Crossword-Solution: RETAMA 6 letters, 5 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 8

The peak, clear in the blue sky, rose up bare and majestic 5000 feet out of as desolate a desert clothed with the stiff retama shrubs (a sort of broom) as you can well imagine.

Tufts of retama, loaded with flowers, adorn the valleys hollowed out by the torrents, and encumbered with the effects of the lateral eruptions.

The peak of Teneriffe presents two of these elevated plains, the uppermost of which, at the foot of the Piton, is as high as Etna, and of very little extent; while the lowermost, covered with tufts of retama, reaches as far as the Estancia de los Ingleses.

The great elevated plain of Retama separates the black, basaltic, and earthlike lava, from the vitreous and feldsparry lava, the basis of which is obsidian, pitch-stone, and phonolite.

The sea of white ashes which encircles the Piton, and covers the vast plain of Retama, is a certain proof of the former activity of the crater: for in all volcanoes, even when there are lateral eruptions, the ashes and the rapilli issue conjointly with the vapours only from the opening at the summit of the mountain.