30 
EARLY REMINISCENCES 
(10,700 ft.), the place where some five-and-thirty years ago Professor C. Piazzi 
Smyth lived with his telescopes for several months. A small wooden hut, belonging 
to a sulphur company, was snowed up and we failed to force the door, but a 
comparatively warm place was found for Mrs. Longstaff where she could at least 
lie down on the cinders in the sun, and the guides, who by this time had come up 
to look for us, were told to take care of her. Our party was now reduced to three 
—myself, faint with the cold and panting for breath; Miss Dixon, panting but 
otherwise well; and Mr. Read, fit for anything. 
There still remained to vanquish 1,500 ft., and that the hardest part. We 
found as a rule the snow was the best going, but we had been warned by Dr. Crotch 
that the only real danger was that of falling into snow pitfalls and damaging one’s 
legs among the blocks of lava or obsidian, the latter as sharp as glass. The truth 
of this danger we soon realized, and therefore as far as possible kept either on the 
snow or on the lava, avoiding the places where they were mixed. In a few places 
the snow slopes approached the consistence of ice, but, as a rule, they afforded 
good foothold. At 11,700 ft. we reached the Rambleta, an elevated crater, from 
which the terminal cone rises. Here Miss Dixon had to succumb, and was left on 
the sunny side of a rock, where she tried to imagine herself warm. 
Mr. Read and I now tackled the final cone, El Piton, a pile of ashes 1 varying in 
height from 400 ft. on one side to 600 ft. on the other. At first we attempted 
to climb a snow slope, but the surface, unlike that of most of the snow, was of 
almost icy hardness, probably owing to the internal heat of the mountain melting 
the snow every day, while the intense radiation caused it to freeze again at night. 
The goat-herd’s stout staff proved a very imperfect substitute for an ice-axe, and, 
a step giving way, Mr. Read had an involuntary glissade which might easily have 
been attended with disastrous results. We then abandoned that side of the cone 
and by making a short circuit ascended with the greatest ease a lava stream or 
dyke on the southern face, which afforded almost a natural flight of steps. 
The exertion of climbing, the rarity of the air at 12,000 ft., and perhaps the 
exhaustion due to cold when sitting on the rock before dawn, nearly overcame me, 
and I only did the last few hundred feet with difficulty—but it was worth it all. 
We stood on a narrow ridge of light coloured rock, partly white, partly pink, 
forming a wall around the crater; this was shaped like a bowl held sloping, the 
western side being but twenty feet above the bottom, the eastern perhaps eighty 
feet, and on that side ending in a veritable peak, the extremity of the crag, which 
was fringed with ice, being no larger than the seat of a chair, but a chair that the 
keen N.W. wind made it hard to sit upon. 
This was, then, actually “El Pico del Teyde,” the “Peak of Hell,” as the 
Guanches (aborigines of Tenerife) called it, and no bad name. I sat down to 
adjust my veil, and at once leaped to my feet—the ground was too hot to sit upon ! 
On all sides hot vapour, charged with sulphur, issued from numerous small apertures 
like rat or rabbit-holes, their mouths fringed with beautiful crystals of sulphur. 
The air as it issued from these was as hot as that of a Turkish bath, and the next 
day when I showed some of these crystals to a lady she smelt them and said, “ Does 
it not remind you of the Devil? ” We saw a stone of some pounds weight which 
had, to all appearance, been blown out of its place that very morning by a new 
“ fumerole ” or blowhole. 
It was at once evident that the volcano on which we stood could only be called 
extinct by a great stretch of terms. In 1705 it surrounded the town of Guimar 
1 See note above. 
