e to vast elevations above the
sea, many of them being between 14,000 and 18,000 feet high. The Indians
of Lican have a tradition that the mountain called L'Altar, or Capac
Urcu, which means "the chief," was once the highest of those near the
equator, being higher than Chimborazo; but in the reign of Ouainia
Abomatha, before the discovery of America, a prodigious eruption took
place, which lasted eight years, and broke it down. The fragments of
trachyte, says M. Boussingault, which once formed the conical summit of
this celebrated mountain, are at this day spread over the plain.[472]
Cotopaxi is the most lofty of all the South American volcanoes which
have been in a state of activity in modern times, its height being
18,858 feet; and its eruptions have been more frequent and destructive
than those of any other mountain. It is a perfect cone, usually covered
with an enormous bed of snow, which has, however, been sometimes melted
suddenly during an eruption; as in January, 1803, for example, when the
snows were dissolved in one night.

Deluges are often caused in the Andes by the liquefaction of great
masses of snow, and sometimes by the rending open, during earthquakes,
of subterranean cavities filled with water. In these inundations fine
volcanic sand, loose stones, and other materials which the water meets
with in its descent, are swept away, and a vast quantity of mud, called
"moya," is thus formed and carried down into the lower regions. Mud
derived from this source descended, in 1797, from the sides of
Tunguragua in Quito, and filled valleys a thousand feet wide to the
depth of six hundred feet, damming up rivers and causing lakes. In these
currents and lakes of moya, thousands of small fish are sometimes
enveloped, which, according to Humboldt, have lived and multiplied in
subterranean cavities. So great a quantity of these fish were ejected
from the volcano of Imbaburu in 1691, that fevers, which prevailed at
the period, were attributed to the effluvia arising from the putrid
animal matter.

In Quito, many important revolutions in the physical features of the
country are said to have resulted, within the memory of man, from the
earthquakes by which it has been convulsed. M. Boussingault declares his
belief, that if a full register had been kept of all the convulsions
experienced here and in other populous districts of the Andes, it would
be found that the trembling of the earth had been incessant. The
frequency