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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.