After a fruitless search of four hours, the scouts returned; no better results attended a second morning and a third--nor our impatience. Clearly the second resource, that of "driving," must now be tried. It was only ten o'clock that third morning, and already the drivers, who had left at dawn so as to reach agreed positions in case of the failure of resource No. 1, would be approaching the fixed points four miles away on the encircling heights, whereat, by signal, they would know whether to proceed with the "drive" or to return by the circuitous route they had gone. Meanwhile we have ourselves to reach the "passes" in the heights above, and the scramble and struggle which that ascent involved we must leave readers to imagine. Bertram gets through such work fairly well, but the writer, a generation older, is fain to choose a lower place, reputed a likely "pass." Here, after waiting an hour, we descried the drivers showing-up at different points of those encircling Riscos de Morezón, climbing like flies down perpendicular faces, disappearing in gorges, and doing all that specialised hunters can. But not an ibex came our way. When we reassembled, it proved that three goats had been seen, one a ram. Thus ended that day--cruel work amidst lovely though terrible scenery--and never a wild-goat within our sight.
On the morrow our selected positions were to be yet nearer the heavens above than those of yesterday--along the highest skylines of Grédos, between the Plaza de Almanzór and the Ameál. From our camp my own post was pointed out, a niche in that far-away impossible ridge. How long, I asked Ramón, do you imagine it will take me to reach it? Our friends, who, lean and lythe of frame, a specialised race of mountaineers, mock mountain-heights and appreciate too little (though they recognise) our relative weakness, reply, "Two hours." But at that precise moment, while I yet scanned with binoculars the scene of this supreme effort, examining in a species of horror that infinity of piled rock-masses, their details cruelly developed in a blazing sunlight, just then, across the field of the glass soared a single lammergeyer. Now I know that these giant birds-of-prey span some ten feet from wing to wing, and the tiny speck that this one, reduced by distance, appeared on the object-glass helped me to gauge what lay before us.