Isle Of Beauty

( Originally Published 1905 )

"Where the clouds love to rest

On the mountain's full breast,

As they wander afar o'er the isles of the sea."

BEYOND all the islands of the Azores I had been curious to see San Miguel. Here were the great lava quarries and breakwater of huge bulk and length, partly swept away in 1896 by a tremendous tidal wave. Here also were the famous pine-apple gardens, the Tangerine orange groves, the seven cities of the Cid, buried in the crater lakes of Sette Cidades and the famed valley of the Furnas. Sometime during the night we anchored in the roadstead. When, early in the morning, I came on deck I saw with pleasure and admiration the city of Ponta Delgada. Perched on a commanding elevation was the crimson-painted church of St. Joseph. To our left was the historic old fort, hoary with age, bastioned, moated and painfully helpless in its senility. Occupying almost an entire square towered the Matriz, the finest church of the Azores, the splendid hospital buildings and the military barracks.

When I entered the city with its population of seventeen or eighteen thousand people I was at once struck with its quaint composite architecture, its air of prosperity and scrupulous cleanliness. The private homes—and many of them are palatial—the stores, the public and civic buildings are of eruptive stone coated in cement stained or dyed in variegated colours. In the city, and indeed on the whole island, there are but four or five English-speaking residents. To one of these, the Hon. George Pickril, the American consul, I bore a letter of introduction. With gracious cordiality he bade me welcome, posted me at the club and secured for me excellent quarters at the "Azor," the only hotel in the city. Accompanied by senhor Moreira I drove, a few days after landing on the island, to Morro dos Capellas, a bold and rugged headland towering sixteen hundred feet above the sea, to whose waters the cleavage is as straight and clean as that of the granite front of Cape Trinity, on the Saguenay. At the base of this rocky promontory is a cove formed by centuries of wave erosion, where the government has established a whaling-station from which thirty thousand gallons of whale oil were last year exported. Night and day from the plane of the headland a " lookout" with a marine glass sweeps the sea to the north, ready at a moment to telephone to the men of the cove the appearance and position of the ocean monsters. Our road from Ponta Delgada to Capellas was as symmetrically crooked as a stake and rider fence of the pioneer days of Ontario. It led through a wondrous panorama, passing rocks festooned with ivy, ravines carpeted with ferns and lava boulders robed in lichens. The wayside is redolent of rhododendrons and breathes of perfume. The very air is a delight, and pulsates with life, helping to sustain and enrich floral vegetation. You feel its invigorating effects and tonic influence as you move towards the undulating uplands shadowed by noble peaks. The road winds up embowered slopes, past welling springs, back and forth in zigzags, over quaintly-constructed bridges, across the steep faces of the foothills, along narrow crests caressed by perfumed breezes, till you feel that you are fed, filled and intoxicated with the sweet air of mountain land. Every foot of arable land is under cultivation. Lava. fences three feet high mark the highway on each side and divide the lots. Rivulets of water course along in stone channels by the side of the roadway, and the noise of running water, so dear to the Azorean heart, is continuous.

At the town of Lomba da Cruz the route winds to the right through gulches and mountain ravines richly clothed with chestnuts, cork oaks and alders. On every side are water threads, jets and cascades made possible by the strange formation of the erratic lava and volcanic settling. Camoens, the Portuguese Virgil, took his descriptions of the "enchanted Island of Venus" from this immediate neighbourhood. The " sonorosa lympha fugitiva" and the springs and runnels leaping down the hillsides so beautifully woven into his " Luciad " are as brightly beautiful and inviting to-day as they were to the great poet two centuries ago.

The view from the summit of the Morro, which we ascended in the afternoon, is entrancing. On every side are the deep, breathing waters of the ocean, whose ululations at night are strangely weird. To the south are the bold and pine-covered peaks of Balho sloping down to fertile valleys, where villages nestle, where cross-crowned spires pierce the drifting clouds, and where fields, green with waving rye and clover, stretch away to the sea and complete a ravishing panorama. As we descended the Morro our route carried us by torrent-swept defiles of rugged ranges, where centuries of rain and erosion have opened and deepened ravines into fearsome canyons. Marvellously beautiful and fair to look upon is the richness of floral apparel in which these hills are attired.

No florist in Canada could offer you, for love or money, a bouquet like unto that which you may gather and fashion here in ten minutes: heliotropes and scented verbenas, blue and scarlet salvias, dahlias and fuchsias of the more primitive kind, chrysanthemums, and great vines of the yellow-flowered madre silva, gay and bright from sheer force of unchecked luxuriance. In the valley of Capellas the wind is beautiful. In the trees it is as the noise of the sea, but muffled. Every leaf that trembles adds a delicate tone to the murmur which at times is like unto the singing of bees when the hive swarms. It has the sense of touch. It is in love with the leaves and caresses the minutest blades of grass.

In this moist air, and at this time of the year the trees have all the tints of yellow as if the leaves were expiring the gold absorbed in summer. There is no falling of the leaf, as we understand the word. Leaf after leaf detaches itself from the stem, and, proud of its golden colour, quits the parental home, and elopes with the first fair breeze that woos it. The sky, when the sun is declining, has the tint of bronze—dark orange and dark blue—and the transparent light of alabaster. At night a bird whistles notes which fall like drops of an opiate on soft marble. Truly the valley of Capellas is an idyllic vale, where nature has accumulated a profusion of riches; a Biblical Eden, where we breathe an air impregnated with an odour of luxuriant vegetation.

On our return to Ponta Delgada we lunched at Ramaltra. The only tannery on the island of San Miguel is in operation in this town, a miserable burg full of half-wild pariah dogs and smells that could be photographed. The tameness of all domestic animals on this island, of cattle, sheep, dogs, pigs and poultry, resulting from habitual kind treatment, is striking to a foreigner. We noticed this in particular in Ramaltra, where a cow walked deliberately up to one of our party, licked his hand and rested her head on his shoulder. On entering the cerejaria, or village inn, the mistress of the house approached deferentially, and courtesying, said : " Louvada seja N osso Senhor Jesus C hristus ,"— praised be Jesus Christ our Lord. " Epara sempre seja louvada"—may He be praised forever and ever —spoke back Augusto Periera, one of our party.

This is a common salutation, and reminds one of the Irish peasant's, " God save all here," and the answer, " God save you kindly, sir." Our luncheon was really a dinner, consisting of sopa secca, " dry soup," made of wheaten bread, beef, cabbage, and mint, followed by bacalhau—dried codfish, boiled and soaked previously for eighteen hours in running water. This is a national dish among the Azoreans. Bread of rye, butter and cheese were served with Minno wine of fine fruitness and possessing a stringency and sharpness enough to take one's breath away. Then followed coffee and cigarettes. We settled our account, shook hands with the kindly people of the house, and reached home about ten o'clock. So clear was the atmosphere and bright the heavens that from the balcony of our hotel we looked out upon the ocean, and could clearly discern the island of Santa Maria floating like a misty mass fifty miles away on the Atlantic.