Quixote rode to
do his penance. The gayest spirits must have been dashed by the gloom of
the knight's self-imposed prison, and mine were not improved. I had a
disquieting impression that Monica's voice, calling an appeal, came
echoing from the mountain walls.

Of course, there was nothing in it, except superstitious nonsense of which
I ought to be ashamed; yet I could not shut my ears to her voice, which
seemed to cry the words her fingers once had written: "Don't desert me!
Don't leave me alone!"

Always the echo followed, as the car mounted higher on the slopes of the
Sierra Morena, and such glories of Spain opened out before our eyes as we
had not seen yet, even in the splendid Gorge of Pancorbo.

Crest above crest, great chains of mountains cut the smooth sapphire of
the sky; and as we serpentined into their closer grasp, each loop of the
Alpine road gave a new and more fantastic combination of rock and stream.
The car was boring into a gorge of astounding sublimity, a hammer-stroke
of Vulcan which had cleft the mountain and left behind chips of copper, of
gold, of silver, and a rich sprinkling of precious gems.

As the god's hammer fell, out of the ruin it made were shaped marvels of
form; Olympian castles and giant statues, images of such savage creatures
as roamed devastating the earth in days when man was in his childhood.

Even the calm countenance of Ropes was transfigured by this burst of
splendour. "Makes you forget that roads can be bad, and tyres go wrong,
doesn't it, sir?" he said to me. "I could drive through places like these,
day and night on end, without food or drink, never knowing if I was done
up."

And praise from a chauffeur is praise indeed!

We were in the defile of Despenaperros, the most terrific and, at the same
time, the noblest gorge of Spain; and I should have known it from stories
told by my father, who had once fought with _bandoleros_ upon this very
road. Down into the river that tossed up white plumes of foam far below,
he had flung one man, while another fired shot after shot from his
carbine, screened behind a rock on the opposite side of the ravine,
scarcely a biscuit-throw away.

Long before, too, history had been made in this mountain passage whose
walls had rung with wilder sounds than the screaming of our siren. The
rival battle-cries of Moor and Spaniard had echoed among the rocks, and
Christian blood and pagan had mingled in the white spume of the river.

I thought