Page:The British Empire in the nineteenth century Volume VI.djvu/18

 6 styled the Soufrière (sulphur-mine) as in other West Indian islands, lies in the north of this range, which sends off spurs on each side, dividing the island into a series of beautiful and fertile valleys running east and west to the coast. The southern part of the chain ends in Mount St. Andrew, 2500 feet in height, overlooking a fine bay and the chief town. The many streams are small, except when they are swollen by the heavy rains in the season between May and February, the average annual fall being 100 inches. At this time thunder-storms are of frequent occurrence, and the prevailing wind is from the north-east. In spite of humidity and the tropical heat, the climate is one of the most healthy in the West Indies. The only wild animals are some hogs and agoutis; the little rivers abound in a fish called "mountain-mullet", somewhat like the grayling in flavour; the sea has abundant and excellent fish, a small species of whale, 20 to 30 feet in length, and a race of sharks which, it seems, do not care for human flesh, and never attack men upset from the island-boats in the many sudden fierce squalls rushing down from the hills.

The pride of St. Vincent, in the way of scenery, is the magnificent Soufrière, one of the finest and largest craters in the world, with its edge at a height of about 3700 feet in the north-west of the island. The road thither up the mountain-side is adorned with flowers of many species, especially with bignonias and orchids; it passes amidst groves of splendid tree-ferns up to a wild and windy, cool and rainy, treeless region, clothed with fern and small red-blossomed "scrub", and with rich broad-bladed grass, covering a surface of cinders that yield to the tourist's tread. Close to the top, on one side of the crater-edge, two huge flat oval slabs, about 200 feet long, and 30 feet high, profusely adorned with ferns, seem to stand sentinel over the vast chasm out of which they were volcanically blown. One step forward, and the grandeur of the Soufrière bursts all at once on the eye. Near a thousand feet below, beneath a ring of awful cliff, lies a circular lake three miles in circumference, formed by an eruption in 1718 which blew into the skies the great ash-cone then rising in a gracefully tapering form for many hundreds of feet above the surrounding crater-lips, studded with trees and flowers amidst which the songs of countless birds made music in one of nature!s noblest gardens. No bottom has been reached by soundings in the water that, to the spectator