I. San Cristobal and the PinsÁpo Region

THIS mountain-system may be regarded as an outlying eastern extension of the Sierra NevÁda. Except at the “Ultimo Suspiro del Moro” there is no actual break, and both in physical features and in fauna the two ranges coincide, while differing essentially from the Sierra MorÉna, their immediate neighbour on the north. The SerranÍa de Ronda, nevertheless, displays distinctive characters which entitle it to a place in this book; it forms, moreover, our “Home-mountains,” lying within a thirty-mile ride eastward of Jerez.

The outstanding feature is the massif—or, in Spanish, NuclÉo Central—of San Cristobal, which rises to 5800 feet, and stands head and shoulders above its surrounding satellites, an imposing pile of cold grey rock and perpendicular precipice.[57]

Nestling beneath its western bastions lies the Moorish hamlet of Benamahoma, whence, housed in friendly quarters, we have oft explored this hill. The route to the summit (which may almost be reached on donkey-back) is by the southern face; for summits, however, merely as such, we have no sort of affection, and never expend one ounce of energy in gaining them, unless they chance to aid a main objective. As to “views,” we are sure to enjoy these from other points quite as effective.

New-fallen snow powdered the ground and mantled the surrounding peaks as we rode out of Benamahoma on March 20. But the sun shone bright, and from a poplar softly warbled a rock-bunting—with pearl-grey head, triple banded. Serins and kitty-wrens sang from the wooded slopes, and we observed long-tailed tits, with cirl-buntings and woodlarks. A grey wagtail by the burnside was already acquiring the black throat of spring.

The tortuous track writhes upwards through sporadic cultivation—the angles at which these hill-men can work a plough amaze, beans and garbanzos grow on slopes where no ordinary biped could maintain a foothold. The industry of mountaineers (here as elsewhere in Spain) is remarkable. Each tillable patch, however small or abrupt, is reduced to service, its million stones removed and utilised to form the foundation for a tiny era, or threshing-floor (like a shelf on the hillside), whereon the hard-won crop is threshed with flails. Higher out on the hills rude stone sheilings are erected to serve as shelters during seed-time and harvest. Not even the hardy Norseman puts up a tougher tussle with nature to wrest her fruits from the earth.

Presently one enters forests of oak and ilex with strange misshapen trunks, stunted and hollow, but decorated with prehensile convolvulus and mistletoe—many three-fourths dead, mere shells with cavernous interior, sheltering tufts of ferns. Here, instead of destroying the whole tree, charcoal-burners pollard and lop; huge lateral limbs are amputated as they grow, and the result, during centuries, produces these monstrosities, rarely exceeding twenty feet in height and surmounted by a 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 displeasing, 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 pinsÁpo 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 (Abies pinsapo) is limited not merely to Spain, but actually to this one mountain-range, the SerranÍa de Ronda—there may exist more remarkable examples of a restricted distribution, but none certainly that we have come across. The pinsÁpo, moreover, 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 pinsÁpos); and, lastly, the Sierra Bermeja on the Mediterranean, distant thirty to thirty-five miles S.S.E. On each of the three the pinsÁpo 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 pinsÁpo 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 pinsÁpo 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 for the purpose to be divested of foliage), illustrate the singular multiple growth described.

The foliage of the pinsÁpo differs from ordinary pine-needles, being rather a series of stiff outstanding spines analogous to those of the Araucaria. They display a crimson efflorescence in March, developing into clusters of red cones by April, and ripening in August to September.[58]

PINSÁPO PINES (Abies pinsapo) Diagram to show trunk-plan, divested of foliage. Girth at base 30 to 45 feet.
PINSÁPO PINES (Abies pinsapo)
Diagram to show trunk-plan, divested of foliage. Girth at base 30 to 45 feet.

