Our ‘*‘Home-Mountains”’ acs 
ravine so precipitous that from the eyrie you could drop a 
pebble into a torrent 200 feet below. Usually their nests are in 
the crags, vast accumulations of sticks conspicuously projecting, 
and generally in pairs, perhaps 100 yards apart, and which are 
occupied in alternate years. Eggs are laid by mid-March, but 
the young hardly fly before June. It was in this sierra that we 
made the sketches of golden eagles from life, here and at p. 317. 
Bonelli’s eagle is another beautiful mountain-haunting species, 
but of it we treat elsewhere. 
From the knife-edged ridge above our eagle’s eyrie (height 5500 
feet) we enjoyed a memorable view. Due south, 50 miles away, 
beyond the jumbled Spanish sierras, lay Gibraltar, recognisable 
by its broken back, but looking puny and inconsiderable amidst 
vaster heights. Beyond it—beyond Tetuan, in fact—rose Mount 
Anna, an 8000-feet African mountain; to the right, Gebel-Musa 
and all the Moorish coast to Cape Spartel, the straits between 
showing dim and insignificant. To the eastward, beyond the 
Sierra de las Nieves aforesaid, stands out boldly the long white 
snow-line of Nevada, its majesty undimmed by distance and 140 
miles of intervening atmosphere. To the west we distinguish 
Jerez, 40 miles away, and beyond it the shining Atlantic. 
From one point there lies almost perpendicularly below, the 
curious medieval village of Grazalema, jammed in between two 
vast cinder-grey rock-faces—its narrow streets, white houses, and 
india-red roofs resembling nothing so much as a toy town. No 
space for “back-streets,” each house faces both ways; yet 
Grazalema is one of the cleanest spots we have struck—how they 
manage that, we know not. 
Immediately beneath Grazalema is a bird-crag that contains 
a regular “choughery,” hundreds of these red-billed corvines 
nesting in its caves and crevices. As neighbours they had lesser 
kestrels and rock-sparrows (Petronia stulta), while the roofs of 
the caverns were plastered with the mud nests of crag-martins. 
We also noticed here alpine swifts, and a great frilled lizard 
escaped us amid broken rocks. 
Within the limits of a chapter even the more notable spots of 
a great serrania cannot all find place; but the rock-gorge known 
as the Yna de la Garganta will not be overpassed, though no 
words of ours can convey the stupendous nature of this place, 
