Romero said nothing, and yet his dress was made of thin linen, and all that he had to wrap round him was a narrow piece of cloth. At last the dawn appeared; we were enveloped in a cloud, and Romero advised us to begin our descent, if we wished to reach Granada before night. When it was sufficiently light to enable us to distinguish the various objects, I observed that Eugene was as red as a lobster nicely boiled, and at the same moment he made an analogous observation with respect to me, and did not feel himself bound to conceal the fact. The young German and Louis were also equally red; Romero alone had reserved his peculiar tint, which resembled, by the way, that of a boot-top, and although his legs of bronze were naked, they had not undergone the slightest alteration. It was the biting cold and the rarefaction of the air that had turned us this colour. Going up a mountain is nothing, because you look at the objects above you, but coming down, with the awful depths before your eyes, is quite a different matter. At first the thing appeared impracticable, and Louis began screeching like a jay who is being picked alive. However, we could not remain for ever on the Mulhacen, which is as little adapted for the purpose of habitation as any place in the known world, and so, with Romero at our head, we began our descent. It would be impossible, without laying ourselves open to the charge of exaggeration, to convey any notion of the paths, or rather the absence of paths, by which our dare-devil of a guide conducted us; never more break-neck obstacles crowded together in the course marked out for any steeple-chase, and I entertain strong doubts as to whether the feats of any "gentlemen riders" ever outrivalled our exploits on the Mulhacen. The _Montagnes Russes_ were mild declivities in comparison to the precipices with which we had to do. We were almost constantly standing up in our stirrups, and leaning back over the cruppers of our horses, in order to avoid performing an incessant succession of parabolas over their heads. All the lines of perspective seem jumbled up together; the streams appeared to be flowing up towards their source, the rocks vacillated and staggered on their bases, and the most distant objects appeared to be only two paces off; we had lost all feeling of proportion, an effect which is very common in the mountains, where the enormous size of the masses, and the vertical position of the different ranges, do not allow of your judging distances in the ordinary manner. In spite of every difficulty we reached Granada without our horses having even made one false step, only they had got but one shoe left among them all. Andalusian horses--and ours were of the most authentic description--cannot be equalled for mountain travelling. They are so docile, so patient, and so intelligent, that the best thing the rider can do is to throw the reins on their necks and let them follow their own impulse.