“Oh, take me away, Wally!” she said, laughing. “Can’t we go ashore?”
“There’s a launch coming off now,” Mr. MacTavish said. “They’ll take you, and bring you back. But don’t go unless you’re a good sailor, Miss Norah—there’s a cheery little lap on in this harbour.”
“I’ll risk it,” Norah declared, laughing.
“Well, it upsets quite a few,” said the junior officer. “However, you’re ashore in a quarter of an hour, so the agony isn’t prolonged.”
The launch bobbed cheerily across the harbour, and the “lop” of which Mr. MacTavish had spoken proved quite sufficient for several of the passengers, who were both green and glad when the little boat arrived at the stone steps of the wharf. At the head of the steps enthusiastic drivers proffered their services. The Billabong party, by the Captain’s advice, had engaged a guide—a bustling gentleman, speaking very imperfect English, who hurried them to the quaint little carriages of the town—two-wheeled, hooded erections, capable, when rattling over their native cobblestones, of inflicting innumerable contusions on the human frame. They dashed wildly up a long, ascending road, the drivers urging their raw-boned steeds with whip and voice.
Las Palmas, to the hurried tourist, offers but little in the way of sight-seeing. To the leisured, with time to drive away from the white town, up the mountain, to Monte and Santa Brigida, there is opportunity for seeing the best of the island—rolling country with deep little cleft glens running to the sea, banana gardens, and the vineyards among which Santa Brigida nestles—vineyards where the Canary wine of old days was made. Motor-buses run there to-day—unromantic successors to the gay old adventurers who sailed the Spanish Main and drank Canary sack.
The majority of ships, however, stay in the port but a few hours, making the call only for mails and vegetables and a shipment of fruit for London; so that the average tourist can but put himself in the hands of a guide and make a meteoric dash through the city, seeing what the guide chooses to show him, and no more.
“Did you ever see such unfortunate, raw-boned horses!” gasped Norah. “I do wish our man wouldn’t beat him so continually.”
The guide smiled widely. “De horse she not mind de beat,” he said.
“I expect they’re used to it,” Jim remarked; “it really seems part of the show. Anyway, they all do it.”