comparison with the surrounding mountains. Its
altitude is twenty-one thousand four hundred and twenty feet, or
forty-five times the height of Strasburg cathedral; or, to state it
otherwise, the fall of one pound from the top of Chimborazo would raise
the temperature of water thirty degrees. One-fourth of this is
perpetually covered with snow, so that its ancient name Chimpurazu--the
mountain of snow--is very appropriate. It is a stirring thought that
this mountain, now mantled with snow, once gleamed with volcanic fires.
There is a hot spring on the north side, and an immense amount of
debris covers the slope below the snow-limit, consisting chiefly of
fine-grained, iron-stained trachyte and coarse porphyroid gray trachyte;
very rarely a dark vitreous trachyte. Chimborazo is very likely not a
solid mountain; trachytic volcanoes are supposed to be full of cavities.
Bouger found it made the plumb line deviate 7" or 8".

The valleys which furrow the flank of Chimborazo are in keeping with its
colossal size. Narrower, but deeper, than those of the Alps, the mind
swoons and sinks in the effort to comprehend their grim majesty. The
mountain appears to have been broken to pieces like so much thin crust,
and the strata thrown on their vertical edges, revealing deep, dark
chasms, that seem to lead to the confines of the lower world. The
deepest valley in Europe, that of the Ordesa in the Pyrenees, is three
thousand two hundred feet deep; but here are rents in the side of
Chimborazo in which Vesuvius could be put away out of sight. As you look
down into the fathomless fissure, you see a white fleck rising out of
the gulf, and expanding as it mounts, till the wings of the condor,
fifteen feet in spread, glitter in the sun as the proud bird fearlessly
wheels over the dizzy chasm, and then, ascending above your head, sails
over the dome of Chimborazo. Could the condor speak, what a glowing
description he could give of the landscape beneath him when his horizon
is a thousand miles in diameter! If

"Twelve fair counties saw the blaze from Malvern's lonely height,"

what must be the panorama from a height fifteen times higher!

Chimborazo was long supposed to be the tallest mountain on the globe,
but its supremacy has been supplanted by Mount Everest in Asia, and
Aconcagua in Chile. In mountain gloom and glory, however, it still
stands unrivalled. The Alps have the avalanche, "the thunderbolt of
snow," and the glaciers, those