114 FIFTEEN DAYS ON THE DANUBE. 
enough, and it there breeds almost exclusively in the cliffs near 
villages, and usually avoids lonely wooded mountains. Brehm 
confirmed this statement of the Count’s, and was much sur- 
prised at seeing the bird and at hearing that it had been 
killed in these woods ; he also gave it as his opinion that the 
Griffon Vulture never builds its nest on trees, but some hours 
later we were to have ample proof that Brehm was for once 
wrong. We left the house in a few minutes and were all 
despatched in totally different directions. My brother-in-law 
drove off into the woods to the left in a little country cart; 
Bombelles and the two Savants also vanished among the thick 
cover by various routes; while Count Chotek and I continued 
our drive along the stream up the valley already described, 
the road often crossing the little brook, and leading us through 
the woods and small marshy glades of this mountain glen, 
which kept getting narrower and narrower. 
The deeper we penetrated into it the higher grew the sur- 
rounding summits and the steeper the slopes, and as we were 
passing along a hillside where there was a long and very 
broad clearing covered with thick bushes, I suddenly caught 
sight of a huge black bird of prey flying majestically over one 
of the heights. I was just thinking that it was too-large for 
an eagle, and its flight was also strange to me, when Count 
Chotek called out that it was a Cinereous Vulture. It was 
the first that I had ever seen in a wild state, and its gigantic 
pinions, with their primaries standing apart like the fingers 
of an outstretched hand, its cuneate tail, its long neck doubled 
back among the feathers of its neck-ruffle, and the way in 
which it sailed through the blue ether, without the slightest 
visible movement of its wings, made this heavy bird, which 
seems so disgusting near at hand, look splendid in the distance. 
A few moments afterwards I saw another, and again another, 
while wherever one looked one noticed either a young Sea- 
Eagle flying heavily over the tree-tops, a “Stein” Eagle 
