Mr Newland the first lieutenant, and I, set out early in the day, accordingly, with a couple of the Hebe's midshipmen, mounted on as many of the little island ponies, to go up inland for a cruise about the hills. You take Side Path along the crags, with a wall betwixt the hard track and the gulf below, till you lose sight of James Town like a cluster of children's toy-houses under you, and turn up above a sloping hollow full of green trees and tropical-like flowering shrubs, round a pretty cottage called the Briars--where one begins to have a notion, however, of the bare blocks, the red bluffs, and the sharp peaks standing up higher and higher round the shell of the island. Then you had another rise of it to climb, on which you caught sight of James Town and the harbour again, even smaller than before, and saw nothing before your beast's head but a desert of stony ground, running hither and thither into wild staring clefts, grim ravines, and rocks of every size tumbled over each other like figures of ogres and giants in hard fight. After two or three miles of all this, we came in view of Longwood hill, lying green on a level to north and east, and clipping to windward against the sea beyond; all round it elsewhere was the thick red crust of the island, rising in ragged points and sharp spires:--the greenish sugar-loaf of Diana's Peak shooting in the middle over the high ridge that hid the Plantation House side of St Helena to leeward. Between the spot where we were and Longwood is a huge fearful-looking black hollow, called the Devil's Punch-Bowl, as round and deep as a pitch-pot for caulking all the ships in the world--except on a slope into one corner of it, where you saw a couple of yellow cottages with gardens about them; while every here and there a patch of grass began to appear, a clump of wild weeds and flowers hanging off the fronts of the rocks, or the head of some valley widening away out of sight, with the glimpse of a house amongst trees, where some stream of water came leaping down off the heights and vanished in the boggy piece of green below. From here over the brow of the track it was all like seeing into an immense stone basin half hewn out, with all the lumps and wrinkles left rising in it and twisting every way about--the black Devil's Punch-Bowl for a hole in the middle, where some infernal liquor or other had run through: the soft bottoms of the valleys just bringing the whole of it up distincter to the green over Longwood hill; while the ragged heights ran round on every side like a rim with notches in it, and Diana's Peak for a sort of a handle that the clouds could take hold of. All this time we had strained ourselves to get as fast up as possible, except once near the Alarm House, where there was a telegraph signal-post, with a little guard-hut for the soldiers; but _there_ each turned round in his saddle, letting out a long breath the next thing to a cry, and heaving-to directly, at sight of the prospect behind.