PICHINCHA. 245 



scaled the mountain, and affirmed that they found seven 

 craters ! 



Going north from Cotopaxi, we come to the dome- 

 shaped Antisana, towering to a height of 19,137 feet, its 

 summit heavily capped with eternal snows. Down its 

 deeply-furrowed sides run immense streams of lava, poured 

 from its crater long ages before the conquest ; we traced 

 one of these far down into the wikl forest upon the east- 

 ern slope of the Andes. The portion which is covered 

 with snow is beautifully rounded, so that in the sunset it 

 appears like a vast golden dome. Upon the flanks of 

 this volcano, 5,600 feet higher than the Hospitium of St. 

 Bernard, is situated the famous hacienda which bears the 

 name of the mountain. 



In the Western Cordillera, rising abruptly from the 

 outskirts of the city of Quito, stands the interesting vol- 

 cano Pichincha. Situated almost directly under the equa- 

 tor, its elevation of nearly three miles (15,827 feet), which, 

 in a temperate climate, would render it a snow-crowned 

 mountain, here scarcely raises its summit above the line 

 of perpetual snow. Its eruptions, the last of which oc- 

 curred in the year 1660, have always been attended with 

 much damage to the city of Quito, located as it is upon 

 its very base. It is a mountain not without an historical 

 interest; for on its elevated slopes was fought, in 1819, 

 the celebrated battle of Pichincha, by the republicans, 

 under Simon Bolivar, against the Spaniards, at an altitude 

 of 10,800 feet; probably the greatest height at which any 

 battle was ever fought. 



An intense longing to have a peep into the crater of 

 this volcano led us, while at Quito, to mature plans for a 

 trip to its summit. Ascending by a gentle grade the side 

 of the mountain, we soon left far below us tlie fine and 

 well-cultivated plateau of Quito ; its undulating plains, 

 spreading out more than forty miles in breadth, broken by 



