ingle arch.

The remaining three leagues to Ronda were exceedingly rough and difficult.
Climbing a barren ascent of nearly a league in length, we reached the
_Puerto del Viento_, or Gate of the Wind, through which drove such a
current that we were obliged to dismount; and even then it required all my
strength to move against it. The peaks around, far and near, faced with
precipitous cliffs, wore the most savage and forbidding aspect: in fact,
this region is almost a counterpart of the wilderness lying between
Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, Very soon, we touched the skirt of a cloud,
and were enveloped in masses of chill, whirling vapor, through which we
travelled for three or four miles to a similar gate on the western side of
the chain. Descending again, we emerged into a clearer atmosphere, and saw
below us a wide extent of mountain country, but of a more fertile and
cheerful character. Olive orchards and wheat-fields now appeared; and, at
four o'clock, we rode into the streets of Ronda.

No town can surpass this in the grandeur and picturesqueness of its
position. It is built on the edge of a broad shelf of the mountains, which
falls away in a sheer precipice of from six to eight hundred feet in
height, and, from the windows of many of the houses you can look down the
dizzy abyss. This shelf, again, is divided in the centre by a tremendous
chasm, three hundred feet wide, and from four to six hundred feet in
depth, in the bed of which roars the Guadalvin, boiling in foaming
whirlpools or leaping in sparkling cascades, till it reaches the valley
below. The town lies on both sides of the chasm, which is spanned by a
stone bridge of a single arch, with abutments nearly four hundred feet in
height. The view of this wonderful cleft, either from above or below, is
one of the finest of its kind in the world. Honda is as far superior to
Tivoli, as Tivoli is to a Dutch village, on the dead levels of Holland.
The panorama which it commands is on the grandest scale. The valley below
is a garden of fruit and vines; bold yet cultivated hills succeed, and in
the distance rise the lofty summits of another chain of the Serrania de
Honda. Were these sublime cliffs, these charming cascades of the
Guadalvin, and this daring bridge, in Italy instead of in Spain, they
would be sketched and painted every day in the year; but I have yet to
know where a good picture of Ronda may be found.

In the bottom of the chasm are a number of corn-mills