430 
A. SCANTY REPAST. 
accompanied us, or perhaps the slaves had made frje with 
out provisions on the way ; be that as it may, we found 
nothing but olives, and scarcely any bread. Horace, in his 
retreat at Tibur, never boasted of a repast more light and 
frugal ; hut olives, which might have afforded a satisfactory 
meal to a poet, devoted to study, and leading a sedentary 
life, appeared an aliment by no means sufficiently substantial 
for travellers climbing mountains. "We had watched the 
greater part of the night, and we walked for nine hours 
without finding a single spring. Our guides were discou- 
raged ; they wished to go back, and we had great difficulty 
in preventing them. 
' In the midst of the mist I made trial of the electrometer 
of Volta, armed with a smoking match. Though very near 
a thick wood of heliconias, I obtained very sensible signs of 
atmospheric electricity. It often varied from positive to 
negative, its intensity changing every instant. These vari- 
ations, and the conflict of several small currents of air, 
which divided the mist, and transformed it into clouds, the 
borders of which were visible, appeared to me infallible prog- 
nostics of a change in the weather. It was only two o’clock 
in the afternoon ; we entertained some hope of reaching the 
eastern summit of the Silla before sunset, and of re-descend- 
ing into the valley separating the Wo peaks, intending there 
to pass the night, to light a great fire, and to make op 
negroes construct a hut with the leaves of the lieliconia. 
We sent off half of our servants with orders to hasten the 
next morning to meet us, not with olives, but with a supply 
of salt beef. 
We had scarcely made these arrangements when the east 
wind began to blow violently from the sea. The thermo- 
meter rose to 12 , 5°. It was no doubt an ascending wind, 
which, by heightening the temperature, dissolved the vapours. 
In less than two minutes the clouds dispersed, and the two 
domes of the Silla appeared to us singularly near. We 
opened the barometer in the lowest part of the hollow that 
separates the Wo summits, near a little pool of very muddy 
water. Here, as in the West India Islands, marshy plains 
are found at great elevations ; not because the woody moun- 
tains attract the clouds, but because they condense the 
wpours by the effect of nocturnal refrigeration, occasioned 
