[A pleasing people.] The country was still flat.  Coco-groves and rice-fields here and there interrupted the thick forest; but the country is thinly inhabited, and the people appear more cheerful, handsomer, and cleaner than those of Samar.  South of Burauen rises the mountain ridge of Manacagan, on the further slope of which is a large solfatara, which yields sulphur for the powder manufactory in Manila, and for commerce.  A Spanish sailor accompanied me.  Where the road passed through swamp we rode on carabaos.  The pace of the animals is not unpleasant, but the stretching across the broad backs of the gigantic carabaos of the Philippines is very fatiguing.  A quarter of an hour beyond Burauen we crossed the Daguitan, which flows south-west to north-east, and is a hundred feet broad, its bed being full of large volcanic blocks; and, soon after, a small river in a broad bed; and, some hundred paces farther, one of a hundred and fifty feet in breadth; the two latter being arms of the Burauen.  They flow from west to east, and enter the sea at Dulag.  The second arm was originated only the preceding year, during a flood.

[The height of hospitality.] We passed the night in a hut on the northern slope of the Manacagan, which the owner, on seeing us approach, had voluntarily quitted, and with his wife and child sought other lodgings.  The customs of the country require this when the accommodation does not suffice for both parties; and payment for the same is neither demanded nor, except very rarely, tendered.

[Up the Manacagan.] About six o’clock on the following morning we started; and about half-past six climbed, by a pleasant path through the forest, to the ridge of the Manacagan, which consists of trachytic hornblende; and about seven o’clock we crossed two small rivers flowing north-west, and then, by a curve, reached the coast at Dulag.  From the ridge we caught sight, towards the south, of the great white heaps of debris of the mountain Danan glimmering through the trees.  About nine o’clock we came through the thickly-wooded crater of the Kasiboi, and, further south, to some sheds in which the sulphur is smelted.

[Sulphur.] The raw material obtained from the solfatara is bought in three classes:  firstly, sulphur already melted to crusts; secondly, sublimated, which contains much condensed water in its interstices; and thirdly, in the clay, which is divided into the more or less rich, from which the greatest quantity is obtained.  Coconut oil, which is thrown into flat iron pans holding six arrobas, is added to the sulphurous clay, in the proportion of six quarts to four arrobas, and it is melted and continually stirred.  The clay which floats on the surface, now freed from the sulphur, being skimmed off, fresh sulphurous clay is thrown into the cauldron, and so on.  In two or three hours six arrobas of sulphur, on an average, may be obtained in this manner from twenty-four arrobas of sulphurous clay, and, poured into wooden chests,