With whip-cracking and vociferation, amid good-natured farewells from the crowd, we started away.

It was just ten o'clock.
At once the road began to climb, and nearly three hours were spent in reaching the highest point of the mountain barrier.

Incessantly winding, often doubling upon itself, the road crept up the sides of profound gorges, and skirted many a precipice; bridges innumerable spanned the dry ravines which at another season are filled with furious torrents.

From the zone of orange and olive and cactus we passed that of beech and oak, noble trees now shedding their rich-hued foliage on bracken crisped and brown; here I noticed the feathery bowers of wild clematis ("old man's beard"), and many a spike of the great mullein, strange to me because so familiar in English lanes.

Through mists that floated far below I looked over miles of shore, and outward to the ever-rising limit of sea and sky.