pice; and
men working in the valley below were like tiny crabs. The Moorish mills
were white, broken hour-glasses, shaking out a stream of silver; geese on
the river were floating bread-crumbs; a string of donkeys crawling up the
steep Moorish road were invisible under their packs, which looked like
mushrooms with moving stems.

The noise of the river floated up to us with a muffled roar, and across
the deep valley its water had cut, tumbled a wild mountain-land, crossed
here and there by white threads of road which clung to the sky-line and
disappeared.

"Great Scott, if this eagle's nest doesn't take the cake!" exclaimed Dick,
always modern. "If there were any more to take, it could have that, too.
Hurrah for you, rock and river. You're sublime."

But we had not seen all, by hanging over that iron railing, nor nearly
all. There was the palace of the Moorish King, and the terrible steps cut
by Christian captives. There was the bridge swung over the gorge; and the
far-famed "window" of rock, one of the wonders of the world. There was the
old Roman amphitheatre, turned into a bull-ring; the town wall, which
Hercules helped to build; the Roman gate, and the Moorish gate, and the
house where Miranda lived; and a hundred other things to be found by
mounting steep hills or sliding down wild precipices.

The splendid mountain air had given Dick a ferocious appetite;
nevertheless he could hardly be torn from the cliff above the "window,"
and vowed that it would be worth while coming all the way from New York to
Ronda next year when the grand new hotel should be finished.

Rain fell while we lunched, but we wandered out again, in a thin mist like
a sieve, through which sifted turquoises and silver spangles; nor did we
cease wandering until it was time for the train to arrive with the
expected petrol. The Californian had not failed us; and with a good supply
of food for the Gloria, and enough for ourselves to last until morning, we
set off, against the advice of everyone.

The sky had cleared, and twilight would soon merge into moonlight; but we
would need the moon and stars as well on the road we had to travel. In
more than one place it was marked on my map by an ominous, thin black line
which meant "Motorists, beware." The country was sparsely populated;
people whispered of _bandidos_; and if anything happened to the car in the
middle of the night, there would be no means of getting help.

Still, if we won through witho