The pinsÁpo-forests are subject to terrible destruction alike by hatchet and fire, tempest and avalanche. Forest-fires sweep whole glens; while rock-slides overwhelm and uproot even the biggest trees by scores. Few scenes that we have witnessed are more eloquent of nature’s violence than these traces of an avalanche. Mammoth skeletons, weird and weather-blanched, protrude by the hundred from chaotic rock-ruin—some still upright, others overthrown or half submerged in debris, yet stretching great white arms heavenward, as though in agonised appeal. The distant roar of an avalanche is a not infrequent sound throughout the mountain-land.

The pinsÁpo-forests of San Cristobal present one of the most striking mountain-landscapes in Andalucia. For some three miles they cover in a semicircle the whole scooped-out amphitheatre of the mountain-side. Their dark-green masses, contrasted against the white rocks on which they grow—and in winter with yet whiter snow—cluster upwards, tier above tier, from below the 3000-feet level away to the extreme summit of the knife-edged ridge above, say 5500 feet. Would that we could depict the beauty of the scene.

CROSSBILL Wrestling with pine-cone.
CROSSBILL
Wrestling with pine-cone.

Through these dark forests a track winds, and here again the evident industry of the mountaineers surprised. At intervals along this pathway lay great baulks of pine-timber (sleepers, planks, and poles), dressed and piled ready for transport. That such loads could be carried hence on donkey-back, or, were such possible, that the labour could be repaid, appeared incredible—so distant are markets and so heavy the cargo.[59]

We had hoped to find in these forests a home of the Spanish crossbill, but not a sign of it rewarded our search. To avail the ripe fruit, the crossbill would need to nest in autumn, and that (wide as is the latitude of its breeding-season) is too much even for the Pico-tuerto. An interesting species found here in March was the cole-tit (Parus pinsapinensis?), which climbed around us, swinging from twigs within a yard as we sat at lunch. Blackstarts abounded, also firecrests. The latter have a pretty habit of engaging in aËrial struggle—whether for love or war—both falling locked together to earth, as blue-tits do. On one such occasion a male, ere taking wing, spread out his flaming crown fanlike, as it were a halo.

Beyond the pinsÁpo-forests succeeds a region of wiry esparto-grass, up which we climbed to yet more sterile zones above. Here cruel rocks are adorned with a dwarf sword-broom, steel-tipped, a thorny berberis, and vicious pin-cushion gorse that protects its newer growths (not that there is anything tender about it at any stage) by a delicate grey tracery that deceives a careless eye. For that subtle tracery is, in fact, the indurated malice of last year’s spikey armour. No handhold does nature here vouchsafe.

Curiously, we noticed woodlarks up here, while blackstarts abounded as titlarks on a Northumbrian moor. In an ivy-clad gorge at 4200 feet we found two nearly completed nests in rock crevices: one occupied a vertical fissure that needed quite twelve inches of packed moss to provide a foundation, the cup-shaped nest being superimposed. But it was not till a month later (April 24) that these birds were laying in earnest.

At 5000 feet the “Piorno” (Spartius scorpius) began to grow, a red-stemmed shrub, known locally as Leche-interna, and on breaking it, the twigs are found to be filled with a milky fluid that justifies the name. The piorno we have never found growing except on the high tops of GrÉdos and other lofty sierras, where it forms a chief food of the Spanish ibex, its presence being, in fact, always associated with that of the wild-goat. Alas! that here, on San Cristobal, that association has been severed—another instance of the heedless improvidence that marks the Spanish race. Fifteen years ago they destroyed the last ibex; fifteen years hence they will have destroyed the last pinsÁpo!

Once for brief moments a broad-horned head, peering over the topmost crags, lent joyous hope that after all an ibex or two might yet survive. But the intruder proved to be one of the dark-brown rams of Ovis bidens that, in semi-feral state, roam these peaks.

San Cristobal itself now holds no big game; though ibex are found but a few leagues to the eastward, and, we rejoice to add (on certain sierras where protection is afforded them), begin to increase. The SerranÍa de Ronda, like NevÁda, of which it is an extension, has never held either boar or deer; both are too rocky and precipitous to shelter those animals, though both boar and roe are found in the lower hills towards Jerez.

