CHAPTER XIV 

 SIERRA MORENA 



IBEX 



The tourist speeding along the Andalucian railways and surveying 

 from his carriage-window the olive-clad and altogether mild- 

 looking slopes of the Sierra Morena, will form no adequate, 

 much less a romantic, conception of that great mountain-system 

 of which he sees Ijut the southern fringe. Yet, in fact, the 

 train hurries him past within a few leagues of jDerhaps the finest 

 big-game country in Spain — of mountain-solitudes and a thousand 

 jungied corries, wherein lurk fierce wolves and giant boars, 

 together with one of the grandest races of red deer yet extant 

 in Europe. 



True, the Sierra Morena lacks both the altitudes and the 

 .stupendous rock-ridges that characterise all other Spanish 

 sierras — from Nevada and Gredos to the Pyrenees. It consists 

 rather of a congeries of jumbled mountain-ranges of no great 

 elevations, but of infinite ramification, and lacking (save at two 

 points only) those bolder features that most appeal to the eye. 

 Were the Spanish ranges all of the contour of j\Iorena, the name 

 " Sierra " would not have applied. It is, moreover, a unilateral 

 range — a buttress, banked up on its northern side by the high- 

 lands of La Mancha, resembling in that respect the well-known 

 Drakensbero- of the Transvaal. 



The Sierra Morena, typical yet apart, divides for upwards 

 of 300 miles the sunny lowlands of Andalucia from the bare, 

 bleak uplands of La Mancha on the north. And in vertical 

 depth (if we may include the contiguous Montes de Toledo) the 

 range extends but little short of 150 miles. 



As a homogeneous mountain-system, Morena thus covers a 

 space equal to the whole of England south of the Thames, with 



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