re glittering through dull red
haze.

And now the steamer ran due south, across the vast basin which is
ringed round by Antigua, Montserrat, and Guadaloupe, with St. Kitts
and Nevis showing like tall gray ghosts to the north-west. Higher
and higher ahead rose the great mountain mass of Guadaloupe, its
head in its own canopy of cloud. The island falls into the sea
sharply to leeward. But it stretches out to windward in a long line
of flat land edged with low cliff, and studded with large farms and
engine-houses. It might be a bit of the Isle of Thanet, or of the
Lothians, were it not for those umbrella-like Palmistes, a hundred
feet high, which stand out everywhere against the sky. At its
northern end, a furious surf was beating on a sandy beach; and
beyond that, dim and distant, loomed up the low flat farther island,
known by the name of Grande Terre.

Guadaloupe, as some of my readers may know, consists, properly
speaking, of two islands, divided by a swamp and a narrow salt-water
river. The eastward half, or Grande Terre, which is composed of
marine strata, is hardly seen in the island voyage, and then only at
a distance, first behind the westward Basse Terre, and then behind
other little islands, the Saintes and Mariegalante. But the
westward island, rising in one lofty volcanic mass which hides the
eastern island from view, is perhaps, for mere grandeur, the
grandest in the Archipelago. The mountains--among which are, it is
said, fourteen extinct craters--range upward higher and higher
toward the southern end, with corries and glens, which must be, when
seen near, hanging gardens of stupendous size. The forests seem to
be as magnificent as they were in the days of Pere Labat. Tiny
knots on distant cliff-tops, when looked at through the glass, are
found to be single trees of enormous height and breadth. Gullies
hundreds of feet in depth, rushing downwards toward the sea,
represent the rush of the torrents which have helped, through
thousands of rainy seasons, to scoop them out and down.

But all this grandeur and richness culminates, toward the southern
end, in one great crater-peak 5000 feet in height, at the foot of
which lies the Port of Basse Terre, or Bourg St. Francois.

We never were so fortunate as to see the Souffriere entirely free
from cloud. The lower, wider, and more ancient crater was generally
clear: but out of the midst of it rose a second cone burie