Our ‘‘Home-Mountains” 349 
delicate superstructure of branches totally disproportionate. 
No more fantastic forms can be conceived than these bloated 
boles, wrestling, as it were, with death, yet still able to transmit 
life to the superstruction above. ‘They recall the Baobab trees 
of Central Africa. In neither case is the effect absolutely dis- 
pleasing, albeit grotesque. Both may be described as deformed 
rather than disfigured. 
On rounding the northern shoulder of the mountain, suddenly 
the whole scene changes. Instead of limb-lopped trunks, one is 
faced by the dark foliage of the pinsdpo pine—a forest monarch 
whose stately growth strikes one’s eye as something conspicuously 
new. And new indeed it is. For the range of this great Spanish 
pine (Abzes pinsapo) is limited not merely to Spain, but actually 
to this one mountain-range, the Serrania de Ronda—there may 
exist more remarkable examples of a restricted distribution, but 
none certainly that we have come across. The pinsdpo, more- 
over, affects even here but three spots: first, San Cristobal 
itself; secondly, the Sierra de las Nieves, a mountain plainly 
visible some thirty miles to the eastward (all its northern corries 
darkened by pinsdpos); and, lastly, the Sierra Bermeja on the 
Mediterranean, distant thirty to thirty-five miles S.8.E. On 
each of the three the pins4po grows in forests; on adjacent hills 
we have observed one or two scattered groups—otherwise this 
pine is found nowhere else on earth. 
A curious character of the pins4po is that it only grows on 
the northern faces of the hills. 
The tree possesses remarkable personality. Though one sees 
a chance specimen grow up straight as a spruce, yet its normal 
tendency is to “flatten out” on top, whence three, four, even 
a dozen independent “leaders” spring away, each with equal 
vigour, and finally form as many distinct vertical trunks, say six 
or eight separate pines all arising from a common base. 
To see the pinsdpo in its pristine majesty and massiveness, 
one must ascend beyond the range of charcoal-burners ; up there 
flourish gigantic specimens, some of which we measured (by rough 
pacing) to encompass ten to fifteen yards of base. These trees 
grow from screes of broken rock—great blocks of white dolomite ; 
but the deep-searching tap-roots penetrate to black alluvia 
beneath. Other huge pines found roothold in walls of living 
rock, The three sketches, made from individual trees (presumed 
