Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/243

211 difficult one—I dare say it was nearer the latter mark, and our time was thirty-five hours.

We clattered up the streets, and went out by a pretty road, studded with villages, gardens, cottages, barrancos, and geraniums falling in rich profusion over the walls into the main road. We turned abruptly from this road up the stony side of the Barranco de San Antonio, and proceeded through cultivated fields, but ever winding by the barranco, which becomes deeper and deeper. Here rushes a fierce mountain torrent. The stone at the sides is scooped as smoothly by its impetuous rush as a knife would carve a cake of soap, and you hear the rebounding in the gigantic caverns, which present all the appearance of being excavated by an immense body of water. On the borders of this mass of stone and of rushing waters, startling caverns, and mysterious rumblings, the edges were bound with rich belts of chestnut trees, wild flowers of every sort, myrtle and rosemary, looking as placid as in a garden; and you do not expect to be awestruck—as you are—when you look into the depth of the ravine, into which you might have taken a step too far, deceived by the treacherous borders, if the strange sounds below had not induced you to look down. We were now about two thousand five hundred feet above the sea.

We ascended a very jagged and rough mountain, like a barranco, ever ascending, and came upon a beautiful slope of forest of mixed bay and broom. The soil, however, is a mass of loose stones as we wind through the forest, and again emerge on another barren, jagged, and stony mountain, like the one before the