As the year went on, signs of strain due to the process of adjustment to the conditions of town life began to make themselves apparent, one of the most distressing symptoms being insomnia. A sleeping-draught which gave five or six hours of sleep was welcomed with a fervour which tells a pitiful tale. Perhaps in some ways even more serious for one who was lecturing daily was loss of voice, which occurred at Christmas. The brief vacation failed to produce permanent improvement, and the early part of the year 1887 saw a losing struggle between ill-health and James Geikie’s strong sense of duty. As soon as the spring vacation freed him he went off to the Canary Islands to recuperate. A letter from Teneriffe, dated 18th April 1887, indicates a characteristically rapid rebound of spirits:--“This place is a paradise on earth!” The hotel (at Orotava) he describes as “simply fairy-like. It is bowered in trees, palms and others. Fountains and lakes are all round, lovely gardens one blaze of gorgeous colour, and rich green, cool colonnades with lounges where you can sit and dream and gaze on the sunlit sea. The mornings and evenings are simply heavenly.” During his stay Prof. Geikie climbed the Peak on foot, an exhausting excursion in the heat, and one for which he was probably not fit. His account of the effect of rising above the mountains noontide cloud-cap is interesting:--“When we got above the clouds the sight was very grand. The upper surface is approximately level, and, rising above it, the higher ridges and mountains look so many islands in a tumbled and rolling sea. But such a sea! Imagine the sun blazing down from a perfectly clear and cloudless sky--the mountain tops rugged and serrated, and coloured red and yellow--and the cloud-sea shining with the most silvery brilliance. Now and again the wind would cause the clouds to rise up like billows and roll for some little distance up the hill-slopes above the general level of the cloud-sea, but the invading billows were soon torn to shreds and disappeared.” Of the top he says:--“What a weird scene it was. Here were numerous extinct volcanoes, craters looking raw and red just as if they had vomited forth yesterday. The ground was sprinkled all round with slags and cinders and volcanic sand and dust, and not a blade of grass was to be seen.”