At Las Palmas

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Title:     At Las Palmas
Author: Morley Roberts [More Titles by Roberts]

On a map the Canary Islands look like seven irregular fish scales, and of these Grand Canary is a cycloid scale. For it is round and has deep folds or barrancas in it, running from its highest point in the middle. Like all the other islands it is a volcanic ash pile, or fire and cinder heap, cut and scarped by its rain storms of winter till all valleys seem to run to the centre. With a shovel of ashes and a watering-pot one could easily make a copy in miniature of the island, and at the first blush it seems when one lands at Las Palmas that one has come to the cinder and sand dumping ground of all the world, an enlarged edition of Mr Boffin's dust heaps, a kind of gigantic and glorified Harmony Jail. There is no more disillusioning place in the world to land in by daytime. The port is under the shelter of the Isleta, a barren cindery satellite of Grand Canary joined to the main island by an isthmus of yellow sand-dunes. The roads are dust; dust flies in a ceaseless wind; unhappy palms by the roads are grey with dust; it would at first seem impossible to eat anything but an egg without getting one's teeth full of grit. And yet after all one sees that there are compensations in the sun. I said to a man who managed a big hotel, "This is a hideous place;" and he answered cheerfully, "Yes, isn't it?" And he added, "We have only got the climate." So might a man say, "I've not much ready money, but I've a million or two in Consols." I understood it by-and-by. And after all Las Palmas is not all the island, nor is its evil-mannered port. The country is a country of vines behind the sand and cinder ramparts of the city, and if one sees no running water, or sees it rarely, the hard-working Canarienses have built tanks to save the rain, and they bring streams in flumes from the inner hills that rise six thousand feet above the sea. They grow vines and sugar and cultivate the cochineal insect, which looks like a loathsome disease (as indeed it is) upon the swarth cactus or tunera which it feeds on. And the islands grow tobacco. Las Palmas is after all only the emporium of Grand Canary and a coaling station for steamers to South Africa and the West Coast and South America. It also takes invalids and turns out good work even among consumptives, for there is power in its sun and dry air.

Its people are Spanish, but Spanish with a difference. The ancient Guanches, now utterly extinct as a people, have left traces of their blood and influence and character. Even now the poor Canary folk naturally live in caves. They dig a hole in a rock, or enlarge a hollow, and hang a sack before the hole, and, behold, they possess a house. Not fifty yards from the big old fort at the back of the town the cliffs are all full of people as a sandstone quarry is sometimes full of sand martins. The caves with doors pay taxes, it is said, but those with no more than a sack escape anything in the shape of a direct tax. To escape taxes altogether in any country under Spain is impossible. The _octroi_ or _fielato_ sees to that.

For the most part Las Palmas to English people is no more than a sanatorium. They come to the Islands to get well and go away knowing as much of the people as they knew before. And indeed the climate is one that makes sitting in a big cane chair much easier than walking even a hundred yards. But the English for that matter do not trouble greatly about the customs or conditions of any foreigners. They _are_ foreigners, Spaniards, strangers. It is easy to sit in the garden of a big hotel surrounded by one's own compatriots and ignore the fact that the Canary Islands do not belong to us. That they do not is perhaps a grievance of a sort. One is pleased to remember that Nelson made a bold attempt to take the city of Santa Cruz in Teneriffe, even though he was wounded and failed. For no more surprising piece of audacity ever entered an English head. There was no more disgrace in his failing than there would be in failing to take the moon. And after all, some day, no doubt, the English will buy or steal a Canary Island. There is a lingering suspicion among us all that no island ought to belong to any other nation, unless indeed it is the United States. With an enterprising people these cinder heaps would be less heavily taxed and more prosperous. For the prosperity of Las Palmas itself is much a matter of coaling. And the islands have had commercial crisis after commercial crisis as wine rose in price and fell, as cochineal had its vain struggle with chemical dyes. Now its chief hold is the banana.

My first walk at Las Palmas was through the port to the Isleta. I went with a Scotchman who talked Spanish like a native and astounded two small boys who volunteered to guide us where no guide was needed. The begging, as in all Spanish places, is a pest, a nuisance, a very desolation. "Give a penny, give a penny," varied by a tremendous rise to "Give a shilling," is the cry of all the children. Among Spaniards it is no disgrace to beg. While in the cathedral one day two of us were surrounded by a gang of acolytes in their church dress who begged ceaselessly, unreproved by any priest. These two boys on the Isleta having met someone who spoke Spanish left us to our own devices after having received a penny. And we went on until we were stayed by sentries. For the Isleta is now a powerful fort. It was made so at the time of the Spanish-American War, and no strangers are allowed to see it. So we turned aside and walked miles by a barbed wire fence, among fired rocks and cinders, where never a blade of grass grew. The Isleta is the latest volcano in Grand Canary, and except in certain states of the atmosphere it is utterly and barrenly hideous. Only when one sees it from afar, when the sun is setting and the white sea is aflame, does it become beautiful. Certainly Las Palmas is not lovely.

