he cones over against Garachico
seemed much alive to me, and had I not warmed frozen hands at the very
earth fires themselves? I broke out hot sulphur with the pick of my
ice-axe. Icod of the Vines, or Orotava itself, port and villa, might
some day wake to such a day as that which has smitten St Pierre in fiery
Martinique.

Once all the quiet seas were unbroken by their seven islands--Hierro,
Palma, Gomera, Teneriffe, Grand Canary, Fuerteventura, and Lanzarote lay
beneath the waters of the smiling ocean. Even now they smell of fire and
the furnace; in the most fruitful vineyards of Grand Canary the soil is
half cinders. In all the islands vast cinder heaps rise black and
forbidding. Lava streams, in which the poisonous euphorbia alone can
grow, thrust themselves like great dykes among fertile lands. The very
sands of the sea are powdered pumice and black volcanic dust. One of the
greatest craters of the world holds within itself great parts of wooded
Palma. On dead volcanoes are the petty batteries of Spain over against
Las Palmas. There is something strange and almost pathetic in the
thought of guns raised where Nature once thundered dreadfully in the
barren sunlit Isleta.

But of all the islands and of all parts of them, the Peak, shining over
clouds and visible from far seas, is the king and chief. I left its
fiery summit with a certain reluctance. It attracted me strangely. It
represented, feebly enough, I daresay, the greatest of all elemental
forces. Yet its faint fires and its smoke and sulphur fumes had all the
power of a mighty symbol. By such means, by such a formula, had the very
world itself been made. Though snow lay upon its slopes and ice bound
ancient blocks of lava together, it might at any hour awake again and
renew the terrors which once must have floated over the seas in a gust
of flame.

SHEEP AND SHEEP-HERDING

With the introduction of fences, which are now coming in with tremendous
rapidity, sheep-herding as an art is inevitably doomed. When I knew
north-west Texas a few years ago there was not a fence between the Rio
Grande and the north of the Panhandle, but now barbed or plain wire is
the rule, and in the pastures it is, of course, not so necessary to look
after the sheep by day and night. In Australia I have not seen those
under my charge for a week or more at a time. While there was water in
the paddock I never even troubled to hunt them up in the hundred square
miles of grey-gre