We rose next morning with nipped feet and hands, which a cup of hot coffee, 'with,' speedily corrected, and were en route at 4.30 A.M. Formerly animals were left at the lower estancia; now they are readily taken on to Alta Vista. My wife rode a sure-footed black nag, I a mule which was perfect whilst the foot-long lever acting curb lay loose on its neck. Returning, we were amazed at the places they had passed during the moonless night.
Our path skirted the Estancia de los Alemanos, about 300 yards higher than the English, and zig-zagged sharply up the pumice-slope. The talus now narrowed; the side-walls of dark trachytic blocks pinching it in. At this grisly hour they showed the quaintest figures—towers and pinnacles, needles and tree-trunks, veiled nuns and monstrous beasts. Amongst them were huge bombs of obsidian, and masses with translucent, vitreous edges that cut like glass. Most of them contained crystals of felspar and pyroxene.
After half an hour we reached the dwarf platform of Alta Vista, 700 feet above the Estancia and 10,730, in round numbers, above sea-level. The little shelf, measuring about 100 to 300 yards, at the head of the fork where the north-eastern and the south-western lava-streams part, is divided by a medial ledge. Here we saw the parent rock of the pumice fragments, an outcrop of yellowish brown stone, like fractured and hardened clay. The four-footed animals were sent back: one rides up but not down such places.
Passing in the lower section the shell of a house where the Astronomer's
[Footnote: The author came out in 1856 to make experiments in astronomical observations. Scientific men have usually a contempt for language: we find the same in Our Inheritanse, &c. (Dalby & Co., London, 1877), where the poor modern hierogrammats are not highly appreciated. But it is a serious blemish to find 'Montana Blanco,' 'Malpays,' 'Chahzorra' (for Chajorra), and 'Tiro del Guanches.' The author also is wholly in error about Guanche mummification. He derides (p. 329) the shivering and shaking of his Canarian guide under a cloudy sky of 40°F., when the sailor enjoyed it in their 'glorious strength of Saxon (?) constitution.' But when the latter were oppressed and discouraged by dry heat and vivid radiation, Manoel was active as a chamois. Why should enduring cold and not heat be held as a test of manliness?]
experiment had been tried, Guide Manoel pointed out the place where stood the tormentos, as he called the instruments. Thence we toiled afoot up the Mal Pais. This 'bad country' is contradictorily described by travellers. Glas (A.D. 1761) makes it a sheet of rock cracked cross-wise into cubes. Humboldt (1799) says, 'The lava, broken into sharp pieces, leaves hollows in which we risked falling up to our waists.' Von Buch (1815) mentions 'the sharp edges of glassy obsidian, as dangerous as the blades of knives.' Wilde (1857) tamely paints the scene as a 'magnified rough-cast.' Prof. Piazzi Smyth is, as usual, exact, but he suggests more difficulty than the traveller finds. I saw nothing beyond a succession of ridge-backs and shrinkage-crevasses, disposed upon an acute angle. These ragged, angular, and mostly cuboidal blocks, resembling the ice-pack of St. Lawrence River, have apparently been borne down by subsequent lava-currents, which, however, lacked impetus to reach the lower levels of Las Cañádas.
Springing from boulder to boulder, an exhilarating exercise for a time, over a 'surface of horrible roughness,' as Prof. Dana says of Hawaii, we halted to examine the Cueva de Hielo, whose cross has long succumbed to the wintry winds. The 'ice-house' in a region of fire occupies a little platform like the ruined base of a Pompey's Pillar. This is the table upon which the neveros pack their stores of snow. The cave, a mere hole in the trachytic lava, opens to the east with an entrance some four feet wide. The general appearance was that of a large bubble in a baked loaf. Inside we saw a low ceiling spiky with stalactites, possibly icicles, and a coating of greenish ice upon the floor. A gutter leads from the mouth, showing signs of water-wear, and the blocks of trachyte are so loaded with glossy white felspar that I attempted to dust them before sitting down.
Local tradition connects this ice-cave with the famous burial-cavern near Ycod, on the northern coast; this would give a tunnel 8 miles long and 11,040 feet high. Many declare that the meltings ebb and flow with the sea-tide, and others recount that lead and lines of many fathoms failed to touch bottom. We are told about the normal dog which fell in and found its way to the shore through the cave of Ycod de los Vinos. In the latter a M. Auber spent four hours without making much way; in parts he came upon scatters of Guanche bones. Mr. Robert Edwards, of Santa Cruz, recounted another native tradition—that before the eruption of A.D. 1705 there was a run of water but no cave. Mr. Addison was let down into it, and found three branches or lanes, the longest measuring 60-70 feet. What the neveros call el hombre de nieve (the snow-man) proved to be a honeycombed mass of lava revetted with ice-drippings. He judged the cave to be a crater of emission; and did not see the smoke or steam issuing from it as reported by the ice-collectors.
Professor P. Smyth goes, I think, a little too far in making this contemptible feature compose such a quarrel as that between the English eruptionist and the Continental upheavalist. Deciding a disputed point, that elevation is a force and a method in nature, he explains the cave by the explosion of gases, which blew off the surface of the dome, 'when the heavy sections of the lava-roof, unsupported from below, fell downward again, wedging into and against each other, so as nearly to reform their previous figure.' But the unshattered state of the stones and the rounded surfaces of the sides show no sign of explosion. The upper Piton is unfitted for retaining water, which must percolate through its cinders, pumices, and loose matter into many a reservoir formed by blowing-holes. Snow must also be drifted in and retain, the cold. Moisture would be kept in the cavern by the low conducting power of its walls; so Lyell found, on Etna, a bed of solid ice under a lava-current. Possibly also this cave has a frozen substratum, like many of the ice-pools in North America.
We then toiled up to another little estancia, a sheltered, rock-girt hollow. The floor of snow, or rather frozen rain, was sprinkled with red dust, and fronts the wind, with sharp icy points rising at an angle of 45°. Here, despite the penetrating cold, we gravely seated ourselves to enjoy at ease the hardly won pleasures of the sunrise. The pallid white gleam of dawn had grown redder, brighter and richer. An orange flush, the first breaking of the beams faintly reflected from above, made the sky, before a deep and velvety black-blue, look like a gilt canopy based upon a rim of azure mist. The brilliancy waxed golden and more golden still; the blending of the colours became indescribably beautiful; and, lastly, the sun's upper limb rose in brightest saffron above the dimmed and spurious horizon of north-east cloud. The panorama below us emerged dimly and darkly from a torrent of haze, whose waving convex lines, moving with a majestic calm, wore the aspect of a deluge whelming the visible world. Martin the Great might have borrowed an idea from this waste of waters, as it seemed to be, heaving and breaking, surging and sweeping over the highest mountain-tops. We saw nothing of the immense triangular gnomon projected by the Pilon as far as Gomera Island, [Footnote: At sunset of July 10, 1863, I could trace it extending to Grand Canary, darkening the southern half and leaving the northern in bright sunshine: the right limb was better defined than the left.] and gradually contracting as the lamp of day rises. Item, we saw nothing of the archipelago like a map in relief; the latter, however, is rarely visible in its entirety. Disappointment!