HOTEL SANTA CATALINA,
LAS PALMAS,
GRAN CANARIA.
_5 Nov. 1898._
I am beginning Guy Fawkes's day by sitting in the verandah before
breakfast to write letters for a homeward-bound mail. Certainly it is
enjoyable here and I mean to get good out of a delightful climate.
Also I mean to convert your half promise of a visit into a whole, and
without going beyond the truth I can say that there is a good deal
here that should please you. At first sight I was repelled by the arid
desolation of the island. I suppose that I ought to have been prepared
for grasslessness, but somehow or another I was not. But then the
wilderness is broken by patches of wonderful green--the green of banana
fields. Wherever a little water can be induced to flow in artificial
channels there are all manner of beautiful things to be seen. I have
picked a date and mustered enough Spanish to buy me a pair of shoes
in the "city" of Las Palmas--a dirty city it is with strange smells;
but we are well outside of it. Between Las Palmas and its port there
is a little English colony. This hotel is so English that they give
me my bill in _£ s. d._ and my change in British ha'pence which have
seen better days. Indeed now I know where our coppers go to when they
have become too bad for use at home. Also the "library" of this hotel
seems a sort of hades to which the bad three-voller is sent after its
decease. But the proposition that all the worst books collect there is
(as you must be aware) not convertible into the proposition that only
bad books come there, and I see a copy of a certain _Life of Henry
Fawcett_ which you may have read. I laze away my time under verandahs
and in gardens--but am not wholly inactive. Sometimes when it is cool I
walk some miles and explore country that is well worth exploration. By
the time you come I shall be ready for an ascent of our central range
with you--it touches 6000 ft. I think, and by that time we shall be
having cooler weather. Yesterday we were breathless: to-day is cloudy
but would be September in England.
It is breakfast time and the porridge is good.