r,
is the other country which has just been shaken. On the sea-shore below
those volcanos stood the hapless city of Arica, whose ruins we saw in the
picture. Then comes another gap; and then a line of more volcanos in
Chili, at the foot of which happened that fearful earthquake of 1835
(besides many more) of which you will read some day in that noble book
_The Voyage of the Beagle_; and so the line of dots runs down to the
southernmost point of America.

What a line we have traced! Long enough to go round the world if it were
straight. A line of holes out of which steam, and heat, and cinders, and
melted stones are rushing up, perpetually, in one place and another. Now
the holes in this line which are near each other have certainly something
to do with each other. For instance, when the earth shook the other day
round the volcanos of Quito, it shook also round the volcanos of Peru,
though they were 600 miles away. And there are many stories of
earthquakes being felt, or awful underground thunder heard, while
volcanos were breaking out hundreds of miles away. I will give you a
very curious instance of that.

If you look at the West Indies on the map, you will see a line of red
dots runs through the Windward Islands: there are two volcanos in them,
one in Guadaloupe, and one in St. Vincent (I will tell you a curious
story, presently, about that last), and little volcanos (if they have
ever been real volcanos at all), which now only send out mud, in
Trinidad. There the red dots stop: but then begins along the north coast
of South America a line of mountain country called Cumana, and Caraccas,
which has often been horribly shaken by earthquakes. Now once, when the
volcano in St. Vincent began to pour out a vast stream of melted lava, a
noise like thunder was heard underground, over thousands of square miles
beyond those mountains, in the plains of Calabozo, and on the banks of
the Apure, more than 600 miles away from the volcano,--a plain sign that
there was something underground which joined them together, perhaps a
long crack in the earth. Look for yourselves at the places, and you will
see that (as Humboldt says) it is as strange as if an eruption of Mount
Vesuvius was heard in the north of France.

So it seems as if these lines of volcanos stood along cracks in the rind
of the earth, through which the melted stuff inside was for ever trying
to force its way; and that, as the crack got stopped up in one plac