The final day of our visit to Sóller brought yet another experience of unusual interest. Our hostess had still another surprise in store for us. We had viewed the high mountains from beneath, now we were going to see them from the crest of one of their number.
Pepe took the reins in his skilled hands and guided the surefooted mules, who, for this expedition, replaced the white horses, up a perilous road that curved about the mountain-side, rising higher and ever higher until we looked down over the many terraces of olives into the valley that lay placidly basking in the afternoon sunshine.
Our ascent was necessarily very deliberate. As we wound slowly up we passed neither dwelling nor human being; and those of us to whom the way was new began to wonder why any road should have existed on so lonely a height. Then when we had got so high that it seemed as though an eaglet's aerie would be the most likely habitation, the road ended on a flat plateau, and we found ourselves driving into the outer courtyard of a farm-house so old and weather-beaten that in appearance it resembled the rocks and crags that surrounded it.
We alighted unnoticed. Doves were flying overhead. A dog greeted our advent with an interrogative growl; fowls clucked about unheeding. Pepe, rolling himself up in a striped blanket, curled up on the box to await the hour when it might be our pleasure to return. And we walked on, wondering if we had left the everyday world behind in the valley and had all unwittingly climbed to the palace of the sleeping beauty.
A stone-cast from the house was a mirador known to our conductress. Securely seated therein, poised right on the edge of the mountain-crest, we looked at the vast panorama. Crags rose high about us. Behind and above us towered an unfamiliar side of the Puig Mayor, its massive shoulders deep in drifted snow.
Far beneath, looking like some gaily coloured map when seen from that height, lay the port of Sóller with its lake-like harbour and pigmy headlands. And northwards spread the far-reaching sea, whose grandeur no altitude could dwarf.
The sensation of being above the world was gloriously exhilarating. When a bird flew overhead we almost felt as though we too had wings, and two lines from Davidson's Ballad of a Nun kept running through my mind:
"I am sister to the mountains now,
And sister to the sun and moon."
Leaving the mirador, we wandered happily about the plateau. Among the grass a strange flower was blooming, and it seemed quite natural that this amazing location should boast a flower of its own. It was an orchid whose sugarloaf-shaped spike was covered with florets of dull purple, close-packed after the manner of a grape hyacinth. In many of the plants the flowers burst into a tuft at the top. It was strange and not pretty, but curiously in keeping with its isolated situation.