o echoes of war in Fuentarabia. Peace lay over its
dark homes and within its ancient walls.

ON A VOLCANIC PEAK

I had seen Etna, Vesuvius and Stromboli, but had never yet climbed any
volcano until I stood upon the summit of the Peak of Teneriffe, Pico de
Teyde, home of the gods and devils as well as of the aboriginal Guanches
of the Canary Islands.

The wind was bitterly cold, more bitter, indeed, than I have ever felt,
and yet, as I stood and shivered upon the little crater's brink, fumes
of sulphurous acid and smoke swept round me and made me choke. The edge
of the crater was of white fired rock; inside the cup the hollow was
sulphur yellow. Puffs of smoke came from cracks. I dropped out of the
wind and warmed myself at the fire. I picked up warm stones and danced
them from one hand to another. And overhead a wind of ice howled. For
the Peak is twelve thousand feet and more above the sea. An hour before
I had been cutting steps in the last slopes of the last ash cone of the
volcano which still lives and may burst into activity at any fatal
moment.

To stand upon the Peak and look down upon the world and the sea gives
one a great notion of the making of things. Once the world was a
crucible. The islands are all volcanic, all ash and cinders, lava and
pumice. But I perceived that the Peak itself, the final peak, the last
five thousand feet of it, was but the last result of a dying fire--a
mere gas spurt to what had been. The whole anatomy of the island is laid
bare; the history and the growth of the peak are written in letters of
lava, in wastes of pumice and fire-scarred walls. The plain of the
Canyadas lies beneath me, and is ten miles across. This was the ancient
crater; it is as big as the crater of Kilauea, in the Hawaiian Islands.
But Kilauea is yet truly alive, a sea of lava with many cones spouting
lava. Such was the crater of Teneriffe before the last peak rose within
its basin. Now retama, a hardy bitter shrub, grows in these plains of
pumice; the flats of it are pumice and rapilli, white and brown. But the
ancient crater walls stand unbroken for miles, though here and there
they have been swept away, some say by floods of water belched from the
pit.

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 pinyon forests were invisible. The
slopes by Orotava lay under cloud,