The Summit of the Guadarrama 231 
the steep crags high above had swept a path through the pines, 
tearing many of them from the ground and creating an impassable 
barrier. 
Sometimes our path would follow the course of some noisy 
torrent, forcing its way down amid great masses of grey boulders, 
and at places forming quiet pools in which were small trout. 
We learnt that these streams had repeatedly been stocked with 
fish, but that before they could attain any size, some predaceous 
native, armed with the inevitable dynamite, came on the scene 
and destroyed them. 
Through the dark masses of foliage the snow-clad hillsides above 
us could from time to time be seen, whilst over our heads was 
always the intensely blue cloudless sky of Spanish spring-time. 
The scenery is magnificent. From one of the summits of the 
Siete Picos, a mass of black granite rocks, rounded and weathered 
to the smoothest surface, and built up in horizontal masses, around 
which the snow still lay deep, we could survey the plains of 
Castile, seemingly at our feet. 
One day, with the aid of a field-glass, we saw the dim outlines 
of some of the larger buildings of the capital, distant from us some 
thirty miles, whilst the famous Escurial, its massive walls and vast 
rambling construction giving it the appearance of a town of itself, 
lay glittering in the sunlight on the southern slopes of the Sierra 
below us. 
Nor were historic associations wanting, for close at hand 
lay the famous pass, the Puerto de Guadarrama, through which 
the tide of French invasion rolled in 1808, as well as those other 
mountain roads which had witnessed the passage of the hosts 
which Napoleon, in his wrath, had dispatched to annihilate the 
audacious Moore, and which same roads, four years later, saw the 
triumphant advance of Wellington’s army on Vitoria and France. 
Whilst we were enjoying our marvellous bird's-eye view from 
