Every time our horses stopped to take breath, we turned round in our saddles to contemplate the immense panorama formed by the circular canvas of the horizon. The mountain tops which lay below us looked as if they had been marked out in a large map. The Vega of Granada and all Andalusia presented the appearance of an azure sea, in the midst of which a few white points that caught the rays of the sun, represented the sails of the different vessels. The neighbouring eminences that were completely bare, and cracked, and split from top to bottom, were tinged in the shade with a green-ash colour, Egyptian blue, lilac and pearl-grey, while in the sunshine they assumed a most admirable and warm hue similar to that of orange peel, tarnished gold or a lion's skin. Nothing gives you so good an idea of a chaos, of a world still in the course of creation, as a mountain range seen from its highest point. It seems as if a nation of Titans had been endeavouring to build some sacrilegious Babel, some prodigious _Lylac_ or other; that they had heaped together all the materials and commenced the gigantic terraces, when suddenly the breath of some unknown being had, like a tempest, swept over the temples and palaces they had begun, shaking their foundations and levelling them with the ground. You might fancy yourself amidst the remains of an antediluvian Babylon, a pre-Adamite city. The enormous blocks, the Pharaoh-like masses, awake in your breast thoughts of a race of giants that has now disappeared, so visibly is the old age of the world written in deep wrinkles on the bald front and rugged face of these millennial mountains. We had reached the region inhabited by the eagles. Several times, at a distance, we saw one of these noble birds perched upon a solitary rock, with its eye turned towards the sun, and immersed in that state of contemplative ecstasy which with animals replaces thought. There was one of them floating at an immense height above us, and seemingly motionless in the midst of a sea of light. Romero could not resist the pleasure of sending him a visiting card in the shape of a bullet. It carried away one of the large feathers of his wing, but the eagle, nothing moved, continued on his way with indescribable majesty, as if nothing had happened. The feather whirled round and round for a long time before reaching the earth; it was picked up by Romero, who stuck it in his hat.