Resina is the point where all travellers stop to take their start for the mountain. The people of the village live by letting donkeys and acting as guides. Beyond the village, the roads become rugged and steep. Most travellers hire these animals, but I preferred walking. While I was stopping a few moments to rest, I heard whips cracking and the sound of wheels; and presently a couple of carriages drove into the village, full of English travellers, going up the mountain. The street was already crowded with villagers, each with his donkey saddled and bridled, ready for the journey. The moment the carriages stopped, they all crowded round them and began pushing, struggling, pulling, hauling, tugging, and scratching one another; bawling and screaming all the time like a pack of bedlamites. Never in my life did I witness so comical a hurly-burly. Each man scrambled and pressed for the carriage door, thrusting his donkey forward through the crowd, by main force, hoping to catch an Englishman on his back as he stepped out of the carriage. The first comer was thrust away by the second, and this one by the third; the whole crowd of them were jammed so hard against the carriages that the doors could not be opened, and the astonished and affrighted travellers remained fast penned up and unable to stir. The tumult and clamor increased; the poor little donkeys, squeezed up in the crowd, whisked their long ears about, and bobbed their noses against everybody around them; presently they began kicking and rearing up, and now the scramble and uproar rose to a pitch that surpasses all description! Down tumbles one of the donkeys, upsetting two or three fellows in his fall; another animal pitches head-foremost over him; the crowd scramble and push forward; whoever tries to get up catches hold of another’s leg and lays him sprawling too; donkeys and men lay scrambling and floundering, pell-mell, with a roaring and braying, such as never was heard before under the sun! I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks, and even to this day, I never can think of the scene without laughing for the hundredth time! At length the carriages made a start forward, leaving the whole ragged regiment behind in the most woful plight. How they settled the matter among themselves I never knew, but jogged on my way up the mountain.