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Here an exciting scene ensues. Continuous streams of people and beasts of burden are pushing both ways; a drove of donkeys laden with rough bundles of cork-wood for the ovens approaches, the projecting ends prodding the passers-by; another drove laden with stones tries to pass them, while half a dozen mules and horses vainly endeavour to pass out.
Over hills covered with broom and heather in blossom, and through hollows grown with oleander, arbutus and the mastic shrub, we rode to the cork-wood forests of San Roque, the sporting-ground of Gibraltar officers.
I forgot to mention before that the Tremolino was officially known as a fruit and cork-wood trader. The zealous officer managed to slip a useful piece of paper into Dominic's hand as he went ashore, and a few hours afterwards, being off duty, he returned on board again athirst for drinks and gratitude. He got both as a matter of course.
The natives seem to have quitted this water on hearing us coming, for they have left behind them a large, long, and unfinished spear, two smaller ones, and some waddies, one of which was quite wet, as if the owner had been in the act of clearing out one of the wells when he heard or saw us coming: he also left a shield cut out of solid wood, which I think was, from its lightness, cork-wood.
The other shark shot forward in a similar manner; but glancing a little to one side, caught in its huge mouth the end of the dolphin-striker, grinding off a large piece of the spar as if it had been cork-wood! This it swallowed almost instantaneously; and then turning once more in the water appeared intent upon renewing the attack.
It was a large piece of Spanish cork-wood. He shoved it under Jack's back, and rested his own left arm on it. He immediately found an immense advantage from the support it afforded. "Who sent that piece of cork-wood to my aid?" he thought; "it did not come by chance." The assurance that he was not deserted gave him additional confidence. Jack also gave further signs of returning animation.
He had been discovered only the day before, running wild through the forest, by two of the nobles who happened to have been hunting in a remote part of the great cork-wood that surrounded the town, and had been carried off by them to the Palace as a surprise for the Infanta; his father, who was a poor charcoal- burner, being but too well pleased to get rid of so ugly and useless a child.
Upon the whole the cork-wood forest is not cheerful, and I would rather frequent it in the pages of Don Quixote than out; though if the trees do not mind being barked it is mere sentimentality in me to pity them. The country grew lonelier and drearier as we mounted, and the wind blew colder over the fields blotched with that sort of ground-palm, which lays waste so much land in southern Spain.
On one edge are fastened pieces of cork-wood as large as a man's fist, about two feet asunder, and on the opposite edge are fastened pieces of lead, about the same distance the lead is intended to keep the lower end of the seine close to the bottom of the river.
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