288
Martinique
Sketches.
that. The cone is green to the top with moss, low grasses, small fern, and creeping pretty plants, like violets, with big carmine flowers. The path is a black line : the rock laid bare by it looks as if burned to the core. We have now to use our hands in climbing ; but the low thick ferns give a good hold. Out of breath, and drenched in perspiration, we reach the apex,—the highest point of the island. But we are curtained about with clouds,—moving in dense white and gray masses : we cannot see fifty feet away. The top of the peak has a slightly slanting surface of perhaps twenty square yards, very irregular in outline ;— southwardly the morne pitches sheer into a frightful chasm, between the converging of two of those long corrugated ridges already described as buttressing the volcano on all sides. Through a cloud-rift we can see another crater-lake twelve hundred feet below—said to be five times larger than the Étang we have just left : it is also of more irregular outline. This is called the Etang Sec, or " Dry Pool," because dry in less rainy seasons. It occupies a more ancient crater, and is very rarely visited : the path leading to it is difficult and dangerous,—a natural ladder of roots and lianas over a series of precipices. Behind us the Crater of the Three Palmistes now looks no larger than the surface on which we stand ;—over its further boundary we can see the wall of another gorge, in which there is a third crater-lake. West and north are green peakings, ridges, and high lava walls steep as fortifications. All this we can only note in the intervals between passing of clouds. As yet there is no landscape visible southward ;—we sit down and wait. IX.
. . . T w o crosses are planted nearly at the verge of the precipice ; a small one of iron ; and a large one of