Jan. 24, 1934 ____: This morning at day break we anchored at Funchal in the Madeira Islands and by noon we had unloaded the cargo and were away. This city is on the side of a volcanic mountain. Its lights as we neared it in the dark glowed and twinkled and spread like a fan from the water-front. As the dawn cleared away the mist we saw the city mounting tier on tier and terrace on terrace, every bit of the land has a building or a garden on it. The buildings and homes are in tinted pastel shades with rose and yellow predominating. It is a beautiful town and a clean one. We took a drove up in the mountains and saw the gardens in all their beauty. Blooms of every description and color, gardenias and camilles growing over the walls, bananas growing along side of the island pines, gardens walled on cliffs with sheer drops of a couple of hundred feet. The streets are very narrow with the houses and buildings built flush on them, streets so steep that they use sleds to slide down them and then the sleds have to be held back so that they will not run away. Streets with clear brooks running in their gutters where the native women wash their clothing by pounding them on the rocks.