34 ABOUT VOLCANOS AND EARTHQUAKES. 



ments of rock. The roofs of houses at the town or vil- 

 lage of Queretaro, upwards of 140 miles distant, were 

 covered with the ashes. The two rivers have again 

 appeared, issuing at some distance from among the 

 hornitos, but no longer as sources of wealth and fertility, 

 for they are scalding not, or at least were so when Baron 

 Humboldt visited them several years after the event. 

 The ground even then retained a violent heat, and the 

 nornitos were pouring forth columns of steam twenty 

 or thirty feet high, with a rumbling noise like that of 

 a steam-boiler. 



(44.) The Island of Sumbawa is one of that curious 

 line of islands which links on Australia to the south- 

 eastern corner of Asia. It forms, with one or two 

 smaller volcanic islands, a prolongation of Java, at that 

 time, in 1815, a British possession, and under the go- 

 vernment of Sir Stamford Raffles, to whom we owe the 

 account of the eruption, and who took a great deal 

 of pains to ascertain all the particulars. Java itself, I 

 should observe, is one rookery of volcanos, and so are 

 all the adjoining islands in that long crescent-shaped 

 line I refer to. 



(45.) On the Island of Sumbawa is the volcano ot 

 Tomboro, which broke out into eruption on the 5th of 

 April in that year; and I can hardly do better than 

 quote the account of it in Sir Stamford Raffles' own 

 words : 



(46.) "Almost every one/' says this writer, "is ac- 

 quainted with the intermitting convulsions of Etna and 

 Vesuvius as they appear in the descriptions of the poet, 



