Twenty-six hours on the railway—at first with the comparative luxury of a Pullman-car: the last seven crawling across the Castilian plain, towards the frowning ridges that look down on Talavera, whereon our Iron Duke repulsed nearly twice his numbers of French, and turned the tide of war: then thirty odd miles in a diligence, and finally a five-league mountain-scramble on mules—this it costs us to reach the home of the Castilian ibex.
Night was closing in and sleet descending in driving sheets, when at length, round a projecting spur, we sighted our destination. The hamlet hung on the steep slope of the sierra, whose snow-clad heights and jagged peaks, towering away into cloud-land, gave us a fair forecast of the labours in store. As for the village—a more picturesque, rumble-tumble maze of quaint, shapeless hovels, all pitched down apparently at random, with their odd chimneys, odd balconies and projecting gables, all wood-built, it would be hard for fancy to depict, or for artist to discover. And the natives—the light-framed, lithe mountaineers, clad in the short majo jackets, tight knee-breeches and cloth gaiters, with smart sky-blue waist-coats, brass-buttoned, and crimson fajas: the women enveloped in brilliant mantas of grass-green or scarlet, and with short petticoats that displayed rounded limbs, bare to the knee—verily we seemed to have fallen upon some surviving vestige of Goth or Moor, all unknown to the world, hidden away in these recesses of the sierra.
Such things, however, had but a platonic interest for men weary, drenched and travel-worn: and a terrible shock remained in store, when, upon a low paneless barn, we deciphered, in hieroglyphic symbols, the word posada. At the moment of our observing the ill-boding sign, a pig was in the act of entering the portals.
Nothing, however, remained but to make the best of it. The cold was intense, and in the deluge of rain and sleet outside, it was impossible to erect our tent, even had a level site existed. We had with us, however, on this campaign, a genius, and with magic skill Vicente transformed the uncouth den: order replaced chaos: our bedsteads were erected, basins, towels, soap, even chairs and a table appeared as by legerdemain: while a savoury olla with two brace of quarter-pound trout from the burn below, and a stoup of good red wine, stood before us.
We soon had the local hunters collected around us, all old friends—Magdaléno, the crack shot of the sierra, Claudio, Juanito, and little Ramon: but their reports were not encouraging.[32] The snow on the heights was still impassable: Almanzor and the Lagunas de Gredos were inaccessible, and these regions formed, we knew, the madre—the true home of the ibex. The system of the ojéo, or mountain-drive, was only practicable as yet (May) on three or four limited areas of the sierra: but there also remained open to us the resource of stalking the ibex. Of this sport we will speak later; but we decided at first to adopt the plan of montería, or big beats.
The first day's batida embraced a huge natural amphitheatre of rock, seven or eight miles in circuit, as roughly depicted opposite. Our men had left before dawn to gain the furthest flank, and we followed soon after, to climb out to the peaks directly above. At first we ascended on little shaggy mules, without saddle, stirrups, or bridle—only a single cord to the nose-halter and a padded roller to sit on. The upward route was as follows: one day will serve to describe all. On the lower slopes (8,000 to 4,000 feet), rough pine forest, gradually opening out, and giving place to a zone of brushwood and coarse vegetation: above, another zone, of esparto and wiry grass interspersed with patches of a peculiar gorse and rosemary scrub, and the piorno, a tough green shrub, whose bleached limbs closely resemble human skeletons. Here and there one could imagine that the rugged slope had been, at no remote period, the scene of a bloody battle.[33] Above this level, plant-life rapidly grows scarcer and more alpine—the bleaberry and gentian, stunted heaths and piornos, with beds of purple saxifrage, white and violet crocuses, and a yellow narcissus, the two last right up to the snow.
The riding here grew worse and worse: the little mules scrambled like cats over the naked rocks, but at last even they could no further go, and were left, picketed in rock-stalls, on some hanging shelf. Now came a terrible scramble on foot—hardly a step but needed to be made good by hand-hold also, and then we reached the lower snows. Treacherous ground this, here frozen into miniature glaciers, there soft and "rotten," or, worst of all, hollowed beneath, precipitating one in a moment upon cruel rocks below. Here several minor accidents, and one of a more serious nature occurred: but after all we prefer the snow to the penultimate zone above—the region of naked rock-matrix (in Spanish canchos corridos), where smooth slippery faces of granite left no hold either for the snow, or for feet, though clad in hempen-soled alparagatas; and every crevice filled level with frozen striæ of snow. Mass above mass towered these monoliths of living granite, veined and streaked with the narrow snow-lines: and beyond them, stretching away for leagues, came the snow-fields of Gredos, imposing in the majesty of a contemporary glacial epoch, and the silence of everlasting ice.
We had high hopes of success in this first batida, for the ground covered was of great extent, traversed by many ravines and corries, and had not been disturbed since the preceding autumn. Yet it proved blank: only a single ibex (male) was enclosed, and it escaped on the right, to snow-fields beyond our reach.