The little cabin, which contrasts its cheerful colour to the
gloomy tint and blistered aspect of-the basaltic caverns, on whose
m a r g i n it seems to totter, and the crumbling scoriae of whose
vaults, appear to hang together so loosely, as to be ready to sink
beneath its weight, and to bury it in cinders; this little hut,
erected as it were on the ruins of a former world, rocked by every
wind, and dashed by every southern surge, is inhabited by a poor
maniac, who, being robbed, by a brother, of all the savings of a life
of labour, at the very moment the old age they were to solace
began to creep upon him, lost his reason, not, as might have been
expected, to revile that providence, which for some wise reason
we might have excused one of his class from crediting, had failed
to protect h i m , but peaceably, and without harming the most insignificant
object about him, to raise rude altars to his God, and to
deck his garden-wall with crowns of thorns, in honour of his
Redeemer, and rudely cut stones (for they could scarcely be called
figures), in memory of his Apostles. A vacant smile played for a
moment on his sad face, as I stopped to examine, and as he
thought, to admire these highly-prized ornaments of his dwelling,
which seemed to be richer in this respect, in his eye, than the
most splendid cathedral; and the look of distress and emotion,
which followed the unwonted smile my respectful forbearance had
induced, when a troop of idle boys discharged a volley of stones
from the beach, and destroyed the greater number of the rude
images he had raised with so much labour and so devoutly revered;
the look he gave me at this moment of wanton cruelty, went to
my heart. This was not the mania which too often follows a
blind and gross superstition, it was the pure, natural, and volunroeks,
with several others of the genus; one was of a dull light green, with blackish
brown stripes, and another of a dull grey spotted with brown, with the apex lighter.
The branchue of the animals of these patellce were not interrupted, and all are eaten.
tary feeling of the heart, undirected, but not unabated, from the
loss of reason.
I lost no time in beginning my excursions into the interior, and
first visited the waterfall, which is about three hours walk from
Funchal. The most direct route, is to descend into the ravine of
the first torrent to the westward of the town, and to follow it
until it is terminated by the fall. The bed of the torrent over
which you walk, for there is no path, is full of immense, rolled,
masses of basalt, nodules, and amygdaloidal fragments of all forms
and sizes; leaving gaps of surface between, occasionally strewed
with ferruginous sand, from the decomposition of the masses of
tufa which have been swept down by the torrent. The whole
distance is to be performed by stepping and jumping from block
to block, (which, when they become slippery after rain, is not a
little hazardous) and descending at rare intervals, to walk over
sharp stones and sliding pebbles. To quit the torrent, and scramble
over the hills and basaltic rocks which bound it on each side,
is to lose yourself and the objects of the journey, as I found in my
first attempt to reach it. Don Joze Monteiro kindly volunteered to
accompany me the second time, and proceeding westward from the
Mount Church, we descended with some difficulty into the torrent,
at about half way between the waterfall and the mouth1. The lower
part of our descent was variegated with pelargonia, the digitalis
purpurea, and various composite, umbelliferes, and ferns; the two
latter extending to the bed of the torrent, where they were
mingled with hepaticee and water-cresses,, The adiantum Africanum
grows abundantly, and lines every little cave hollowed out of the
rocks by the streams, but the inhabitants make no use of i t ; probably,
this species, although so similar to the a. capillw veneris,
x We passed over several patches of red earth, apparently resulting from the decomposition
of the tufa and basalt, but it seemed to me, to be highly unfavourable to
vegetation.