New-fallen snow powdered the ground and mantled the surrounding peaks as we rode out of Benamahoma on March 20. But the sun shone bright, and from a poplar softly warbled a rock-bunting--with pearl-grey head, triple banded. Serins and kitty-wrens sang from the wooded slopes, and we observed long-tailed tits, with cirl-buntings and woodlarks. A grey wagtail by the burnside was already acquiring the black throat of spring. [Illustration: ROCK-BUNTING (_Emberiza cia_)] The tortuous track writhes upwards through sporadic cultivation--the angles at which these hill-men can work a plough amaze, beans and _garbanzos_ grow on slopes where no ordinary biped could maintain a foothold. The industry of mountaineers (here as elsewhere in Spain) is remarkable. Each tillable patch, however small or abrupt, is reduced to service, its million stones removed and utilised to form the foundation for a tiny era, or threshing-floor (like a shelf on the hillside), whereon the hard-won crop is threshed with flails. Higher out on the hills rude stone sheilings are erected to serve as shelters during seed-time and harvest. Not even the hardy Norseman puts up a tougher tussle with nature to wrest her fruits from the earth. Presently one enters forests of oak and ilex with strange misshapen trunks, stunted and hollow, but decorated with prehensile convolvulus and mistletoe--many three-fourths dead, mere shells with cavernous interior, sheltering tufts of ferns. Here, instead of destroying the whole tree, charcoal-burners pollard and lop; huge lateral limbs are amputated as they grow, and the result, during centuries, produces these monstrosities, rarely exceeding twenty feet in height and surmounted by a delicate superstructure of branches totally disproportionate. No more fantastic forms can be conceived than these bloated boles, wrestling, as it were, with death, yet still able to transmit life to the superstruction above. They recall the Baobab trees of Central Africa. In neither case is the effect absolutely displeasing, albeit grotesque. Both may be described as deformed rather than disfigured.