To Leslie Stephen.
Hotel Santa Catalina,
Las Palmas,
Gran Canaria.
5 Nov. 1898.
I am beginning Guy Fawkes's day by sitting in the verandah before breakfast to write letters for a homeward-bound mail. Certainly it is enjoyable here and I mean to get good out of a delightful climate. Also I mean to convert your half promise of a visit into a whole, and without going beyond the truth I can say that there is a good deal here that should please you. At first sight I was repelled by the arid desolation of the island. I suppose that I ought to have been prepared for grasslessness, but somehow or another I was not. But then the wilderness is broken by patches of wonderful green—the green of banana fields. Wherever a little water can be induced to flow in artificial channels there are all manner of beautiful things to be seen. I have picked a date and mustered enough Spanish to buy me a pair of shoes in the "city" of Las Palmas—a dirty city it is with strange smells; but we are well outside of it. Between Las Palmas and its port there is a little English colony. This hotel is so English that they give me my bill in £ s. d. and my change in British ha'pence which have seen better days. Indeed now I know where our coppers go to when they have become too bad for use at home. Also the "library" of this hotel seems a sort of hades to which the bad three-voller is sent after its decease. But the proposition that all the worst books collect there is (as you must be aware) not convertible into the proposition that only bad books come there, and I see a copy of a certain Life of Henry Fawcett which you may have read. I laze away my time under verandahs and in gardens—but am not wholly inactive. Sometimes when it is cool I walk some miles and explore country that is well worth exploration. By the time you come I shall be ready for an ascent of our central range with you—it touches 6000 ft. I think, and by that time we shall be having cooler weather. Yesterday we were breathless: to-day is cloudy but would be September in England.
It is breakfast time and the porridge is good.