All of them do not, like St. Kitts, Guadaloupe, and St. Vincent,
slope up to one central peak. In Martinique, for instance, there
are three separate peaks, or groups of peaks--the Mont Pelee, the
Pitons du Carbet, and the Piton du Vauclain. But all have that
peculiar jagged outline which is noticed first at the Virgin
Islands.

Flat 'vans' or hog-backed hills, and broad sweeps of moorland, so
common in Scotland, are as rare as are steep walls of cliff, so
common in the Alps. Pyramid is piled on pyramid, the sides of each
at a slope of about 45 degrees, till the whole range is a congeries
of multitudinous peaks and peaklets, round the base of which spreads
out, with a sudden sweep, the smooth lowland of volcanic ash and
lava. This extreme raggedness of outline is easily explained. The
mountains have never been, as in Scotland, planed smooth by ice.
They have been gouged out, in every direction, by the furious tropic
rains and tropic rain-torrents. Had the rocks been stratified and
tolerably horizontal, these rains would have cut them out into
tablelands divided by deep gullies, such as may be seen in
Abyssinia, and in certain parts of the western United States. But
these rocks are altogether amorphous and unstratified, and have been
poured or spouted out as lumps, dykes, and sheets of lava, of every
degree of hardness; so that the rain, in degrading them, has worn
them, not into tables and ranges, but into innumerable cones. And
the process of degradation is still going on rapidly. Though a
cliff, or sheet of bare rock, is hardly visible among the glens, yet
here and there a bright brown patch tells of a recent landslip; and
the masses of debris and banks of shingle, backed by a pestilential
little swamp at the mouth of each torrent, show how furious must be