l on again.

Ours was a silent, uninhabited world, without a house visible anywhere,
save here and there some stony ruin--a landmark of the Peninsular War. One
could but think that gnomes stole out at night from holes under the hills,
to till the land for absentee owners; for the illimitable fields were
cultivated down to the last inch. We shared a queer impression that we had
strayed into a country which no human eye had seen for centuries; but when
we crossed the broad Douro running to the Bay of Biscay and Oporto, and
steered the car jerkily through the ragged village of Mojales, at an
abrupt turn of the road we were in a different world--a desert of stones.

Prehistoric giants had played with dolmens and cyclopean boulders, and
left their toys scattered in confusion. Stonehenge might have been copied
from one of their strange structures; and they had given later races a
rough idea of forts and cities. Giant children had fashioned stone
elephants, heads of warriors, dogs sitting on their haunches, granite
drinking cups, and misshapen baskets, all of astonishing size. Or was it
water, slow as the mills of the gods, and as sure, which had wrought all
these fantastic designs, and piled these tremendous blocks one upon
another?

A high stone bridge spanned a rocky ravine carved by that slow power in a
few leisure millions of years; and there, sheltered from the wind, would
have been an ideal place for motorists to picnic. But the Duke did not
picnic, therefore we must not. Following hard upon his heels we went on,
up and up into the mountain world, still in the playground of vanished
giants, winding along a road as wild as the way to Montenegro. Rising at
regular intervals before us, on either side stood tall stone columns,
sentinel-like, placed in pairs to guide wayfarers through white drifts in
time of winter storms. The country was wooded, and began to have the air
of a private park, though the heights were close above us now, and our
road ascended steadily. From the scenery of Montenegro we came plump into
the Black Forest; and Baden-Baden might have lain in the valley below
these pointed mountains clothed in mourning pines.

Squish! The brown slush of melted snow gushed out in fountains as our fat
tyres ploughed through, and on either hand it lay unbroken in virgin
purity beneath the pines. Half a mile higher, and even the traffic of
heavy ox-carts and the sun's fierce fire had had no power to break the
marble pa