Manolo was able to understand how absurd his demeanour was.

“Oh, God!” he screamed as he pressed his breaks, “this road ends in the sea!”

And then he realised that it was too late.

He felt his 4x4 Jeep sliding down the cliff into a void.

But then the Lord, who knew his noble heart, and who had decided that his time in paradise had not come yet, ordered the Jeep to jump upwards and to his right, where it kindly fit into a small cave that his angels had carved from the second day of the creation of the world.

When Manolo and Belinda were rescued by a navy helicopter, they told the journalists that they were transported onto the air by the miraculous intervention of the Lord.

“Of course!” a journalist exclaimed with irony, unwilling to admit the intervention of Jesus Christ in the life of the upright, “another miracle!”