From the last ash-peak of fire, as I stood on the crater walls in smoke and a cold wind, I saw no sign of Teneriffe's fertility. The works of man upon the lower slopes below the piñon forests were invisible. The slopes by Orotava lay under cloud, the sea was hidden almost to its horizon by a vast plain of heaving mist. All I could see plainly was the old crater itself, barren, vast, tremendous, with its fire-scarred walls and its fumaroles. To the west some smoked still, smoked furiously. But though I stood upon the highest peak, another one almost as high lay behind me. Chahorra gaped and gasped, as it seemed, like a leaping, suffocating fish in drying mud. Its crater opened like a mouth and around it lesser holes gaped. On the plain of the old crater there rise two separate volcanoes—one, the true peak, rising 5000 feet from the Cañada floor (itself 7000 feet above the sea), and Chahorra, nearly 4000. But so vast is the ancient crater that these two peaks, one yet alive and the other dead, seem but blisters or boils upon its barren plain. To the north, miles from the edge of my peak, I could see the crater cliff rise red. To the west and east the wall has broken down, but the Fortaleza, as the Canary men call it, stands yet, scarred into chimneys, shining, half glassy, half like fired clay. And further to the east, beyond the gap called the Portillo, the cliffs rise again as one follows the trail over that high desert to Vilaflor. White pumice lies under these cliffs, looking like a beach. Once perhaps the crater was level with the sea. It may even be that the crater walls were broken down by outer waters, not by any volcanic flood.
None knows at what time the peak of Chahorra and the great peak were truly active. But obviously the final peak itself was the result of a last great eruption. Perhaps the old crater had been quiescent for thousands of years, and then it worked a little and threw up El Teyde. At some other time Chahorra rose. At another period, in historic times, the volcano above Garachico, even now smoking bravely, sent its lava into Garachico's harbour and destroyed it. But the last peak as it stands is the work of two periods of activity at least. The first great slope ends at another flat called the Rambleta. Here was once an ancient crater. Then the fires quietened, and there was a time of lesser activity. It woke again, and threw up the last weary ash-cone of a thousand feet or near it.
All things die, but who shall say when a volcano has done its worst? A quiet Vesuvius slew its thousands: Etna its tens of thousands. Some day perhaps Teneriffe will wake again, either in earthquakes or lava-flow, and cause a Casamicciola or a Catania. The cones over against Garachico seemed much alive to me, and had I not warmed frozen hands at the very earth fires themselves? I broke out hot sulphur with the pick of my ice-axe. Icod of the Vines, or Orotava itself, port and villa, might some day wake to such a day as that which has smitten St Pierre in fiery Martinique.
Once all the quiet seas were unbroken by their seven islands—Hierro, Palma, Gomera, Teneriffe, Grand Canary, Fuerteventura, and Lanzarote lay beneath the waters of the smiling ocean. Even now they smell of fire and the furnace; in the most fruitful vineyards of Grand Canary the soil is half cinders. In all the islands vast cinder heaps rise black and forbidding. Lava streams, in which the poisonous euphorbia alone can grow, thrust themselves like great dykes among fertile lands. The very sands of the sea are powdered pumice and black volcanic dust. One of the greatest craters of the world holds within itself great parts of wooded Palma. On dead volcanoes are the petty batteries of Spain over against Las Palmas. There is something strange and almost pathetic in the thought of guns raised where Nature once thundered dreadfully in the barren sunlit Isleta.
But of all the islands and of all parts of them, the Peak, shining over clouds and visible from far seas, is the king and chief. I left its fiery summit with a certain reluctance. It attracted me strangely. It represented, feebly enough, I daresay, the greatest of all elemental forces. Yet its faint fires and its smoke and sulphur fumes had all the power of a mighty symbol. By such means, by such a formula, had the very world itself been made. Though snow lay upon its slopes and ice bound ancient blocks of lava together, it might at any hour awake again and renew the terrors which once must have floated over the seas in a gust of flame.
SHEEP AND SHEEP-HERDING
With the introduction of fences, which are now coming in with tremendous rapidity, sheep-herding as an art is inevitably doomed. When I knew north-west Texas a few years ago there was not a fence between the Rio Grande and the north of the Panhandle, but now barbed or plain wire is the rule, and in the pastures it is, of course, not so necessary to look after the sheep by day and night. In Australia I have not seen those under my charge for a week or more at a time. While there was water in the paddock I never even troubled to hunt them up in the hundred square miles of grey-green plain with its rare clumps of dwarf box. If dingoes were reported to be about I kept my eyes open, of course, but they were very rare in the Lachlan back blocks, and I was never able to earn the five shillings reward for the tail of this yellow marauder. But in Texas there are more wild animals—the coyote, the bear, the "panther" or puma—and it is impossible to leave the sheep entirely to their own devices, even in pastures which prevent them wandering. Nevertheless, looking after them on fenced land is very different from being with them daily and hourly, sleeping with them at night, following and directing them by day, being all the time wary lest some should be divided from the main flock by accident, or lest the whole body should spy another sheep-owner's band and rush tumultuously into it.