mbord. Accustomed only to English horses,
I confess I paused in dismay: but as men and horses seemed to take
the hill as a matter of course, the only thing to be done was to
give the stout little cob his head, and not to slip over his tail.
So up we went, splashing, clawing, slipping, stumbling, but never
falling down; pausing every now and then to get breath for a fresh
rush, and then on again, up a place as steep as a Devonshire furze-
bank for twenty or thirty feet, till we had risen a thousand feet,
as I suppose, and were on a long and more level chine, in the midst
of ghastly dead forests, the remains of last year's fires. Much was
burnt to tinder and ash; much more was simply killed and scorched,
and stood or hung in an infinite tangle of lianes and boughs, all
gray and bare. Here and there some huge tree had burnt as it stood,
and rose like a soot-grimed tower; here another had fallen right
across the path, and we had to cut our way round it step by step,
amid a mass of fallen branches sometimes much higher than our heads,
or to lead the horses underneath boughs which were too large to cut
through, and just high enough to let them pass. An English horse
would have lost his nerve, and become restive from confusion and
terror; but these wise brutes, like the pack-mule, seemed to
understand the matter as well as we; waited patiently till a passage
was cut; and then struggled gallantly through, often among logs,
where I expected to see their leg-bones snapped in two. But my
fears were needless; the deft gallant animals got safe through
without a scratch. However, for them, as for us, the work was very
warm. The burnt forest was utterly without shade; and wood-cutting
under a perpendicular noonday sun would have been trying enough had
not our spirits been kept up by the excitement, the sense of freedom
and of power, and also by the magnificent scenery which began to
break upon us. From one cliff, off which the whole forest had been
burnt away, we caught at last a sight westward of Tocuche, from
summit to base, rising out of a green sea of wood--for the fire,
coming from the eastward, had stopped half-way down the cliff; and
to the right of the picture the blue Northern Sea shone through a
gap in the hills. What a view that was! To conceive it, the reader
must fancy himself at Clovelly, on the north coast of Devon, if he
ever has had the good fortune to see that most beauti