tench of garlic, to eat a mess of soup, very hot and
comforting. And after that out into the dark (there being as yet but a
faint flush of green and primrose colour over towards the east), where
four fresh mules (which Don Sanchez overnight had bargained to exchange
against our horses, as being the only kind of cattle fit for this
service) are waiting for us with other two mules, belonging to our
guides, all very curiously trapped out with a network of wool and little
jingling bells. Then when Don Sanchez had solemnly debated whether we
should not awake Don Lopez to say farewell, and we had persuaded him
that it would be kinder to let him sleep on, we mounted into our high,
fantastic saddles, and set out towards the mountains, our guides
leading, and we following close upon their heels as our mules could get,
but by no guidance of ours, though we held the reins, for these
creatures are very sagacious and so pertinacious and opiniastre that I
believe though you pulled their heads off they would yet go their own
way.

Our road at first lay across a rising plain, very wild and scrubby, as I
imagine, by the frequent deviations of our beast, and then through a
forest of cork oaks, which keep their leaves all the year through, and
here, by reason of the great shade, we went, not knowing whither, as if
blindfold, only we were conscious of being on rough, rising ground, by
the jolting of our mules and the clatter of their hoofs upon stones; but
after a wearisome, long spell of this business, the trees growing more
scattered and a thin grey light creeping through, we could make out that
we were all together, which was some comfort. From these oaks, we passed
into a wood of chestnuts, and still going up and up, but by such
devious, unseen ways, that I think no man, stranger to these parts,
could pick it out for himself in broad daylight, we came thence into a
great stretch of pine trees, with great rocks scattered amongst them, as
if some mountain had been blown up and fallen in a huge shower of
fragments.

And so, still for ever toiling and scambling upwards, we found ourselves
about seven o'clock, as I should judge by the light beyond the trees and
upon the side of the mountain, with the whole champaign laid out like a
carpet under us on one side, prodigious slopes of rock on either hand,
with only a shrub or a twisted fir here and there, and on the further
side a horrid stark ravine with a cascade of water thundering down in