400 
GUATEMALA. 
appearance conveys the impression of a greater, than its 
real mass. On the 20th of January, 1835, the disturb¬ 
ance began with very loud explosions, heard for a hundred 
leagues. Above the mountain rose an inky cloud which 
spread outwards precisety as Pliny describes the terrible 
cloud that rose above Vesuvius in 7.9, spreading like an 
Italian pine. From this column of heated vapor and 
sand darted lightning-flashes, produced either by the 
friction of the immense quantity of rough mineral parti¬ 
cles, or by the sudden projection of hot gases and 
minerals into the much cooler atmosphere. As the cloud 
spread, the light of the sun was obscured, everything 
looked sickly in the yellow light, and the falling sand 
irritated both eyes and lungs. For two days the explo¬ 
sions grew more frequent and louder, while the eruption 
of sand increased • and on the third day the terrible noises 
were loudest in an almost absolute darkness. The rain of 
sand continued until a deposit of several feet had formed 
for many leagues around the crater. At Leon, in Nicara¬ 
gua, more than a hundred miles away, the sand was 
several inches deep, and it fell in Vera Cruz, Jamaica, 
Santa Fe de Bogota, and over an area nearly two thou¬ 
sand miles in diameter. At Belize the noise of the ex¬ 
plosions was so loud that the commandant mustered his 
troops and manned the forts, thinking there was a naval 
action off the anchorage. For eight hundred miles these 
noises were heard, and the vibrations near the volcano 
must have been indeed terrible. We can credit the ac¬ 
counts of the terror of the wild things of Nature as well 
as of human beings. For thirty leagues around, the as¬ 
tounded people believed that the Last Judgment had 
come, and in the darkness, thick with the falling ashes, 
