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The inimitable magic of distance and high desert air veiled greasewood, sage and sand with the glamour of unreality. The mountains beyond, unspeakably desolate and forbidding at close range, and the little black buttes standing afar, off small spewings of age-old volcanos dead before man was born seemed fascinating, unknown islets anchored in a sea of enchantment.
After a few days' march the two reached Anjou and met a troop of Bagauders. Young, robust and daring, my father was an acceptable recruit. He joined the band, and long live the Bagaudy! Raiding from province to province, he came as far as Auvergne, which he never left. The country was favorable for his pursuit forests, mountains, rocks, caverns, torrents, extinct volcanos!
This mountain is not conical like Popocatepetl, but its shoulders are broader, and break into grand peaks, like some of the Dents of Switzerland, and it has no crater. Indeed, the two mountains, joined together like Siamese twins, look as though they had been set up, side by side, to illustrate the two contending theories of the formation of volcanos.
After the little gap of the Isthmus of Panama, it begins again in Quito, the very country which has just been shaken, and in which stand the huge volcanos Chimborazo, Pasto, Antisana, Cotopaxi, Pichincha, Tunguragua, smooth cones from 15,000 to 20,000 feet high, shining white with snow, till the heat inside melts it off, and leaves the cinders of which the peaks are made all black and ugly among the clouds, ready to burst in smoke and fire.
Volcanos are natural to the globe, as general operations; but we are not to consider nature as having a burning mountain for an end in her intention, or as a principal purpose in the general system of this world.
If I can make you understand those words, you will see why volcanos must be in general of the shape of Cotopaxi. Cone, crater, lava: those words make up the alphabet of volcano learning. The cone is the outside of a huge chimney; the crater is the mouth of it.
Let us take a view of the most elevated places of the earth; if the present theory is just, it is there that we should find volcanos. But is not this the case? There are volcanos in the Andes; and round the Alps we find many volcanos, which are in France upon the one side, and in Germany upon the other, as well as upon the Italian side, where Vesuvius still continues to exhibit violent eruptions.
Chiloe, about 340 miles southward of Concepcion, appears to have been shaken more strongly than the intermediate district of Valdivia, where the volcano of Villarica was noways affected, whilst in the Cordillera in front of Chiloe, two of the volcanos burst-forth at the same instant in violent action.
Unquestionably, if he had stayed on his job, as these expressive Americans put it, his sister would have been in New York, possibly on the Atlantic Ocean when San Francisco shook herself to ruin. "But not necessarily alive," said Lady Victoria callously, removing her cigar, her heavy eyes that looked like empty volcanos, staring down over the smoldering waste.
Volcanos burn, and cataracts roar between us. With caution then will I endeavour to tread the giddy circle. Since I must, however unprepared, be my own master, I will endeavour to be collected, sober, and determined. One expedient I have thought of, which I hope will be of service to me in the new scene upon which I am to enter.
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