On reaching a crest above, two lammergeyers appeared, the first carrying a long stick or thin bone athwart his beak; the second held a course direct to where L. sat on the ridge, coming so near that the rustle of huge wings sounded menacingly and the white head, golden breast, and hoary shoulders showed clear as in a picture. We expected to find the eyrie somewhere hard by, but in this we were mistaken--once more. It was not on that hill, nor the next; but on a third![60] We discovered the nest of our friends, the golden eagles. It was situate quite two miles away, in a vertical pulpit-shaped rock-stack, that stood forth in a terribly steep scree. From a cavern in the face of this (prettily overhung by a clump of red-berried mistletoe) flew the male eagle. From below, the eyrie was accessible to within a dozen feet; but that interval proved impassable. In the evening we returned with the rope, and having made this fast above, L. was about to ascend from below, when the man left in charge at the top (probably misunderstanding his instructions) let all go, and down came the rope clattering at our feet! It was too late to rectify the blunder that night, and a month elapsed ere we would revisit the spot. Then this curious result ensued. The eagles, we found, had so bitterly resented the indignity of a rope having been (even momentarily) stretched athwart their portals that they had abandoned their stronghold, leaving two handsome eggs, partly incubated. Their eyrie was eight feet deep, its entrance partly overgrown with ivy and (as above mentioned) overhung by red-berried mistletoe growing on a wild-cherry--the nest built of sticks, lined with esparto, and adorned with green ivy-leaves and twigs of pinsápo. [Illustration: GOLDEN EAGLE HUNTING (1) The "stoop"--quite vertical. (2) "Got him." ] The golden eagle is still common, ornamenting with majestic flight every sierra in Spain. For eagles are notoriously difficult to kill, and, when killed, cannot be eaten; so the goat-herd, with characteristic apathy and Arab fatalism, suffers the ravages on his kids and contents himself with an oath. Only once have we found a nest in a tree; it was a giant oak, impending a ravine so precipitous that from the eyrie you could drop a pebble into a torrent 200 feet below. Usually their nests are in the crags, vast accumulations of sticks conspicuously projecting, and generally in pairs, perhaps 100 yards apart, and which are occupied in alternate years. Eggs are laid by mid-March, but the young hardly fly before June. It was in this sierra that we made the sketches of golden eagles from life, here and at p. 317. Bonelli's eagle is another beautiful mountain-haunting species, but of it we treat elsewhere. * * * * *