getting out seemed equally impossible.
The slopes of the hills were often fifty degrees. Everywhere was a thick
growth of brush and trees. At times the road ran almost dangerously
close to a precipice. But at last, about eleven o'clock, we began to get
out of the thick entanglement of mountains and in the distance could see
the ocean on the north side of the island. "Fayal is there," said our
guide, pointing, as it seemed, but a little way off. Yet it took two
hours' hard riding to reach it. Our path lay at first along the back of
a great spur of the main mountain; it narrowed till there was a
precipice on either side--on the right hand some seven or eight hundred
feet, on the left more than a thousand. I had not looked down the like
since I crossed the Jackass Mountain on the Fraser River in British
Columbia. Underneath us were villages--scattered huts, built like
bee-hives. The piece of level ground beneath was dotted with them. The
place looked like some gigantic apiary. The dots of people seemed
little larger than bees. And soon we came to the same stack-like houses
close to our path. It was Sunday, and these village folks were dressed
in their best clothes. They were curiously respectful, for were we not
_gente de gravate_--people who wore cravats--gentlemen, in a word? So
they rose up and uncovered. We saluted them in passing. It was a
primitive sight. As we came where the huts were thicker, small crowds
came to see us. Now on the right hand we saw a ridge with pines on it,
suggesting, from the shape of the hill, a bristly boar's back; on the
left the valley widened; in front loomed up a gigantic mass of rock,
"The Eagle's Cliff," in shape like Gibraltar. It was 1900 feet high, and
even yet it was far below us. But now the path pitched suddenly
downwards; there were no paving-pebbles here, only the native hummocks
of rock and the harder clay not yet washed away. The road was like a
torrent-bed, for indeed it was a torrent when it rained; but still our
horses were absolute in faith and stumbled not. And the Eagle's Cliff
grew bigger and bigger still as we plunged down the last of the spur to
a river then scanty of stream, and we were on the flat again not far
from the sea. But to reach Fayal it was necessary to climb again,
turning to the left.

Here we found a path which, with all my experience of Western America
mountain travel, seemed very hard to beat in point of rockiness and
steepness. We had to lead our hor