130 The Andes and the Amazon. 



tude diminishes the impression of awe and wonder, for the 

 Andes on which it rests are heaved to such a vast altitude 

 above the sea, that the relative elevation of its summit be- 

 comes reduced by comparison with the surrounding moun- 

 tains. Its altitude is 21,420 feet, or forty-five times the 

 height of Straslurg Cathedral ; or, to state it otherwise, the 

 fall of one pound from the top of Chimborazo would raise 

 the temperature of water 30°. One fourth of this is per- 

 petually covered with snow, so that its ancient name, Chim- 

 purazu — the mountain of snow — is very appropriate.^ It 

 is a stirring thouglit that this mountain, now mantled with 

 snow, once gleamed with volcanic fires. There is a hot 

 spring on the north side, and an immense amount of debris 

 covers the slope below the snow-limit, consisting chiefly of 

 fine-grained, iron-stained trachyte and coarse porphyroid 

 gray trachyte ; very rarely a dark vitreous trachyte. Chim- 

 borazo is very likely not a solid mountain : tr'achytic volca- 

 noes are supposed to be full of cavities. Bouguer found it 

 made the plumb-line deviate 7^^ or 8'^. 



The valleys which furrow the flank of Chimborazo are 

 in keeping with its colossal size. Narrower, but deeper 

 than those of the Alps, the mind swoons and sinks in the 

 effort to comprehend their grim majesty. The mountain 

 appears to have been broken to pieces like so much thin 

 crust, and the strata thrown on their vertical edges, reveal- 

 ing deep, dark chasms, that seem to lead to the confines of 

 the lower world. The deepest valley in Europe, that of the 

 Ordesa in the Pyrenees, is 3200 feet deep ; but here are 

 rents in the side of Chimborazo in which Vesuvius could 

 be put away out of sight. As you look down into the fath- 

 omless fissure, you see a white fleck rising out of the gulf, 



* " White ^Mountain" is the natural and almost uniform name of the high- 

 est mountains in all countries ; thus Himalaya, ]\Iont Blanc, Hoemus, Sierra 

 Nevada, Ben Nevis, Snowdon, Lebanon, White Mountains of United States, 

 Chimborazo, and lUimani. 



