On Saturday we had a splendid excursion up to the top of the pass that leads from here up to the other side of the island. Road in the proper sense there was none, and the track incredibly bad, worse than any Alpine path owing to the loose irregular stones. The mules, however, pick their way like cats, and you have only to hold on. The pass is 6000 feet high, and we ascended still higher. Fortune favoured us. It was a lovely day and the clouds lay in a great sheet a thousand feet below. The peak, clear in the blue sky, rose up bare and majestic 5000 feet out of as desolate a desert clothed with the stiff retama shrubs (a sort of broom) as you can well imagine. [(The Canadas, which he calls] "the one thing worth seeing there.") It took us three hours and a half to get up, passing for a good deal of the time through a kind of low brush of white and red cistuses in full bloom. We saw Palma on one side, and Grand Canary on the other, beyond the layer of clouds which enveloped all the lower part of the island. Coming down was worse than going up, and we walked a good part of the way, getting back about six. About seven hours in the saddle and walking. You never saw anything like the improvement in Harry. He is burnt deep red; he says my nose is of the same hue, and at the end of the journey he raced Gurilio, our guide, who understands no word of English any more than we do Spanish, but we are quite intimate nevertheless. [My brother indeed averred that his language of signs was far more effectual than the Spanish which my father persisted in trying upon the inhabitants. This guide, by the way, was very sceptical as to any Englishman being equal to walking the seventeen miles, much less beating him in a race over the stony track. His experience was entirely limited to invalids.] He reiterates his distress at not getting letters from his wife: "Certainly I will never run the risk of being so long without--never again." When, after all, the delayed letters reached him on his way back from the expedition to the Canadas, thanks to a traveller who brought them up from Laguna, he writes (April 24):--] Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things. [Here is a novel description of an hotel at Puerto Orotava:--] It is very pretty to look at, but all draughts. I compare it to the air of a big wash-house with all the doors open, and it was agreed that the likeness was exact. [On May 2 he sailed for Madeira by the "German", feeling already "ten years younger" for his holiday. On the 3rd he writes:--]