José. “No, señor, not tired, but I have no soul to-night to play. This morning they asked me to bring medicine from the town for Carmen, but when I reached the house she was dead. I find myself very sad.”
Dolóres. “Pero, si ya tiene su palma y su corona?” ... = but as she already has her palm and her crown?
José. “That is true! Bring the guitar and I will see if it will quit me of this tristeza!”
Next morning the snow prevented our leaving; and the day after, while riding away, we met some of the villagers carrying poor Carmen to the burial-ground on the mountain-side. The body, plainly robed in white, was borne on an open bier, the hands crossed and head supported on pillows, thus allowing the long unfettered hair to hang down loose below. It was an impressive and a picturesque scene, and as I rode on, the rejoinder of Dolóres came to my mind, “Ya tiene su palma y su corona.”
CHAPTER XXXI
IN THE SIERRA NEVÁDA (Continued)
ITS BIRD-LIFE IN SPRING-TIME
THE long snow-lines of the sierra had vanished behind whirling cloud-masses, black and menacing. The green avenues of the Alhambra seemed gloomier than ever under a heavy downpour, while troops of rain-soaked tourists belied the glories of an Andalucian springtide.
Serins sang in the elms, and wrynecks noisily courted, as we set forth with a donkey-team for the sierra. On former occasions we had explored northwards up the Darro towards Jaën, another year up the Genil, this spring we had selected the valley of the Monachil. Hardly had we entered the mountains than thunder crackled overhead, and then a rain-burst drove us to shelter in a cave. Next day broke ominous enough, but we rode on up the wild gorge of the Monachil, and after seven hours’ hill-climbing reached the alpine farm of San Gerónimo, to the guarda of which we had a recommendation. The house nestles beneath the serrated ridge of the Dornájo, 6970 feet.
With some dismay we found assembled at this outlandish spot quite a small crowd of men, women, and children who, with dogs, pigs, hens, and an occasional donkey, all appeared to inhabit a single smoke-filled room. We were bidden to take seats amidst this company, and watched the attempt to boil an enormous pan of potatoes over a green brushwood fire, while domestic animals (including cattle) passed freely through to the byres beyond. These being on higher ground had created in front a sort of quagmire, which was crossed by a plank-bridge. Rain was falling smartly, and the writer’s spirits, be it confessed, sank to zero at the prospect of a week or two in such quarters. Worse situations, however, have had to be faced, and usually yield to resolute treatment. Thus when a separate room—albeit but a dirty potato store—had been assigned to us, trestle-beds and a table set up, the quality of comfort advanced in quite disproportionate degree.
Now the Sierra Neváda with its league-long lines of unbroken snow, accentuated by the mystery of the towering Veleta, massive Mulahacen, and the rest, presents an alpine panorama that is absolutely unrivalled in all the Peninsula. But immediately below those transcendent altitudes, in its middle regions the Sierra Neváda is lacking in many of those attributes that charm our eyes—naturalists’ eyes. Over vast areas and on broad shoulders of the hills the winter-snows linger so long that plant-life, where not actually extinct, is scant and starved; while these dreary inchoate stretches are strewn broadcast with a debris of shale and schist that resembles nothing so much as one of nature’s giant rubbish tips. True, there exists a sporadic brushwood, exiguous, dwarfed, and intermittent; there are scattered trees, ilex and pinaster (Pinus pinaster), up to about 7000 feet. But all seems barren by comparison. One’s eye hungers for the deep jungles of Moréna, for the dark-green pinsapos of San Cristobal, or the stately granite walls of Grédos. Here all is on a big scale, the biggest in Spain; but size alone does not itself constitute beauty, and the adornments of beauty are lacking. We write of course not as mountaineers, but as naturalists.