As soon as the Sierra Morena is passed, the aspect of the country undergoes a total change; it is like going all at once from Europe to Africa; vipers, crawling to their nests, leave their oblique marks on the fine gravel of the roads; and the aloe begins to brandish its large thorny sabres at the sides of the ditches. These large fans of thick, brawny, bluish-grey leaves immediately throw a different appearance over the whole landscape. You feel that you are in a new country; you understand that you have really quitted Paris; but the difference in the climate, in the architecture, and in the costumes, does not astonish you so much as the presence of the large vegetables belonging to the torrid regions, and which we are only accustomed to behold in hothouses, in France. The laurels, the holm oaks, the cork, and the fig-trees, with their varnished and metallic-looking foliage, have about them something free, robust, and wild, which indicates a climate in which nature is more powerful than man, and in which she can do without him. Before us extended the fine country of Andalusia, unfolding itself to our view, like an immense panorama. The scene possessed the grandeur and appearance of the sea: chains of mountains, which distance confounded with the sky itself, succeeded one another, with the gentlest undulations, like long rows of billows of azure. Large clouds of white vapour filled up the intervals; and here and there the rays of the sun streaked with gold some of the nearer mountain-tops, and made them sparkle with a thousand colours like a pigeon's breast. Other ridges, curiously irregular, resembled those draperies in ancient pictures which were yellow on one side and blue on the other. The whole was inundated with a most dazzling and splendid light, similar to that which must have illuminated the terrestrial paradise. It streamed through this ocean of mountains like liquid gold and silver, dashing a phosphorescent foam of spangles on every obstacle it met with. The scene before us was much more vast than the grandest perspectives of Martin, and infinitely more beautiful. The infinite in things filled with light is sublime and stupendous in a far different manner to the infinite in things smothered in darkness.