7 8 SPORT AND TRAVEL 



(February 8), I felt sure it must contain an egg or 

 eggs. The species of the bird I could not deter- 

 mine, as it seemed to me smaller than either the 

 golden or the sea eagle, though the tail seemed to 

 have a good deal of white in it. 1 However, there was 

 no time just then to do anything more than mark 

 the position of the nest in reference to the surround- 

 ing country, with a view to revisiting it and taking 

 the eggs, and perhaps shooting the eagle to make 

 sure of identifying them ; so after calling Mustapha's 

 attention to the nest, and trying to make him under- 

 stand that I wanted to come back to it and take the 

 eggs, we pushed on after the goats. We soon hit off 

 their tracks on a piece of soft ground, and though we 

 soon lost them on some rocks, we kept on, on about 

 the line they had been taking. We had been travel- 

 ling along the hillside for some two hours or more, 

 climbing in and out of the ravines of greater or lesser 

 extent, subdivided into numberless small corries, when, 

 on peering over a pile of rocks, we commanded a view 

 over a much broader ravine than usual. Some two 

 hundred yards distant, and rather below us, a large 

 buttress of rock running out from the hill above 

 divided this ravine into two unequal portions, the 

 larger being beyond it. Standing motionless on a 

 ledge near the top of this buttress of rock, we saw a 

 small nanny-goat. I do not think it saw us, as we 

 were peering very cautiously over the edge of the 



1 This bird proved to be a Short-Toed Eagle (Circaetus gallicus). 



