The average annual temperature of Las Canadas is that of N. latitude 53 degrees, Holland and Hanover; in fact, here it is the Pyrenees, and below it Africa. The sun blazed from a desert of blue, and the waving heat-reek rose trembling and quivering from the tawny sides of the foregrounds. The clouds, whose volumes were disposed like the leaves of a camellia, lay far down to the north-east, as if unable to face the fires of day. And now the great trachytic dome, towering in the translucent air, was the marking feature. Its angle, 35 to 42 degrees, or double that of the lower levels, suggests distant doubts as to its practicability, nor could we believe that it rises 3,243 feet above its western base, Las Cañádas. The summit, not including the terminal Pilon--a comparatively dwarf cone [Footnote: There is a very bad sketch of the Pike in Mr. Scrope's popular work on _Volcanoes_ (p. 5); the eruptive chimney is far too regularly conical.]--is ribboned with clinker, and streaked at this season with snow-lines radiating, like wheel-spokes from a common centre. Here and there hang, at an impossible angle, black lava-streams which were powerless to reach the plain: they resembled nothing so much as the gutterings of a candle hardening on the outside of its upright shaft. Evidently they had flowed down the slope in a half fluid state, and had been broken by contraction when cooling. In places, too, the surface was streaked with light yellow patches, probably of sun-gilt _tosa_ or pumice. On our right, or to the north-north-east of the Pike, rose La Fortaleza, _alias_ the Golliada del Cedro. The abrupt wall had salient and re-entering angles, not unlike the Palisades of the Hudson River, with intercalated strata and a smooth glacis at the base, except between the east and north-west, where the periphery has been destroyed. It is apparently basalt, as we may expect in the lower levels before reaching the trachytic region. The other notable features were Monte Tigayga, with its vertical cliff, trending northwards to the sea; the gap through which the Orotava lava-bed burst the crater-margin; the Llano de Maja ('Manja' in Berthelot), a strip of Las Canadas, and the horizontally striated Peak of Guajara (8,903 feet).