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Moorish blood there may be, too, here and there, left behind by those who built the little 'atalaya' or fire-beacon, over the old harbour, to correspond, by its smoke column, with a long line of similar beacons down the Spanish coast. The Basques resemble in look the Southern Welsh quick-eyed, neat in feature, neat in dress, often, both men and women, beautiful.
Like the knuckle-bone of the Tenerife ham it is a contorted mass of red and black lavas and scoriae, with sharp slides and stone-floods still distinctly traceable. Of its five eruptive cones the highest, which supports the Atalaya Vieja, or old look-out, now the signal-station, rises to 1,200 feet. A fine lighthouse, with detached quarters for the men, crowns another crater-top to the north.
The principal towns in this territory are Lares de Guajaba or Hincha, to-day called Hinche, which was founded in 1504 and was the birthplace of General Pedro Santana; Las Caobas, founded about the middle of the eighteenth century; San Miguel de la Atalaya, to-day called St. Michel, founded about the same time; and San Rafael de la Angostura, called St. Raphael by the Haitians.
Beyond Tenoya town I inspected a crateriform ravine, and Monte Cardones boasted a honeycomb of caves like the Atalaya. The fine rich vega of Arucas, a long white settlement before whose doors rose drying heaps of maize and black cochineal, was a pleasant, smiling scene.
Returning to the road-fork, I mounted a hill on the right hand and sighted the Atalaya, another local lion. Here a perpendicular face of calcareous rock fronts a deep valley, backed by a rounded hill, with the blue chine of El Cumbre in the distance: this is the highest of the ridge, measuring 8,500 feet.
A movement of Lieutenant Franklin Gardner, re-enforced later by the mounted rifles under Major Edwin Vose Sumner and a battalion of the First Artillery under Lieutenant-Colonel Childs, to occupy a position near the base of the Atalaya, provoked a sharp conflict. General Santa Anna, being at the front, ordered re-enforcements. Colonel Thomas Childs withdrew, having advanced under a misapprehension.
Every peak had its atalaya, or watch-tower, ready to make its fire by night or to send up its column of smoke by day, a signal of invasion at which the whole country was on the alert.
The toothless old sailor continued singing the heroic deeds of long ago, as if they dated from yesterday, as if he had witnessed them himself, as if a flash from the atalaya announcing a disembarcation of enemies might suddenly flare across this land of combat, enveloped in darkness.
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