And yet there is one beauty at Las Palmas, a beauty that none of the natives can appreciate and few of the visitors ever see. It is a kind of beauty which demands a certain training in perceiving the beautiful. There are some folks in this world who cannot perceive the beauty of a sunset reflected in the mud of a tidal river at the ebb. They have so keen a sense of the ugliness of mud that they fail to see the reflections of gold and pink shining on the wet surface. It is so with sand, and Las Palmas has some of the greatest and most living sand-dunes in the world. And not only does it owe its one great beauty to the sand, it owes its prosperity to it as well. Yet folks curse its great folded dunes, which by blocking the channel between the main island and the Isleta have created the sheltered Puerto de la Luz, where all its shipping lies in security from the great seas breaking in Confital Bay. These dunes rise two hundred feet at least, and for ever creep and shift and move in the draught of keen air blowing north and north-west. In the sunlight (and it is on them the sunlight seems most to fall) they shine sleekly and appear to have a certain pleasant and silky texture from afar. But as we walk towards them the light gets stronger, almost intolerably strong, and when one is among them they deceive the eye so that distances seem doubled. And they lie and move in the wind. Day after day I watched them, and walked upon them, and on no two days were they alike; their contours changed perpetually, changed beneath one's eyes like yellow drifting snow. They advanced in walls, and the leeward scarp of these walls was of mathematical exactness. As the wind blew the sands moved, a million grains were set in motion, so that at times the surface was like a low cloud of sand driving south-east. In the lee of the greater dunes were carven hollows, and here the sand-clouds moved in faint shadows. A gust of wind made one look up into the clear sky for clouds where there were none. The motion of the sand was like shot silk. Now and again we came to a vast hollow, a smooth crater, a cup, and from its bottom nothing was visible but the skyline and the sky. Again we saw over the blazing yellow ridge sudden white roofs of the Puerto and the masts of ships, and then a streak of blue more intense than ever because of the red yellow of the sand. And all the time the dunes moved, lived and marched south-east, while the sands rose up out of the sea of the windy bay and marched overland. The sand itself was very dry, very fine, so fine indeed that when it trickled through the fingers it felt like fine warm silk. No particle adhered to another. As I raked it through my fingers the sand ran in strange, enticing curves, each pouring stream finely lined, as if it was woven of curious fibres, making a wonderful design of interlacing columns. And deep beneath the surface it held the heat of yesterday.

To sit upon, within, these dunes and see the wind dance and the sand pour had a strange fascination for me. I lost the sense of time and yet had it impressed upon me. The march of the sand was slow and yet fast; there was a strange sense of inevitability about it; each grain was alive, moving, bent on going south-east. There was silence and yet an infinite sense of motion; no life and yet a sense of living. The sand came up from the sea, marched solemnly and descended into the sea again. The two seas were two eternities; that narrow neck of sand was life. Distances grew great in the sun and the glare; it was a desert and a solitude, and yet close at hand were all the works of man. I often sat in the folds of the dunes and soaked in the sunshine as I was lost to the world.

And beyond it all was Confital Bay; there I forgot that Las Palmas was ugly, a bastard child of Spanish mis-rule and modern commerce, for the curve of the bay and its sands and boulder beach to the eastward were wonderful. For though Confital is but a few steps across the long sand spit to leeward of which the commercial port lies, it might be a thousand miles away as it faces the wind and has its own quiet and its own glory of colour. The sea tumbles in upon a beach of shingle and sand and is for ever in foam, and the colour of it is tropical. Away to the left the hills above Banyodero and Guia are for the most part shadowy with clouds. Often they are hidden, swathed in mist to the breakers at their feet. And yet the sun shines on Confital and both bays, and on the Isleta, which is red and yellow and a fine atmospheric blue away towards Point Confital, where the sea thunders for ever and breaks in high foam like a breaking geyser. On the beach at one's feet often lie Portuguese men-of-war, thrown up by the sea. They are wonderful purple and blue, and very poisonous to touch, as so many beautiful things of the sea are. One whole day was greatly spoiled to me by handling one of them carelessly. My hands smarted furiously, and when I sucked an aching finger, after washing it in the sea, the poison transferred itself to my tongue and I had hardly voice left to swear with at a wandering band of young beggars from the Puerto. But then neither swearing, nor entreaty, nor indifference will send Spanish beggars away. They are to be borne with like flies, or mosquitoes, or bad weather, and only patience may survive them. But for them and for cruelty to animals Spain and Spain's dependencies might make a better harvest out of travellers. One may indeed imagine after all that nothing but accident or a sense of desperation might land and keep one at Las Palmas. I would as soon stay there for a long time as I would deliberately get out of a Union Pacific overland train at Laramie Junction and put down my stakes in that dusty and bedevilled sand and alkali hell. And yet there is the climate at Las Palmas. And out of it are the sand-dunes and Confital Bay.

[The end]
Morley Roberts's essay: At Las Palmas

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