Our ''Home-Mountains" 355 



ravine so precipitous that from the eyrie you could drop a 

 pebble into a torrent 200 feet below. Usually their nests are in 

 the crags, vast accumulations of sticks conspicuously projecting, 

 and generally in pairs, perhaps 100 yards apart, and which are 

 occupied in alternate years. Eggs are laid by mid-March, but 

 the young hardly fly before June. It was in this sierra that we 

 made the sketches of golden eagles from life, here and at p. 317. 



Bonelli's eagle is another beautiful mountain-haunting species, 

 but of it we treat elsewhere. 



From the knife-edged ridge above our eagle's eyrie (height 5500 

 feet) we enjoyed a memorable view. Due south, 50 miles away, 

 beyond the jumbled Spanish sierras, lay Gibraltar, recognisable 

 by its broken back, but looking puny and inconsiderable amidst 

 vaster heights. Beyond it — beyond Tetuan, in fact — rose Mount 

 Anna, an 8000-feet African mountain ; to the right, Gebel-Musa 

 and all the Moorish coast to Cape Spartel, the straits between 

 showing dim and insignificant. To the eastward, beyond the 

 Sierra de las Nieves aforesaid, stands out boldly the long white 

 snow-line of Nevada, its majesty undimmed by distance and 140 

 miles of intervening atmosphere. To the west we distinguish 

 Jerez, 40 miles away, and beyond it the shining Athmtic. 



From one point there lies almost perpendicularly below, the 

 curious mediaeval village of Grazalema, jammed in between two 

 vast cinder-grey rock-faces — its narrow streets, white houses, and 

 india-red roofs resembling nothing so much as a toy town. No 

 space for " back-streets," each house faces both ways ; yet 

 Grazalema is one of the cleanest spots we have struck — how they 

 mauaoe that, we know not. 



Immediately beneath Grazalema is a bird-crag that contains 

 a regular " choughery," hundreds of these red-billed corvines 

 nesting in its caves and crevices. As neighbours they had lesser 

 kestrels and rock-sparrows [Petronia stulta), while the roofs of 

 the caverns were plastered with the mud nests of crag-martins. 

 We also noticed here alpine swifts, and a great frilled lizard 

 escaped us amid broken rocks. 



Within the limits of a chapter even the more notable spots of 

 a great serrania cannot all find place ; but the rock-gorge known 

 as the Yna de la Garganta will not be overpassed, though no 

 words of ours can convey the stupendous nature of this place, 



