I have not felt so well for a long time. I do nothing, have a prodigious appetite, and Harry declares I am getting fat in the face.
[Santa Cruz was reached early on April 10, and in the afternoon he proceeded to Laguna, which he made his headquarters for a week. That day he walked 10 miles, the next 15, and the third 20 in the course of the day. He notes finding the characteristic Euphorbia and Heaths of the Canaries; notes, too, one or two visitations of dyspepsia from indigestible food. He writes from Laguna:—]
From all that people with whom we meet tell me, I gather that the usual massive lies about health resorts pervade the accounts of Teneriffe. Santa Cruz would reduce me to jelly in a week, and I hear that Orotava is worse—stifling. Guimar, whither we go to-morrow, is warranted to be dry and everlasting sunshine. We shall see. One of the people staying in the house said they had rain there for a fortnight together…I am all right now, and walked some 15 miles up hill and down dale to-day, and I am not more than comfortably tired. However, I am not going to try the peak. I find it cannot be done without a night out at a considerable height when the thermometer commonly goes down below freezing, and I am not going to run that risk for the chance of seeing even the famous shadows.
[By some mischance, no letters from home reached him till the 26th, and he writes from Guimar on the 23rd:—]
A lady who lives here told me yesterday that a postmistress at one place was in the habit of taking off the stamps and turning the letters on one side! But that luckily is not a particular dodge with ours.
We drove over here on the 17th. It is a very picturesque place 1000 feet up in the midst of a great amphitheatre of high hills, facing north, orange-trees laden with fruit, date palms and bananas are in the garden, and there is lovely sunshine all day long. Altogether the climate is far the best I have found anywhere here, and the house, which is that of a Spanish Marquesa, only opened as a hotel this winter, is very comfortable. I am sitting with the window wide open at nine o'clock at night, and the stars flash as if the sky were Australian.
On Saturday we had a splendid excursion up to the top of the pass that leads from here up to the other side of the island. Road in the proper sense there was none, and the track incredibly bad, worse than any Alpine path owing to the loose irregular stones. The mules, however, pick their way like cats, and you have only to hold on. The pass is 6000 feet high, and we ascended still higher. Fortune favoured us. It was a lovely day and the clouds lay in a great sheet a thousand feet below. The peak, clear in the blue sky, rose up bare and majestic 5000 feet out of as desolate a desert clothed with the stiff retama shrubs (a sort of broom) as you can well imagine. [(The Canadas, which he calls] "the one thing worth seeing there.") It took us three hours and a half to get up, passing for a good deal of the time through a kind of low brush of white and red cistuses in full bloom. We saw Palma on one side, and Grand Canary on the other, beyond the layer of clouds which enveloped all the lower part of the island. Coming down was worse than going up, and we walked a good part of the way, getting back about six. About seven hours in the saddle and walking.
You never saw anything like the improvement in Harry. He is burnt deep red; he says my nose is of the same hue, and at the end of the journey he raced Gurilio, our guide, who understands no word of English any more than we do Spanish, but we are quite intimate nevertheless. [My brother indeed averred that his language of signs was far more effectual than the Spanish which my father persisted in trying upon the inhabitants. This guide, by the way, was very sceptical as to any Englishman being equal to walking the seventeen miles, much less beating him in a race over the stony track. His experience was entirely limited to invalids.]
He reiterates his distress at not getting letters from his wife: "Certainly I will never run the risk of being so long without—never again." When, after all, the delayed letters reached him on his way back from the expedition to the Canadas, thanks to a traveller who brought them up from Laguna, he writes (April 24):—]
Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. Nobody—children or any one else—can be to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things.