ning place in the world to land in by
daytime. The port is under the shelter of the Isleta, a barren cindery
satellite of Grand Canary joined to the main island by an isthmus of
yellow sand-dunes. The roads are dust; dust flies in a ceaseless wind;
unhappy palms by the roads are grey with dust; it would at first seem
impossible to eat anything but an egg without getting one's teeth full
of grit. And yet after all one sees that there are compensations in the
sun. I said to a man who managed a big hotel, "This is a hideous place;"
and he answered cheerfully, "Yes, isn't it?" And he added, "We have only
got the climate." So might a man say, "I've not much ready money, but
I've a million or two in Consols." I understood it by-and-by. And after
all Las Palmas is not all the island, nor is its evil-mannered port. The
country is a country of vines behind the sand and cinder ramparts of the
city, and if one sees no running water, or sees it rarely, the
hard-working Canarienses have built tanks to save the rain, and they
bring streams in flumes from the inner hills that rise six thousand feet
above the sea. They grow vines and sugar and cultivate the cochineal
insect, which looks like a loathsome disease (as indeed it is) upon the
swarth cactus or tunera which it feeds on. And the islands grow tobacco.
Las Palmas is after all only the emporium of Grand Canary and a coaling
station for steamers to South Africa and the West Coast and South
America. It also takes invalids and turns out good work even among
consumptives, for there is power in its sun and dry air.

Its people are Spanish, but Spanish with a difference. The ancient
Guanches, now utterly extinct as a people, have left traces of their
blood and influence and character. Even now the poor Canary folk
naturally live in caves. They dig a hole in a rock, or enlarge a hollow,
and hang a sack before the hole, and, behold, they possess a house. Not
fifty yards from the big old fort at the back of the town the cliffs are
all full of people as a sandstone quarry is sometimes full of sand
martins. The caves with doors pay taxes, it is said, but those with no
more than a sack escape anything in the shape of a direct tax. To escape
taxes altogether in any country under Spain is impossible. The _octroi_
or _fielato_ sees to that.

For the most part Las Palmas to English people is no more than a
sanatorium. They come to the Islands to get well and go away knowing as
much of the peopl