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Updated: June 23, 2025
There he heard of rich gold countries in the east, and decided to seek them. With an army of 350 Spanish cavalry and infantry, as well as 4000 Indians, he set out from Quito and marched over the Andes past the foot of Cotopaxi to the lowlands of the Napo River. It was a reckless enterprise. The Indians were frozen to death in crowds on the great heights.
Far above them in the still air rose the snowy crests of Cotopaxi and Chimborazo, while only a narrow strip of green and fertile land lay between the mountains and the sea.
These are tossed into the air with tremendous violence, consequently, to a great height. The stones thus ejected are sometimes of immense size. A rock, whose weight is estimated at two hundred tons, was thrown from the summit of Cotopaxi to the distance of more than ten miles. Large stones have been tossed up by Vesuvius to the estimated height of three thousand six hundred feet.
Now let us go ahead and get aboard the Cotopaxi." It was well on toward noon of that day before all the arrangements made were completed, and the several ships proceeded towards their respective destinations.
To the first class belong Cotopaxi, the peak of Teneriffe, and the peak of Orizava in Mexico. In the second may be placed Cargueirazo and Pichincha, in the province of Quito; the volcano of Puracey, near Popayan; and perhaps also Hecla, in Iceland.
The globe, it may be said, is agitated with the greater force, in proportion as the surface has a smaller number of funnels communicating with the caverns of the interior. At Naples and at Messina, at the foot of Cotopaxi and of Tunguragua, earthquakes are dreaded only when vapours and flames do not issue from the craters.
Not a whisper of such names as Chimborazo and Cotopaxi had reached Europe. A great Inca had recently died and bequeathed his power to his two sons, Huascar and Atahualpa. Just as always in the Old World, such a partition produced friction and disputes, and at length civil war broke out.
A block weighing 200 tons is said to have been thrown nine miles by Cotopaxi; masses of rock weighing as much as twenty tons to have been ejected by Mount Ararat in 1840; and stones to have been hurled to a distance of thirty-six miles in other cases. The solid matter thrown out by volcanoes consists of lapilli, scoriae, dust and bombs.
Strange it seems, that volcanic fires should glow at such a height in the midst of snow and ice. But in this particular Cotopaxi does not stand alone.
In these the Piton preserves its conic figure to the very summit: the whole of their declivity is inclined the same number of degrees, and uniformly covered with a layer of pumice-stone very minutely divided; when we reach the top of these volcanoes, nothing obstructs the view of the bottom of the crater. The peaks of Teneriffe and Cotopaxi, on the contrary, are of very different construction.
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