THE MAGICIAN’S LAND

Hokitika Guardian, 12 July 1928, Page 1

THE MAGICIAN’S LAND

(By J. M. N. Jeffries in the London “Daily Mail.”)

SANTA CRUX DE TENERIFE, May 6.

For many centuries the islands which we know as the Canary Isles were more of a fable than a reality. They were supposed to form the rim of tho world, apd if any of the ancients had wished to peer over that strange edge of life his first task would have been to search for their mythical shores.

At the uttermost limit of those uttermost isles possibly lie might come to where the last doubtful slope of earth was reared against infinity. But more likely, as lie drew to his journey’s end the valley itself would give way beneath his feet or the hill would crumble through in an awful tissue. Such was the repute of the Canaries.

The men of a. later age grew securer in their knowledge of the ocean and of the earth, yet even they thought the islands to he the home of magicians, or else a place of uncanny bliss where dead heroes wandered. And now we in our time, have shed all these ijjussions, but the land which gave them birth still seems to retain them. 'Here at least, at Santa Cruz of Tenerife, as you stand upon the heights above the many-coloured town, the mountains which you see stretching their contorted summits eastward almost cry out to you, “Give as hack our magicians!”

Those mountains axe still living, in so far as their soil and rocks can live, in the age of Merlin. Neither husbandry nor trade por war por any of the arts by which men have swept the earth clean if imaginings have prevailed over them. Far below sjiips make a thoroughfare of the tamed waters and upon the mole by which the fruit stearpers lie hales of bananas and packages and barrels in their hundreds are piled ready for the winches.

But the great coast rises from that little surf of commerce breaking upon it, rises from’the puff of dust of the harbour-works and from the patch of the town itself, apd from the road which creeps for a span at its base, high into a sky-line of abracadabra.

Gorge and ravine, headland and cape, peak and hollow scooped from the bowl of the crater, the whole wild island side springs upward in the march to enchantment.

Perhaps there may be in distant seas beyond the Equator some parallel for these mountains which, by their size and shape, by their aspect of chaos and of undiscovery, by their hoary colours, still appear portion of the unredeemed primeval earth. But in the nearer parts of the globe it has not been my own lot to find any such. Long, long ago out of a seething volcanic welter they broke, thundering into crests as they came. Universal fire ringed them round, while piercing hot hurricanes seared them into their innumerable ridges. •So, as time passed, tv hen the fury of their genesis had been abated, with

hardly a change of outline they mpst have stood revealed by' the first of all dawns, by the new cold light, which grew on them aa the winds grew, and as as if the winds' were taking sulvstance. ’ ..

And this they have remained, becoming more and more stubborn’ apd spell-bound, as the world around, through cycle after cycle, gravitated and settled its frame to the wiJI of God and awaited the creation of man. The self-same they stand now that magic league-long line of mountains from Santa Cruz to Anga Point' in Teneriffe, eight mountains,' and e'ight gulfs, scaled like the flanks oL tho crocodile or the lizard, with as' many levels as tho swaying leaves' of "top ’ forest, superb and hopeless, outlaws'w Heaven, expecting the incantation? which come not,' calling in'vain f<jr £he wizard? who never werei