312 Unexplored Spain 
enormous pan of potatoes over a green brushwood fire, while 
domestic animals (including cattle) passed freely through to the 
byres beyond. These being on higher ground had created in 
front a sort of quagmire, which was crossed by a plank-bridge. 
Rain was falling smartly, and the writer’s spirits, be it confessed, 
sank to zero at the prospect of a week or two in such quarters. 
Worse situations, however, have had to be faced, and usually 
yield to resolute treatment. Thus when a separate room—albeit 
but a dirty potato store—had been assigned to us, trestle-beds 
and a table set up, the quality of comfort advanced in quite 
disproportionate degree. 
Now the Sierra Nevada with its league-long lines of unbroken 
snow, accentuated by the mystery of the towering Veleta, massive 
Mulahacen, and the rest, presents an alpine panorama that is 
absolutely unrivalled in all the Peninsula. But immediately 
below those transcendent altitudes, in its middle regions the 
Sierra Nevada is lacking in many of those attributes that charm 
our eyes — naturalists’ eyes. Over vast areas and on broad 
shoulders of the hills the winter-snows linger so long that plant- 
life, where not actually extinct, is secant and starved; while these 
dreary inchoate stretches are strewn broadcast with a debris of 
shale and schist that resembles nothing so much as one of nature’s 
giant rubbish tips. True, there exists a sporadic brushwood, 
exiguous, dwarfed, and intermittent; there are scattered trees, 
ilex and pinaster (Pinus pinaster), up to about 7000 feet. But 
all seems barren by comparison. One’s eye hungers for the deep 
jungles of Moréna, for the dark-green pinsapos of San Cristobal, 
or the stately granite walls of Grédos. Here all is on a big 
scale, the biggest in Spain; but size alone does not itself con- 
stitute beauty, and the adornments of beauty are lacking. We 
write of course not as mountaineers, but as naturalists. 
It boots not to tell of days when rain fell in sheets and an 
icy neblina swept the hills, shrouding their summits from view. 
A single ornithological remembrance shall be recorded — the 
abundance of certain northern-breeding species on the middle 
heights, especially common wheatears and skylarks. After 
watching these carefully, we were convinced by their actions 
(their song, courting, and fluttering flight) that both intended 
to nest here at 7000 feet, and dissection confirmed that view. 
Time alone prevented our settling the point; but a month 
