Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/244

212 forest. It is now eleven o'clock, and we are four thousand five hundred feet above the sea, and the men ask for a halt. The valley rises like a hanging garden all the way till you come to the first cloud and mist, after which are no more houses; the mist rests upon the woods, and ascends and descends for about the space of a league. We had now just got to the clouds. They usually descend to this distance, and, except on very clear days, hang there for several hours in the day—if not all day—shutting out the upper world of mountains like a curtain, though above and below it all may be clear. We dismounted in a thick, misty cloud, and looked about us, leaving the men to eat, drink, and breathe the animals.

The whole of our ascent appeared to me to be like ascending different mountains, one range higher than another, so that when you reached the top of one you found yourself unexpectedly at the foot of another; only each varies as to soil: stones, vegetation; stones, cinders, stones.

At one o'clock we passed the last vegetation, six thousand five hundred feet, with a shady clearing under the retornas, which our men told us was the Estancia della Cierra—the first station. The thermometer in shade was at 60°. Here we unloaded the mules, and tied them to the bushes, upon which they fed. We ate, drank, the men smoked, and then we reloaded and remounted, and soon emerged from the last vegetation, and entered upon Los Cañadas, through a gap, by the gate of Teora—a natural portico of lava. Here we ceased ascending for some time, the Cañadas being a