Thus the journey, like the earlier one to Messina, brought the indefatigable student into touch once more with a “philosophical animal.” This alone would have made it well worth the trouble. How many more of the kind the future might still have in reserve for him! In the quiet months at Puerto del Arrecise, on Lanzarote, he was gradually restored to his spiritual balance. Nature had taken much from him, but she offered him an inexhaustible return. His elasticity and vigour of frame had been restored before he left Teneriffe. In a twenty-two hours’ tour, only interrupted by two hours’ sleep, he had climbed to the highest summit of the Peak, in such an unfavourable season (in the November snow) that the native guides would not go any further in the end; all those who were with him except one stopped short a little way from the top. The short rest at the summit (4,128 yards above the sea-level, on the icy edge of the crater) was greatly enjoyed by him. He could see over a distance of 5,700 square miles, as much as one-fourth of the whole of Spain. “The extraordinary range and height of the horizon gives one a vague idea of the infinity of space. The deep unbroken silence and the consciousness that we have left all animal and vegetal life far behind, produce a profound feeling of solitude. One feels oneself, with a certain pride, master of the situation that has been secured with so much trouble and risk. But the next moment one feels what we really are—momentary waves in the infinite ocean of life, transitory combinations of a comparatively small number of organic cells, which, in the last resort, owe their origin and significance to the peculiar chemical properties of carbon. How small and mean at such moments do we find the little play of human passions that unfolds itself far below in the haunts of civilisation! How great and exalted in comparison does free Nature seem, as it unrolls before us, in one vast picture, the whole majesty and splendour of its creative power!” Thus he himself describes the moment. Something of that feeling of exalted solitude entered into his life. He stood firm and undazed—come what might. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VII GROWTH OF IDEAS