172 REACTION OF THE INTERIOR OF THE EARTH 



Riobamba, Feb. 4, 1794, many facts were collected by 

 me on the spot from the lips of survivors, and with 

 the most solicitous desire to elicit historic truth. Some 

 of these, as has been already stated, were analogous 

 to circumstances which took place in the great Cala- 

 brian earthquake of 1783 ; others, which were new, 

 were especially characterised by an explosive action from 

 below upwards. The earthquake itself was neither an- 

 nounced nor accompanied by any subterranean noise : 

 but a prodigious noise, still designated simply as " el gran 

 ruido," was first heard eighteen or twenty minutes later, 

 and only under the two towns of Quito and Ibarra, at a 

 distance from Tacunga, Hambato, and the chief theatre 

 of devastation. In the history of catastrophes suffered 

 by man, there is no other instance in which in the 

 course of a few minutes, and in a thinly peopled moun- 

 tainous country, so many thousand lives were lost by 

 the production and passage of a few earth-waves, accom- 

 panied by the opening of fissures. In reference to this 

 earthquake, of which the first accounts were given by 

 the celebrated Valencia botanist, Don Jose Cavanillas, 

 particular attention is further due to the following 

 phenomena : Fissures, which alternately opened and 

 closed, so that persons partially engulfed were saved by 

 extending their arms that they might not be swallowed 

 up ; portions of long trains of muleteers and laden mules 

 (recuas), disappearing in suddenly opening cross fissures, 

 whilst other portions, by a hasty retreat, escaped the dan- 

 ger ; vertical oscillations, by the non-simultaneous rising 

 and sinking of adjoining portions of ground, so that 

 persons standing in the choir of a church, sixteen feet 

 above the pavement of the street, found themselves 



