VISIT TO THE ESCURIAL. Aridity and Desolation of the Country--First View of the Escurial--Sombre appearance of the building--The Church--The blind Cicerone--The Pantheon Pictures--Anecdote of Spanish Robbers. In order to proceed to the Escurial, we hired one of those fantastic vehicles, of which we have already had occasion to speak, covered with grey cupids and other ornaments in the Pompadour style, dragged by four mules, and enhanced by the presence of a zagal in a tolerable masquerading suit. The Escurial is situated about seven or eight leagues from Madrid, not far from Guadarrama, at the foot of a chain of mountains. It is impossible to imagine anything more arid and desolate than the country you have to pass through in order to reach it. There is not a single tree, not a single house; nothing but a succession of steep declivities and dry ravines, which the presence of several bridges points out as the beds of different torrents, and here and there a long vista of blue mountains capped with snow or clouds. Such as it is, however, the view is not without a certain kind of grandeur; the absence of all vegetation gives an extraordinary degree of boldness and severity to the outline of the ground. In proportion as you proceed further from Madrid, the stones with which the way is thickly strewed become larger, and evince, more and more, an ambitious feeling of being taken for rocks. They are of a bluish grey, and appear, as they are scattered over the scale-like soil, like so many warts upon the wrinkled back of a centenarian crocodile; they form a thousand strange shapes upon the outline of the hills, which resemble the ruins of gigantic edifices.