Two Months on the Guadalquiver. 



I. The River. 



To the ornithologist, the Guadalquiver, at all events 

 from Seville to its mouth near Cadiz, is one of the 

 most interesting rivers in Europe. In times gone 

 by, most of the country on each side of the river 

 for about twenty miles from its present mouth, was 

 covered by the sea. But the land has been reclaimed, 

 not by the Spaniards, but by the river itself. For countless 

 years the river deposited at its mouth, layer upon layer, the 

 innumerable particles which its waters brought down to 

 the sea, and thus, gradually, the sea-bottom was raised, 

 until at length the sea was ousted and level plains appeared. 

 Then the sea began to fight for the land, but it fought 

 against itself, for it threw up sandbanks round the margin 

 of this newly formed land. The wind blew the sand, and 

 the sandbanks increased in length and breadth until they 

 completely shut out the ocean. Thus, the river, the sea, 

 and the wind combined to form a great flat expanse of 

 many square miles in extent. The plains so formed are 

 known in Spain as the rnarismas. A small part of them 

 is wooded with pine and cork-oak, or covered with a dense 



