[Footnote 12: A jargon mixture of the Portuguese, Spanish, and French languages was frequently resorted to in our anxiety to make ourselves understood by the natives, and when one word failed another was substituted. An officer who had just entered the country was most anxious to procure an egg, and having failed to make himself understood, as a last resource, he cut a piece of _pipe-clay_ into the shape of an egg, and was instantly supplied.] CHAPTER V. March continued—Wild and striking aspect of the country—Excellence of discipline—Camp followers—Spanish peasant girls and men—Plain of Fuente de Guinaldo—Reflections on a soldier's life—A vegetable conflagration—Village of Martiago—Difficulties of the French—Arrival in cantonments—The paymaster's peculiarities. Continuing our route through the town of Castello Branco and several villages, we obtained to the left a view of the tremendous ridge of snow-capt mountains of the Sierra d'Estrella. The barrier of bare and rugged rocks towards the Spanish side, when gilded by the departing glare of the setting sun, assumes the grandest appearance, and, in the revellings of imagination, a thousand palaces of burnished gold may be fancied amid these adamantine rocks, vieing with each, other in height and endless variety of form. Afar off, an old monastery might be descried, perched on the summit of bare and wild precipices; its spiral turrets shooting on high, and encompassed by the immensity of space; the frowning battlements overhanging the valley below, and threatening to overwhelm the passing traveller with loose stones and crumbling ruins—while the deep tones of the monastic bell chimed the vesper hour. On a solitary eminence a lonely shepherd stood, tending his flock, with a carbine slung across his shoulder, and a couple of wolf-dogs crouching at his feet, their necks encircled by strong iron collars bristling with long spikes, to protect them against the gripe of the voracious wolves. All around seemed of other times in this precipitous part of the country, composed principally of solid rock. The rude hand of time had identified towns and villages with their primitive stones; houses had fallen to decay, but nothing new had arisen on the ruins; streets branched out, but it was no wise uncommon to find huge rocks, of many tons weight, sticking up in the middle of them, never having been removed, and leaving the traveller the option of a choice of one of the two narrow roads round these natural obstacles.