That Nature cannot be improved on, is a doctrine with some, both in art and science. There are painters who advocate simple copying to form a picture; under the sweeping and levelling conclusion, that everything that is natural, is beautiful; and there are physicians who oppose the idea of sending consumptive patients to a warm climate,—the absurdity, say they, of supposing that nature would have produced beings in any region of the earth, not adapted to that part, far better than to any other.

Yet in spite of such opinions, men who have been threatened with failing lungs in this country, expatriate themselves and become sturdy sheep-farmers in Australia; and there are, happily for art, many painters, who will not condescend to sit down before the first barn or tree they chance to come across, but wander over the whole country, noting thousands of trees and dwellings of men; comparing, selecting, combining, and reasoning on the differences found.

To the same effect has been the introduction of cochineal and its cactus into Teneriffe. Nature had previously set a plant in the island, Dracœna Draco, or the dragon-tree, producing a splendid scarlet in the form of gum, dignified by the old Arabian physicians with the mystic name of “dragon's blood.” What need then, according to certain dogmatists, for introducing an insect and a plant from the other side of the world?

Quietly we had retired to rest on the night of July 17th; and after a day so fully occupied, slept soundly enough, little thinking of the morrow; but the morrow came in due course, and proved quite able to take care of itself, and establish its own claims to attention. At an early hour, the shaking and shivering of the tent, and the noise of wind increasing every moment, awoke us. We went out, and lo! the direction of the gale was S.W.; the threatened, and the promised, return current from the Equator, had at last arrived.

If we must live in a wind, by all means let it be the S.W., and not the N.E., that effete, unwholesome, used up, polar stream. As to the chemical constitution and sanitary qualities of the two winds there could be no comparison between them; but then, which was likely to do its spiriting most violently? We feared, after all, the south-west; because the heights were its proper province in these latitudes.

Peering into the wind's eye, we could discover little to guide us as to what was coming; the sky was clear and blue, as usual; all the country below the level of 5000 feet was covered in by the stratum of N.E, cloud, that spread out over the sea as well, and this was also its wont; again, all the country, craters, and peaks, above 5000 feet of elevation, appeared as dry, and as hard in outline as ever.

On September 20th, in a luxurious temperature of 78°, at a table decorated with heaps of glorious purple figs, richly ripe mulberries, bowls of fragrant honey, cups of chocolate whipped up into froth displaying all the colours of the rainbow, &c. &c., we took breakfast in Orotava, our minds in a state of perfect ease that we had long been strangers to. And why? every one was safe down from the mountain, and all our goods and chattels as well. The last mule loads had arrived without accident the previous night, and were now under lock and key close to us.

The sun came out with almost oppressive warmth amongst broken clouds; the air was steaming and hot, feeling like a vapour bath; papau and banana trees waved their fine fronds before the window, amid passion-flowers climbing everywhere. The barometer might be standing at thirty inches, but we did not feel so capable or so inclined for exertion as in the thin, dry and cold air of Alta Vista. From early autumn, we had suddenly returned to the height of sultry summer. There was more in this, than at first met the eye; more than mere difference of elevation would account for; and various changes had occurred since we were last here.

Morning came, and showed us all the minutiæ of hill-tops far and near, above the sea of clouds; but no carpenter. Again we made a great fire, with green wood now, so that its white smoke rising in a high pillar, might enable the lost seaman, unskilled in wild mountain lore, to recognise the top of Guajara. Several wide circles were swept around the station, and one of the Spaniards descended into the crater, and coasted along, as it were, by the foot of Guajara, reascending on the other side; but no trace of our wanderer was found.

Had he merely miscalculated the distance, and his walking powers, the previous night, and then lain down to rest,—on finding himself benighted by the rapid closing of an almost tropical twilight,—it would have been the safest and best course to pursue; for, in darkness, a precipice might easily be stumbled over; while on the other hand, in this warm summer season, and in a land without large wild animals of any description, a man could take no harm during a night's repose under a sheltering rock. But then thought we, in such case he would surely have started again soon after day-break, and would have returned to the tents at an early hour. Here however, eleven o'clock in the forenoon had arrived, and there was no appearance of him yet.

About a mile to the south of our station, along; the descending slope, was a curving ridge of rocks, the mouldering rim of a small crater; and interesting, from the rare feature of verticality in some parts of its exterior. Just in front of it, was apparently, a road across the mountain; the “road of the Guanche kings,” we felt inclined to name it. Not a bush or rock was there visible, and the sides were bordered or marked out, by large blocks at short intervals. But then who would make so grand a line for traffic through desolate parts of the mountain, when there were only mule paths in the cultivated regions; a line too, from 100 to 150 feet broad, and leading only from a precipice on the west, over a barren and stony ridge, to another precipice on the east?

We went down to examine the place; and as soon as we arrived on the seeming road—a tract sure enough cleared of all large obstacles—we at once began to sink in over our ankles, in a gravel of yellow and brown stones, of remarkably small specific gravity, and acting almost like a quicksand. The change was startling, after the rock-firm surface of Guajara; and tracing the line both ways, we found neither more nor less, than these symptoms of a danger of sinking in.

With our long train of mules defiling down the pass, we soon reached the floor of the great crater, whose central cone we were to climb before night. The direct distance to be travelled, was but four miles, and the general inclination nothing important, but the roughness was verily inconceivable. One of our reconnoitring parties a few days previously, had tried a straight cut across this lava-covered plain, to save themselves the trouble of going round towards the east, to a smoother region; but after awhile they became entangled amid such terrible stones, that they had to take all the baggage off their mules, and carry everything on their own shoulders.

As we stood on the Canada, the pumice beach of a once fiery sea, its frontal wave of lava, rose between us and the Peak, as a long ridge of rocks piled one over the other, at the steepest angle at which they could avoid falling over. Looking westward, the lava rolled up to the crater wall, formed there by Guajara, whose cliffs and avalanches of broken stones, we loved to trace from the summit, down to the base; where sudden pinnacles and spires shot up, with a strong family resemblance to the “Lunar Rocks.” Some appearances of this phenomenon were seen also in the eastern direction, whither we now pursued our way; gazing upwards in admiration at the range of mural precipices far above our heads.

The “Lunar Rocks” had been a subject of high admiration, and intense puzzle, from the first day of our tenanting Guajara. We had complete command over them as to view; for, from the top of our cliff, or volcanic wall, we gazed almost vertically down upon them as they lay, or rather rose, and shot up, on the floor of the gigantic crater. Was it as a Gordian method of solving the difficulty of their origin, that Von Buch left them entirely out of his large map; otherwise a most excellent one, specially called a carte physique, and engraved so laboriously in the line manner, as to leave no part of the paper unburdened with careful conventional shading. Suffice it that they are not there; yet were in earlier Spanish charts; and are also in that more recent map of MM. Barker-Webb and Berthelot, which the friends of the great German geologist have so unhesitatingly condemned in everything.

Look down at any time of the day from Guajara, and these “Lunar Rocks” riveted your attention. In the middle of the day they gleamed again with bright greens, reds, blues, purples, and whites, as well as with yellows and browns. The greens, and likewise all those other colours being due, to the nature of the rock. Not to vegetation certainly; for of that there was practically nothing, even in the plain about, save the barely visible, far between dottings of globular retama bushes; the living, dark grey; the dead (see Photo-stereograph, No. 6), cinereous white.