210 TRAVELS AMONGST THE GREAT ANDES, chap. xi. 



a thousand feet below the top of Griiagua-Pichincha^ there was 

 an extensive prospect to the south and east. We saw the summits 

 of Illiniza and Corazon rising immediately over that of Atacatzo ; ^ 

 and Cotopaxi and Antisana (each nearly forty miles away) by 

 moonlight.^ In the night I heard, at irregular intervals, roars 

 (occurring apparently at no great distance) exactly corresponding 

 to the noise made by the escapes of steam from the crater of 

 Cotopaxi. The minimum temperature at night was 29° Faht. 



On the next morning (March 23) all four of us followed Jean- 

 Antoine's track, and upon striking the western ridge of Guagua I 

 found there was a very precipitous fall on the other (or northern) 

 side, where the crater, presumably, was located. We crossed this 

 ridge, and after descending about four hundred feet saw that we 

 were in the valley that I had looked down upon from the ensillada. 

 While the upper part of it was rocky, precipitous, and bare, the 

 slopes below were covered with a good deal of vegetation ; amongst 

 which there was neither smoke, steam, fissures, nor anything that 

 one would expect to see at the bottom of the crater of a volcano 

 which is said to have been recently in eruption. This however, no 

 doubt, is a crater of Pichincha.^ Its depth, reckoning from the 

 highest point of the mountain, is probably not less than two 

 thousand feet ; its breadth is fully as much, and the length of the 

 part we saw was at least a mile. It had none of the symmetry 

 of the crater of Cotopaxi. The western extremity was clouded 

 during the whole of our stay on the summit. 



1 The summits of the four mountains Illiniza, Corazon, Atacatzo, and Pichineha 

 are nearly in a line ; that is to say, a line drawn from the former to the latter passes 

 almost exactly through the summits of the two others. From our second camp on 

 Pichineha I found that the top of Corazon was 8°15' more west than Atacatzo, and 

 Illiniza was 3°45' more west than Corazon. 



2 The large snow or glacier plateau on the north-east of Antisana appeared an 

 important feature of that mountain, when seen from Pichineha. 



3 In a paper published at Chalons, in 1858, by the Society of Agriculture, 

 Commerce, Arts and Sciences of the Department of the Marne, entitled Ascencion 

 du Pichineha^ M. Jules Remy refers to this valley when speaking of " the crater" ; 

 and he states that it leads to another one, farther to the west, from which it is 



