One day we visited the heights about half a league from this place, where, on the previous September, a brigade of the third division had been engaged. Many skeletons of the French horses lay in deep ravines, or on the shelvings of rocks, to the very summit of the ridge, on the crest of which some of the Portuguese gunners were cut down; and where for a short time the cannon remained in the hands of the enemy. It must have been at this moment that the second battalion of the fifth regiment retook them by charging in line, before the enemy's cavalry had time to form. I rode up the ragged ground myself with the utmost difficulty; the ground near the summit was so steep that the Portuguese, while throwing balls into the valley, could not see the advance of the French cavalry until quite upon them. Not that I wish to detract from the deserts of the Portuguese; but, as it has been stated that they stood to their guns to the last, I only wish to demonstrate how it happened. The very print of the wheels of the cannon were still indented in the ground, and showed, to an inch, where they had stood. The whole of the dead French soldiers lying in the valley were stripped, and in a perfect state of preservation, blanched like parchment by the alternate rain and sunshine; and their skins had become so hard, that the bodies on being touched sounded like a drum. The vultures had picked the bones of the horses perfectly clean, but had left the soldiers untouched; and, although _four months_ had elapsed since they had fallen, their features were as perfect as on the day they were killed. Some of these soldiers were gracefully proportioned, and extended in every possible attitude. The rubbish of the breaches at Ciudad Rodrigo having been cleared away, the parapets built up with gabions and fascines, all the trenches filled up, and a garrison of Spanish soldiers left for its defence—at the latter end of February we marched towards Badajoz, for the purpose of laying siege to that fortress, a distance of one hundred and sixty miles, the road more than half way lying through the rocky provinces of Portugal, where the villages are generally built on the tops of the highest mountains, with the remains of Moorish castles, or towers, studding the wildest rocks and the most tremendous precipices. We remained a week at Castello de Vida, then resumed our march, and, on the 16th of March, entered Elvas, the principal fortress on the frontier of the Alentéjo, three leagues distant from Badajoz. It is situated on a hill, flanked on the right by a fort or citadel, half a mile without its walls, and on the left by the fort La Lippe, which stands on a scarped hill, a mile from the town.