Now, as they won to the bare-fanged wind-shrieking altitudes of the pass, Morales and his men felt dizzy; their stomachs churned, their heads were like gas-filled balloons. Sheerly below them dropped the narrow, profound gutter of the Llanos de Jaen. It seemed composed of three parts rock, standing on end, and seven parts air, giddying around in a stew. They drew their eyes away. They felt as if they would like to leave off clinging by their finger nails and slip down into the abysmal void.
They sank down upon the uneven spaces of a granite spire that was as a needle for slimness. Into the north rolled away, like a gray sea of mist, the massive ramifying Sierra Morena. To the south and ahead bulked up, even more imposing of port, the lofty altitudes of the Sierra Nevada. It was like some long and magnificent staircase, its lower steps of mica schist overgrown with gum cistus, rhododendron, and broom, its top a dazzling flow of snow. Crags and peaks, jungled windy cuts, rock-bound alpine lakes, creamy knobs, and sharp obelisks saw-edged the sublime blue like the teeth of some titanic rake. The white melting heads of old Muley Hassan and the Picacho de la Veleta looked but a jump away, and yet with the mighty distance, the pink and purple of rhododendron, the white and pink of trailing arbutus and the green of gum cistus and broom seemed all of the same hazy blueness. It was a stupendous, overpowering jumble of cathedral mountains, colossal mountains, awful mountains.
"The Sierra Nevada has a scowling look," remarked Manuel Morales. "We may thank the good Dios humbly and gratefully, if we come triumphant through those solitudes and steeps."
"We must not lose another mule," said Jacques Ferou. "There are no red deer in the Sierra Nevada, nor wild boar, nor even mongoose. Is it not so? The panniers of provisions are our only salvation."
"And the mules may be eaten, too, when we're hungry enough," added Carson grimly. "I've eaten worse meat in my day in Death Valley, California."
Aguilino the guide heard the remarks without a quiver of his scarred eye.
Late that afternoon, John Fremont Carson halted his mule on the eyebrow of a cliff and the caravan crowded together at imminent risk of one or more going overside. His beast had gone suddenly lame, Carson said. It was standing on three legs, gray head drooping, and attempting every little while to put down its fourth leg.
"Carajo! The cattle must be shot!" said the guide Aguilino at first glance. "The contents of its panniers can be apportioned among the other mules."
"Nothing doing," said Carson shortly. "We can't afford to lose a single mule."
"You are right, monsenor," agreed Jacques Ferou. "In the Sierra Morena, the cabanas of the mountaineers were far between and few, and we succeeded in keeping our strength only by killing our meat as we went. Here, this Sierra Nevada seems as empty of men and wild meat as the deserts of French Algiers. We must save all our panniers, all our mules."