The Goto Donana 



31 



distant Ronda mountains seen through a framework of stone- 

 pines, across seventy miles of sandy dunes, marismas, and 

 intervening phiins. After a couple of hours we skirt the famous 

 sandhills, innocent of the slightest dash of green, which for some 

 inscrutable reason attract, morning after morning, at the first 

 tinge of dawn, countless greylag geese to their barren expanse and 

 on which, si Dios quiere, toll shall be levied ere long. The 

 marismas and lonfj la croons are covered here and there witli 



---:->.. 



SPANISH IMPERIAL EAGLE 



black patches crawling with myriads of waterfowd, to be 

 described after supper by the careful Vazquez as muy pocos, un 

 salpicon — a mere sprinkling. Their names and habits, are they 

 not written, with the most competent of pens, in this very 

 volume ? We stop, perhaps, for a first deer-drive on our line of 

 march. How thrdlins: that sudden rustle in the brushwood ! 

 Stag is it, or hind, or grisly porker? As we approach the 

 "■ Palacio " we see the spreading oak on which perched, 

 contemptuous and unsuspecting, the imperial eagle, honoured 

 this year by a bullet from King Alfonso's unerring rifle. As we 



