The mules were dragging our carriage across the plain whilst she told me these things about the people, and at intervals she served me as eyes to note the beauties that we passed. There were orchards of almond-trees that seemed from a distance to be bearing a crop of snowflakes, till one came nearer and could distinguish the delicate pinks and mauves of their blossom; there were bushy algobras with rich green foliage; oranges, bearing the last of that juicy crop which, when fresh gathered, melts in the mouth like ice; olive-trees, with dry gray leaves and trunks so grotesquely gnarled as to suggest arboreal pain. The hot sun above, dappling the young corn and filling the stone water-conduits with soft tree-shadows; the tinkling twitter of unseen birds; the repose everywhere, made up a charm which my poor words refuse to utter. And yet she made me feel it all, and more besides. We approached the cup-edge of the mountain. To a Spaniard all trees except fruit-trees mean so many cubic feet of wood for building or charcoal. As Spain and Italy both know, climates change when the forests go, and the crops suffer from long droughts or heavy deluges which sweep the soil bodily away in spite of laboriously-built stone terraces or concrete-lined water ducts. But that is for _manana_. The timber is wanted for to-day, and down it comes. Yet from a merely scenic point of view this ruthless axemanship is hardly to be deplored where we were then. The rocks were bare, save for scattered dark-green dottings of pine or ilex perched where they could not readily be come at; they were full of fantastic shadows; they were shaven, gray, and rugged; they were unspeakably grand. The crags closed in as we went on, and the hiss of the stream which had neared the road began to drown the bird-songs. Some of the hills beside us were clothed with green shrubs, and some were gaunt and bare, of homely gray splashed with red. Ahead there was a wee white house, apparently balanced like an eagle's nest in an inaccessible eyrie. The orchards had gone, but the stony land was still scratched up to receive crops, and laboriously terraced to keep the soil from being swilled into the sea. The hills pressed farther together into a rocky gorge, with the rut of the road perched high on one side, and the stream brawling away fifty feet below. Goats with tinkling bells were flitting about the crags like so many brown flies. One began to wonder whether the road was not a _cul-de-sac_, and whether Valledemosa did not lie in some other direction. There seemed absolutely no outlet except for wings. But with an angle of the gorge one opened out a new scene. Another wide valley lay ahead of us, through which the road wound steeply, past women gathering the purple olives from the turf beneath the trees, past laden orange-trees, and sprawls of prickly pears, and fields of sprouting beans.