140 AVILD SPAIN. 



CHAPTER XII. 

 IBEX-SHOOTING IN SPAIN. 



I. — Sierra de Gredos (Old Castile). 



Twenty-six hours on the railway — at first with the 

 comparative kixiirv of a PuHman-car : the last seven 

 crawling across the Castilian plain, towards the frowning 

 ridges that look down on Talavera, whereon our Iron 

 Duke repulsed nearly twice his numbers of French, and 

 turned the tide of war : then thirty odd miles in a diligence, 

 and finally a five-league mountain-scramble on mules — 

 this it costs us to reach the home of the Castilian ibex. 



Night was closing in and sleet descending in driving 

 sheets, when at length, round a projecting spur, we 

 sighted our destination. The hamlet hung on the steep 

 slope of the sierra, whose snow-clad heights and jagged 

 peaks, towering away into cloud-land, gave us a fair fore- 

 cast of the labours in store. As for the village — a more 

 picturesque, rumble-tumble maze of quaint, shapeless 

 hovels, all pitched down apparently at random, with their 

 odd chimneys, odd balconies and projecting gables, all 

 wood-built, it would be hard for fanc}' to depict, or for 

 artist to discover. And the natives— the light-framed, 

 lithe mountaineers, clad in the short majo jackets, tight 

 knee-breeches and cloth gaiters, with smart sky-blue waist- 

 coats, brass-buttoned, and crimson fajas : the women 

 enveloped in l)rilliant manias of grass-green or scarlet, and 

 with short petticoats that displayed rounded limbs, bare to 

 the knee — verily we seemed to have fallen upon some sur- 

 viving vestige of Goth or Moor, all unknown to the world, 

 hidden away in these recesses of the sierra. 



