The height of the Tenerife Pike, once held the loftiest in the world, is 12,198 feet, in round numbers 12,200. Thus it stands nearly at the altitude of Mont Blanc (15,784 feet) above the Chamounix valley, a figure of 12,284 feet. The slope from the base is 1 in 4.6. The direct distance from Orotava on the map measures 10.5 miles; along the road 18, according to the guides. The terminal chimney and outlet for vapours which would erupt elsewhere, rises 520 feet from its pedestal, the central Rambleta, and its ascent generally occupies an hour. One visitor has reduced this _montagne pelée_ to 60-70 feet, and compares it with the dome of a glass-house. From below it resembles nothing so much as a cone of dirty brown _cassonade_, and travellers are justified in calling it a sugarloaf. I can hardly rest satisfied with Von Buch's description. 'Teyde is a pointed tower surrounded by a ditch and a circular chain of bastions.' The word Teyde is supposed to be a corruption of Echeyde, meaning Hades: hence the title Isla Infierno, found in a map of A.D. 1367. The Guanches also called it Ayadyrma, and here placed their pandemonium, under Guayota, the head-fiend. The country-folk still term the crater-ring 'la caldera de los diablos en que se cuecen todas las provisiones del Infierno' (the Devil's caldron, wherein are cooked all the rations of the infernals). Seen by moonlight, or on a star-lit night, the scenery would be weird and ghostly enough to suggest such fancies, which remind us of Etna and Lipari. I had been prepared by descriptions for a huge chasm-like crater or craters like those on Theon Ochéma, Camerones Peak. I found a spoon-shaped hollow, with a gradual slope to the centre, 100 × 150 feet deep, the greater length of the oval running north-east, where the side is higher, to south-west, where there is also a tilt of the cup. The floor was a surface of burning marl and whitish earthy dough-like paste, the effect of sulphurous acid vapours upon the argile of the lava. This stratum was in places more than 80 feet thick; and fumes rose fetid with sulphuric acid, and sulphates of soda, alumina, and ammonia from the dead white, purple red, vivid green, and brilliant yellow surface of the solfatara. Hence the puffs of vapour seen from below against the sparkling blue sky, and disappearing like huge birds upon the wings of the wind: hence, too, the tradition of the mast and the lateen sail. A dig with the Guanche _magada_ or _lanza_, the island alpen-stock, either outside or inside the crater, will turn up, under the moist white clay, lovely trimetric crystals of sulphur, with the palest straw tint, deepening to orange, and beautifully disposed in acicular shapes. The acid eats paper, and the colours fade before they leave the cone.