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
gateway 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 can not be described. The panorama from
this lofty summit is more pleasing, but equally sublime. Toward 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 parallel ridges
of the mountain chain, dropping one behind the other, are the gigantic
staircase by which the ice-crowned Chimborazo steps down to the sea. A
white sea of clouds covers the peaceful Pacific and the lower parts of
the coast. But the vapory ocean, curling into the ravines, beautifully
represents little coves and bays, leaving islands and promontories like
a true ocean on a broken shore. We seem raised above the earth, which
lies like an opened map below