2;o 



LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, xv 



shrubs (a sort of broom) as you can well imagine. It took 

 us three hours and a half to get up, passing for a good deal of 

 the time through a kind of low brush of white and red cistuses 

 in full bloom. We saw Palma on one side, and Grand Canary 

 on the other, beyond the layer of clouds which enveloped all 

 the lower part of the island. Coming down was worse than 

 going up, and we walked a good part of the way, getting back 

 about six. About seven hours in the saddle and walking. 



You never saw anything like the improvement in Harry. 

 He is burnt deep red; he says my nose is of the same hue, and 

 at the end of the journey he raced Gurilio, our guide, who 

 understands no word of English any more than we do Spanish, 

 but we are quite intimate nevertheless.* 



He reiterates his distress at not getting letters from his 

 wife : " Certainly I will never run the risk of being so long 

 without never again." When, after all, the delayed letters 

 reached him on his way back from the expedition to the 

 Canadas, thanks to a traveller who brought them up from 

 Laguna, he writes (April 24) : 



Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been 

 horribly anxious. Nobody children or any one else can be 

 to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to im- 

 mortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as 

 wise in that as in other things. . . . 



Here is a novel description of an hotel at Puerto 

 Orotava : 



It is very pretty to look at, but all draughts. I compare it 

 to the air of a big wash-house with all the doors open, and it 

 was agreed that the likeness was exact. 



I have no account of the visit to the Canadas, ' the 

 one thing worth seeing there." But on May 2 he sailed 

 for Madeira by the German, feeling already ' ten years 

 younger" for his holiday. On the 3rd he writes: 



* My brother indeed averred that his language of signs was far 

 more effectual than the Spanish, which my father persisted in trying 

 upon the inhabitants. This guide, by the way, was very sceptical as 

 to any Englishman being equal to walking the seventeen miles, much 

 less beating him in a race over the stony track. His experience was 

 entirely limited to invalids. 



