A Kite or Buzzard is too cautious to return directly to the nest. Alighting first on a distant pine, it will approach by three or four flights, and at last one knows that the coveted prize sits well within shot, but either directly behind, or in such a position that (from the ambush) the gun cannot be brought to bear. The trap saved all this, and rarely failed to secure such specimens as were required--many caught by the beak and killed instantly.[52]
A characteristic of the forests of Doñana are the enormous sand-hills--mountains of blown sand dazzling in the reflected sunlight, and devoid of green thing or trace of life, beyond the track of prowling Lynx or Mongoose, or the curious "broad-gauge" _vestigia_ of the tortoise. Stay: there is a thin black strip of moving objects--they are all ants, and that is one of their great highways--a beaten track connecting two great industrial centres. Except on the chosen line--a mere strip barely an inch wide, though hundreds of yards in length--not another insect will be visible on the wastes of sand. To the selected route each member of their infinite community confines his course as systematically as the steamships of our great ocean lines. One cannot resist the temptation of interrupting this well-regulated microcosm. Instantly confusion spreads in the black ranks: around the point of obstruction the intercepted battalions spread out like a fan: the tumult and disorder extend backwards along either column till for yards the sand is carpeted with the fragments of a disorganized host. But these scattered units are each seeking to re-establish their lost continuity. The re-formed column deflects a little to pass on one side or the other (not both), and in a few minutes the "trade-route" has resumed its former monotonous regularity.
Elsewhere the sand-wastes are clothed, especially in their deeper dells and hollows, with cistus-scrub or tamarisk, and the stone-pine (_Pinus pinea_) somehow finds sustenance and even luxuriates. How plant-life can survive on the remnants of pulverized rock is a mystery--though here, perhaps, the deep-seated roots strike into alluvial soil below--and no more comprehensible in view of the analogous fact that the vines producing the richest Spanish wines also flourish in equally ungenial soils. The vintages of Jerez are garnered from grapes grown on arid and silicious soil: the strong red wine of Val-de-Peñas, so grateful in torrid Spain, comes, literally, from a "valley of stones," and in the Alto Douro the vineyards occupy hillsides composed of little bits of (what looks like) broken slate and disintegrated shale, so little coherent, that the slopes must be terraced before they are cultivable. Strange anomalies--plant a vine in rich soil, and you get vine leaves--in tropical lands, the vine becomes a barren evergreen--in arid soil or shale, it produces nectar.