AND PORTO SANTO. 55 



My last excursion in this part of the interior of Madeira was to 

 the Poul de Serra. We slept on a bed of dry fern, and in view of 

 a blazing fire, in one of the huts raised for the shelter of the in- 

 spector of the roads, and started about an hour before day-light 

 for the Poul, which we reached soon after seven o'clock. It is a 

 vast plateau, or table land, about nine miles long, and three broad, 

 sometimes covered with a sandy soil, sometimes with rich pasturage, 

 and less frequently, with mouldering tufa and basaltic rock. 

 There were several patches of ice in the earliest part of the morn- 

 ing, and the thermometer was as low as 42° at eight o'clock. It is 

 5159 feet above the level of the sea, and might be made very pro- 

 ductive, had the Portuguese any spirit or knowledge as agricul- 

 turists. At present it is the Hartz of Madeira, and the peasants 

 who live at some distance, when obliged to traverse it in their 

 journies to the westward, do so with a hurried step and fearful 

 eye, looking for some mahgnant gobhn, or offended spirit, in every 

 cloud that settles around it : the most alarming stories, however, 

 are generally traced to the four or five families who live beneath 

 its brow, and get a better livelihood than ordinary, by cutting fire- 

 wood, and feeding cattle on it. The vaccinium cappadocium 

 abounds in thickets of small trees, and the peasants make vinegar 

 of its berries. The sonchus radiatus grows to a large size, and 

 serves as food for innumerable rabbits, aU of which are said to 

 have descended from a single doe, wliich Httered on board Pres- 

 trello's ship, who was the first governor of Porto San to \ I saw 

 nothing to interest the geologist, unless it was several of those 

 faint, and more or less circular depressions, which some have 

 imagined in Europe to be traces of craters, without reflecting, that 

 the original base on which these volcanic plateaux rest, were pro- 

 bably plains, and that, if the basalt first flowed from an opening 

 made in the middle of a plain, it would form a plateau without 



' Collecgao de noticias, p. 8. 



