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 Moréna, will form no adequate, 
much less a romantic, conception of that great mountain-system 
of which he sees but the southern fringe. Yet, in fact, the 
train hurries him past within a few leagues of perhaps the finest 
big-game country in Spain—of mountain-solitudes and a thousand 
jungled 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 Moréna lacks both the altitudes and the 
stupendous rock-ridges that characterise all other Spanish 
sierras—from Nevada and Grédos 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 Moréna, 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 
Drakensberg of the Transvaal. 
The Sierra Moréna, 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, Moréna thus covers a 
space equal to the whole of England south of the Thames, with 
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