Just below the highest peak, the Cumbre de San Cristobal, lies a curious little alpine meadow. It is only forty yards square, and while we rested, lunching, on unaccustomed level a golden eagle swept overhead, chased and hustled by a mob of choughs that colonise these crags. Ten minutes later a lammergeyer afforded a second glorious spectacle, speeding through space on pinions rigidly motionless, but strongly reflexed, as is usual on a descending gradient. Only once, as far as eye could follow, was one great wing gently deflected, and that merely from the “wrist.”

On reaching a crest above, two lammergeyers appeared, the first carrying a long stick or thin bone athwart his beak; the second held a course direct to where L. sat on the ridge, coming so near that the rustle of huge wings sounded menacingly and the white head, golden breast, and hoary shoulders showed clear as in a picture. We expected to find the eyrie somewhere hard by, but in this we were mistaken—once more. It was not on that hill, nor the next; but on a third![60]

We discovered the nest of our friends, the golden eagles. It was situate quite two miles away, in a vertical pulpit-shaped rock-stack, that stood forth in a terribly steep scree. From a cavern in the face of this (prettily overhung by a clump of red-berried mistletoe) flew the male eagle. From below, the eyrie was accessible to within a dozen feet; but that interval proved impassable. In the evening we returned with the rope, and having made this fast above, L. was about to ascend from below, when the man left in charge at the top (probably misunderstanding his instructions) let all go, and down came the rope clattering at our feet! It was too late to rectify the blunder that night, and a month elapsed ere we would revisit the spot. Then this curious result ensued. The eagles, we found, had so bitterly resented the indignity of a rope having been (even momentarily) stretched athwart their portals that they had abandoned their stronghold, leaving two handsome eggs, partly incubated. Their eyrie was eight feet deep, its entrance partly overgrown with ivy and (as above mentioned) overhung by red-berried mistletoe growing on a wild-cherry—the nest built of sticks, lined with esparto, and adorned with green ivy-leaves and twigs of pinsÁpo.

GOLDEN EAGLE HUNTING (1) The “stoop”—quite vertical. (2) “Got him.”
GOLDEN EAGLE HUNTING
(1) The “stoop”—quite vertical. (2) “Got him.”

The golden eagle is still common, ornamenting with majestic flight every sierra in Spain. For eagles are notoriously difficult to kill, and, when killed, cannot be eaten; so the goat-herd, with characteristic apathy and Arab fatalism, suffers the ravages on his kids and contents himself with an oath. Only once have we found a nest in a tree; it was a giant oak, impending a 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 NevÁda, 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 mediÆval 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 serranÍa 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, a chasm riven right through the earth’s crust till its depths are invisible from above; and overshadowed by encircling walls of sheer red crags, broken horizontally at intervals, thus forming, as it were, tier above tier, and flanked by a series of bastions and flying buttresses apparently provided to support the vast superstructure above.

By climbing along the rugged central tier, one overlooks from its apex, as from the reserved seats of a dress-circle, the whole domestic economy of a vulture city in being. Every ledge in that abyss was crowded; many vultures sat brooding, their heads laid flat on the rock or tucked under the point of a wing. Elsewhere a single grey-white chick, or a huge white egg, lay in full view on the open ledge, nestled, apparently, on bare earth; and behind these each niche or cavern had its tenant. The rocks around a nest were often stained blood-red, and one vulture arrived carrying a mass of what appeared carrion in its claws. Another brought a wisp of dry esparto-grass athwart her beak and deposited it in her nest.[61]

While we watched this scene a smart thunderstorm passed over, with the result that shortly afterwards the vultures spread their huge wings to dry, displaying attitudes some of which we endeavour to sketch—see also p. 9.

