i88g THE CANARIES 2 6o 



of the Canaries ; notes, too, one or two visitations of dys- 

 pepsia from indigestible food. He writes from Laguna : 



From all that people with whom we meet tell me, I gather 

 that the usual massive lies about health resorts pervade the 

 accounts of Teneriffe. Santa Cruz would reduce me to jelly in 

 a week, and I hear that Orotava is worse stifling. Guimar, 

 whither we go to-morrow, is warranted to be dry and everlast- 

 ing sunshine. We shall see. One of the people staying in the 

 house said they had rain there for a fortnight together. ... I 

 am all right now, and walked some 15 miles up hill and down 

 dale to-day, and I am not more than comfortably tired. How- 

 ever, I am not going to try the peak. I find it cannot be done 

 without a night out at a considerable height when the ther- 

 mometer commonly goes down below freezing, and I am not 

 going to run that risk for the chance of seeing even the famous 

 shadows. 



By some mischance, no letters from home reached him 

 till the 26th, and he writes from Guimar on the 23rd : 



A lady who lives here told me yesterday that a post-mistress 

 at one place was in the habit of taking off the stamps and turn- 

 ing the letters on one side ! But that luckily is not a particular 

 dodge with ours. 



We drove over here on the I7th. It is a very picturesque 

 place 1000 feet up in the midst of a great amphitheatre of high 

 hills, facing north, orange-trees laden with fruit, date palms and 

 bananas are in the garden, and there is lovely sunshine all day 

 long. Altogether the climate is far the best I have found any- 

 where here, and the house, which is that of a Spanish Marquesa, 

 only opened as a hotel this winter, is very comfortable. I am 

 sitting with the window wide open at nine o'clock at night, and 

 the stars flash as if the sky were Australian. 



On Saturday we had a splendid excursion up to the top of 

 the pass that leads from here up to the other side of the island. 

 Road in the proper sense there was none, and the track in- 

 credibly bad, worse than any Alpine path owing to the loose 

 irregular stones. The mules, however, pick their way like cats, 

 and you have only to hold on. The pass is 6000 feet high, and 

 we ascended still higher. Fortune favoured us. It was a lovely 

 day and the clouds lay in a great sheet a thousand feet below. 

 The peak, clear in the blue sky, rose up bare and majestic 5000 

 feet out of as desolate a desert clothed with the stiff retama 



