overed with sand and cinders
for about two hundred feet, and the sides are inclined at an angle of
about thirty-five degrees. At ten o'clock we reached the brim of the
crater, and the great gulf burst suddenly into view.

We can never forget the impression made upon us by the sight. We speak
of many things here below as awful, but that word has its full meaning
when carried to the top of Pichincha. There you see a frightful opening
in the earth's crust nearly a mile in width and half a mile deep, and
from the dark abyss comes rolling up a cloud of sulphurous vapors. Monte
Somma in the time of Strabo was a miniature; but this crater is on the
top of a mountain four times the height of the Italian volcano.
Imagination finds it difficult to conceive a spectacle of more fearful
grandeur or such solemn magnificence. It well accords with Milton's
picture of the bottomless pit. The united effect of the silence and
solitude of the place, the great depth of the cavity, the dark
precipitous sides, and the column of smoke standing over an unseen
crevice, was to us more impressive than thundering Cotopaxi or fiery
Vesuvius. Humboldt, after standing on this same brink, exclaimed, "I
have never beheld a grander or more remarkable picture than that
presented by this volcano;" and La Condamine compared it to "the Chaos
of the poets."

Below us are the smouldering fires which may any moment spring forth
into a conflagration; around us are black, ragged cliffs,--fit boundary
for this gate-way to the infernal regions. They look as if they had just
been dragged up from the central furnace of the earth. Life seems to
have fled in terror from the vicinity; even lichens, the children of the
bare rocks, refuse to clothe the scathed and beetling crags. For some
moments made mute by the dreadful sight, we stood like statues on the
rim of the mighty caldron, with our eyes riveted on the abyss below,
lost in contemplating that which cannot be described. The panorama from
this lofty summit is more pleasing, but equally sublime. Towards the
rising sun is the long range of the Eastern Cordillera, hiding from our
view the great valley of the Amazon. To right and left are the peaks of
another procession of august mountains from Cotocachi to Chimborazo. We
are surrounded by the great patriarchs of the Andes, and their speaker,
Cotopaxi, ever and anon sends his muttering voice over the land.

The view westward is like looking down from a balloon. Those