The descent into the unseen depths beneath was rewarded, despite a terrible scramble—part of the way on a rope—by discovering a fairy grotto filled with pink, azure, and opalescent stalactites and stalagmites. The bed of the canyon, which from above had appeared to be paved with sand, now proved to consist of boulders ten feet high. After threading a devious course through these for half-a-mile we reached the mouth of the grotto. Its width would be nearly 200 feet and height about half that, the form roughly resembling the quarter of a cocoa-nut. The dome, in delicate colouring, passes description—the apex bright salmon-pink, changing, as it passed inwards, first into clear emerald, then to dark green, and finally to indigo; while the reflected sunlight filtering down between the rock-walls of the canyon caused phantasmagoric effects such as, one thought, existed only in fairyland. The cavern was backed by pillars of stalactites resembling the pipes of a mighty organ, and of so soft and feathery a texture that it was surprising, on touching them, to find hard rock. The floor also was composed of great smooth stalagmites, deep brown in colour.

From outside, one saw the sky as through a narrow rift between the perpendicular walls which towered up 300 feet; and above that level there again uprose the vultures’ cliffs already described.

One evening we detected afar a cavern which showed signs of being the present abode of a lammergeyer. Ere reaching it, however, a keen eye descried one of these birds in the heavens at an altitude that dwarfed the great GypaËtus to the size of a humble kestrel. Presently, after many descending sweeps, the lammergeyer entered another cavern 2000 feet higher up—in fact, close under the sky-line, among some scanty pinsÁpos. The hour was 4 P.M., and after a long day’s scramble, the writer shied at a fresh ascent. Not so my companion, L., who set off at a run, and within an hour had reached the eyrie. It proved empty, though the leg of a freshly killed kid lay half across the nest. This was presumably the alternative site, used, this year, merely as a larder; but time did not that night admit of further search.

The writer beguiled the two-hours interval in interviewing a wild gipsy-eyed girl of twelve, whose name was JosÉfa AguilÁr, and whose vocation in life to attend a herd of swine. Throughout Spain, whether on mountain or plain, one sees this thing—a small boy or girl spending the livelong day in solitary charge of dumb beasts, goats or pigs, even turkeys—and the sight ever causes me a pang of regret. Probably I am quite wrong, but such hardly seems a human vocation—certainly it leads nowhere. In intervals of pelting her recalcitrant charges with stones, JosÉfa told me she lived in a reed-hut which was close by, but so small that I had overlooked its existence; that she never went to school or had been farther from home than Zahara, a village some few miles away. She asked if I was from Grazalema, and on being told from England, she repeated the word “Inglaterra” again and again, while her bright black eyes became almost sessile with wonderment. JosÉfa’s frock was hanging in tatters, torn to bits by the thorny scrub. I gave her some coppers to buy a new one, and with a little joyous scream JosÉfa vanished among the bush.

LAMMERGEYER ENTERING EYRIE
LAMMERGEYER ENTERING EYRIE

Darkness was closing in ere L. returned; then great thunder-clouds rolled up, obscuring the moon, and oh! what we suffered those next three hours, scrambling over rock and ridge, through forest and thicket—all in inky darkness and under a deluge of rain.

On returning to this remote ridge (having ascended from the opposite face), we soon renewed our friendship with the lammergeyer—when first seen, it was being mobbed by an impudent chough. Then it sailed up the deep gorge below us, passing close in front, and after clearing an angle of the hill, wheeled inwards and with gently closing wings plunged into a cavern in the crag. We felt we had our object assured; yet on examining these mighty piles of rocks—a couple of hours’ stiff climbing—it was evident we were mistaken, for no nest, past or present, did they reveal. It was on yet a third stupendous crag, quite a mile from the alternative site first discovered, that this year these lammergeyers had fixed their home. The nest was in quite a small cave in the rock-face; more often (as described in Wild Spain) the lammergeyer prefers a huge cavern in the centre of which is piled an immense mass of sticks, heather-stalks, and other rubbish—the accumulation of years—and lined with esparto-grass and wool. The eggs always number two and are richly coloured, whereas the griffon lays but one, and that white. Although laying takes place as early as January, yet the young are unable to fly before June. Our principal object this year was to sketch the lammergeyer in life, and in this several rough portraits serve to show that we succeeded—so far as in us lies.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There remain notes of later vernal developments in these beautiful sierras; but alas! this chapter is already too long, so over the taffrail they go.