Ronda 



inconvenient heavy things to ride in, though they certainly 

 keep one dry ; we were rather impatient to get to Ronda 

 before the day ended, and were trotting briskly on, when 

 Harry's pony fell, and he and his beast, all enveloped in a 

 voluminous mass of cloak, rolled among the sand and stones. 

 I expected to have to put up another board ; but he got up, 

 and was no worse. 



Still, Ronda did not appear, which seemed distressing, as 

 we could now see a league and more before us, and there was 

 nothing but a great, blank, round-backed ordinary hill, over 

 which our road lay ; and beyond which, from the nature of 

 the ground, Ronda, such as we fancied Ronda, could not 

 possibly be. After an hour's riding we got over the bleak 

 round hill, and descended a gentle slope into a straggling 

 unremarkable town, which might have been a suburb of 

 Bradford. Very much disgusted, we rode down the long 

 sloping street, and came to the Cristobal Posada. Here 

 we put up, and supped and grumbled. 



The rain had ceased, and the broad moon was rising like 

 a great fire-balloon above the mountains, the silver of her 

 beams frosted on the snowy summits around. We went 

 out, for it was cold and wretched in the posada, and came to 

 the edge of a very deep precipice, which falls off like a 

 tremendous sunk fence from the lower end of the new 

 town. We discovered the celebrated bridge, and looked 

 down through gratings upon a dizzy depth of darkness, 

 where, in the indistinct abyss, a rushing of waters echoed. 



The view from the bridge, if we had come upon it in a 

 state of mind unembittered by previous disappointment, 

 might have struck us very favourably ; for the roaring chasm 

 beneath, the broad shadowy valley, sunk six hundred preci- 

 pitous feet before us, and the moonlit snow mountains 

 beyond, formed, no doubt, a tolerable combination in their 



152 



