re?

What a volcano is like, it is easy enough to show you; for they are the
most simply and beautifully shaped of all mountains, and they are alike
all over the world, whether they be large or small. Almost every volcano
in the world, I believe, is, or has been once, of the shape which you see
in the drawing opposite; even those volcanos in the Sandwich Islands, of
which you have often heard, which are now great lakes of boiling fire
upon flat downs, without any cone to them at all. They, I believe, are
volcanos which have fallen in ages ago: just as in Java a whole burning
mountain fell in on the night of the 11th of August, in the year 1772.
Then, after a short and terrible earthquake, a bright cloud suddenly
covered the whole mountain. The people who dwelt around it tried to
escape; but before the poor souls could get away the earth sunk beneath
their feet, and the whole mountain fell in and was swallowed up with a
noise as if great cannon were being fired. Forty villages and nearly
3000 people were destroyed, and where the mountain had been was only a
plain of red-hot stones. In the same way, in the year 1698, the top of a
mountain in Quito fell in in a single night, leaving only two immense
peaks of rock behind, and pouring out great floods of mud mixed with dead
fish; for there are underground lakes among those volcanos which swarm
with little fish which never see the light.

But most volcanos as I say, are, or have been, the shape of the one which
you see here. This is Cotopaxi, in Quito, more than 19,000 feet in
height. All those sloping sides are made of cinders and ashes, braced
together, I suppose, by bars of solid lava-stone inside, which prevent
the whole from crumbling down. The upper part, you see, is white with
snow, as far down as a line which is 15,000 feet above the sea; for the
mountain is in the tropics, close to the equator, and the snow will not
lie in that hot climate any lower down. But now and then the snow melts
off and rushes down the mountain side in floods of water and of mud, and
the cindery cone of Cotopaxi stands out black and dreadful against the
clear blue sky, and then the people of that country know what is coming.
The mountain is growing so hot inside that it melts off its snowy
covering; and soon it will burst forth with smoke and steam, and red-hot
stones and earthquakes, which will shake the ground, and roars that will
be heard, it may be, hundreds of miles away.

And