pink-and-white convolvulus.

The track led us up and down, and grew more stony as we went on,
gradually rising, till we were about a thousand feet above the sea.
Looking back, Tangier lay far below, and beyond it in the distance white
cragged mountains glinted in the sun.

It was a glorious day, November 24: a fresh breeze, tempered as it so
seldom is in England at that time of year. Our path wound round the hills
and dipped towards the sea. From the stretches of heather through which
we brushed we could hear below us the surf breaking on the rocks: it
might have been a corner of the west coast of Scotland.

After eight miles' up-and-down tramp, the lighthouse at the end of the
great cape, Spartel, the north-west corner of the African Continent, came
into sight. This lighthouse was built at the instigation of the eleven
Powers, but actually by the Sultan. The Powers--Great Britain, France,
Germany, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Russia, America, and
Brazil--share the cost of its maintenance, and that of the whole road
from Tangier to the lighthouse, which follows the line of
telegraph-posts, the cable being laid to Spartel. The lighthouse is
French built; its fixed intermittent white light can be seen thirty-six
miles away, and it stands 312 feet above sea-level.

Sitting down at its base, looking out to sea, we watched the black spines
of rock underneath us, set in whirlpools of foam--the Dark Continent
showing the last of its teeth. On our left the coast trended away into
the hazy distance: to our right across the blue Straits lay the yellow
sands of the bay where Trafalgar was fought, and the irregular little
town of Tarifa, backed by purple Spanish hills.

The evenings were short, and we were soon on our homeward way. The
stunted bushes on each side of the path, disturbed by the devastating
woodcutters, could hardly hold a lion in the present day. Yet in the
course of Sir John Hay's forty odd years of administration in Morocco two
were seen in these same woods, and he shot there himself a striped _Hyaena
rufus_, a great shaggy animal with a bristling mane. One of the two lions
ought to have been shot, but he doubled back, and was heard of afterwards
travelling at a swinging trot between Tangier and Tetuan. He killed an ox
in the valley the next day, and disappeared in the direction of the
snow-topped mountains.

In this twentieth century lions in the north of Morocco would be a rare
sight: towards