Beyond the Cima we made the gay little town of Telde, which lodges some 4,000 souls, entering it by a wide fiumara, over which a bridge was then building. The streets were mere lines of scattered houses, and the prominent buildings were the white dome of San Pedro and San Juan with its two steeples of the normal grey basalt. Near the latter lay the little Alameda, beggar-haunted as usual. On the north side of the Barranco rose a caverned rock inhabited by the poor. We shall see this troglodytic feature better developed elsewhere.
To visit the Caldera de Bandana, three miles from the city, we hired a carriage with the normal row of three lean rats, which managed, however, to canter or gallop the greater part of the way. The boy-driver, Agustin, was a fair specimen of his race, obstinate as a Berber or a mule. As it was Sunday he wanted to halt at every venta (pub), curioseando—that is, admiring the opposite sex. Some of the younger girls are undoubtedly pretty, yet they show unmistakable signs of Guanche blood. The toilette is not becoming: here the shawl takes the place of the mantilla, and the head-covering, as in Tenerife, is capped by the hideous billycock. To all my remonstrances Don Agustin curtly replied with the usual island formula, 'Am I a slave?' This class has a surly, grumbling way, utterly wanting the dignity of the lower-order Spaniard and the Moor; and it is to be managed only by threatening to withhold the propinas (tip). But the jarvey, like the bath-man, the barber, and generally the body-servant and the menial classes which wait upon man's person, are not always models of civility.
We again passed the hospital and ascended the new zigzag to the right of the Giniguada. The torrent-bed, now bright green with arum and pepper, grows vegetables, maize, and cactus. Its banks bear large plantations of the dates from which Las Palmas borrows her pretty Eastern names. In most places they are mere brabs, and, like the olive, they fail to fruit. The larger growths are barbarously docked, as in Catholic countries generally; and the fronds are reduced to mere brooms and rats'-tails. The people are not fond of palms; the shade and the roots, they say, injure their crops, and the tree is barely worth one dollar per annum.
At the top of the Cuesta de San Roque, which reminded me of its namesake near Gibraltar, I found a barren ridge growing only euphorbia. The Barranco Seco, on the top, showed in the sole a conspicuously big house which has no other view but the sides of a barren trough. This was the 'folly' of an eccentric nobleman, who preferred the absence to the company of his friends.
Half an hour's cold, bleak drive placed us at the Tafira village. Here the land yields four crops a year, two of maize and two of potatoes. Formerly worth $100 per acre, the annual value had been raised by cochineal to $500. All, however, depends upon water, which is enormously dear. The yelping curs have mostly bushy tails, like those which support the arms of the Canary Islands. The grey and green finches represent our 'domestic warbler' (Fringilla canaria), which reached England about 1500, when a ship with a few birds on board had been wrecked off Elba.
[Footnote: The canary bird builds, on tall bushes rather than trees, a nest of moss, roots, feathers and rubbish, where it lays from four to six pale-blue eggs. It moults in August and September; pairs in February, and sometimes hatches six times in a season. The natives declare that the wild birds rarely survive the second year of captivity; yet they do not seem to suffer from it, as they begin to sing at once when caged. Mr. Addison describes the note as 'between that of the skylark and the nightingale,' and was surprised to find that each flock has a different song—an observation confirmed by the people and noted by Humboldt (p. 87).]
The country folk were habited in shirts, drawers derived from the Moors, and tasseled caps of blue stuff, big enough for carpet-bags. The vine still covered every possible slope of black soil, and the aloes, crowned with flowers, seemed to lord it over the tamarisks, the hemlocks, and the nightshades.
Upon this monte, or wooded height, most of the gentry have country-houses, the climate being 12 degrees (Fahr.) cooler than by the sea. La Brigida commands a fine view of the Isleta, with its black sand and white foam, leek-green waters upon the reefs, and deep offing of steely blue.
Leaving the carriage at the forking road, I mounted, after a bad descent, a rough hill, and saw to the left the Pico de Bandana, a fine regular cone 1,850 feet high. A group of a few houses, El Pueblo de la Caldera, leads to the famous Cauldron, which Sir Charles Lyell visited by mistake for that of Palma. Travellers compare it with the lakes of Nemi and Albano: I found it tame after the cup of Fernando Po with its beautiful lining of hanging woods. It has only the merit of regularity. The unbroken upper rim measures about half a mile in diameter, and the lower funnel 3,000 feet in circumference. The sides of piedra pomez (pumice) are lined and ribbed with rows of scoriaceous rock as regular as amphitheatre-seats, full 1,000 feet deep, and slope easily into a flat sole, which some are said to have reached on horseback. A copious fountain, springing from the once fiery inside, is collected below for the use of the farm-house, El Fondo de la Caldera. The fields have the effect of a little Alpine tarn of bright green. Here wild pigeons are sometimes caught at night, and rabbits and partridges are or were not extinct. I ascended Bandana Peak to the north-north-east, the piton of this long extinct volcano, and enjoyed the prospect of the luxuriant vegetation, the turquoise sea, and the golden sands about Maspalomas, the southernmost extremity of Grand Canary.
Returning to the road-fork, I mounted a hill on the right hand and sighted the Atalaya, another local lion. Here a perpendicular face of calcareous rock fronts a deep valley, backed by a rounded hill, with the blue chine of El Cumbre in the distance: this is the highest of the ridge, measuring 8,500 feet. The wall is pierced, like the torrent-side of Mar Saba (Jerusalem), with caves that shelter a troglodyte population numbering some 2,000 souls. True to their Berber origin, they seek refuge in the best of savage lodgings from heat, cold, and wind. The site rises some 2,000 feet above sea-level, and the strong wester twists the trees. Grand Canary preserves more of these settlements than Tenerife; they are found in many parts of the island, and even close to the capital. Madeira, on the other hand, affects them but little. We must not forget that they still exist at St. Come, within two hours' rail of Paris, where my learned and lamented friend Dr. Broca had a country-house.