Part 7 (1/2)
All of these would be visible from a single stand-point--the summit of Cotopaxi. The lofty peaks shoot up with so much method as almost to provoke the theory that the Incas, in the zenith of their power, planted them as signal monuments along the royal road to Cuzco. The eastern series is called the _Cordillera real_, because along its flank are the remnants of the splendid highway which once connected Quito and the Peruvian capital.[67] It can also boast of such tremendous volcanoes as Cotopaxi and Sangai. The Western Cordillera contains but one active volcano; but then it can point to peerless Chimborazo and the deep crater of Pichincha. These twenty volcanic mountains rise within a s.p.a.ce only two hundred miles long and thirty miles wide. It makes one tremble to think of the awful crevice over which they are placed.[68]
[Footnote 67: We traveled over a portion of this ancient road in going from Riobamba to Cajabamba. It is well paved with cut blocks of dark porphyry. It is not graded, but partakes of the irregularity of the country. Designed, not for carriages, but for troops and llamas, there are steps when the ascent is steep.]
[Footnote 68: Grand as the Andes are, how insignificant in a general view! How slightly they cause our globe to differ from a perfect sphere!
Cotopaxi const.i.tutes only 1/1100 of the earth's radius; and on a globe six feet in diameter, Chimborazo would be represented by a grain of sand less than 1/20 of an inch in thickness.]
CHAPTER VIII.
The Volcanoes of Ecuador.--Western Cordillera.--Chimborazo.--Iliniza.--Corazon.--Pichincha.--Descent into its Crater.
Coming up from Peru through the cinchona forests of Loja, and over the barren hills of a.s.suay, the traveler reaches Riobamba, seated on the threshold of magnificence--like Damascus, an oasis in a sandy plain, but, unlike the Queen of the East, surrounded with a splendid retinue of snowy peaks that look like icebergs floating in a sea of clouds.
On our left is the most sublime spectacle in the New World. It is a majestic pile of snow, its clear outline on the deep blue sky describing the profile of a lion in repose. At noon the vertical sun, and the profusion of light reflected from the glittering surface, will not allow a shadow to be cast on any part, so that you can easily fancy the figure is cut out of a mountain of spotless marble. This is Chimborazo--yet not the whole of it--you see but a third of the great giant. His feet are as eternally green as his head is everlastingly white; but they are far away beneath the bananas and cocoa-palms of the Pacific coast.
Rousseau was disappointed when he first saw the sea; and the first glimpse of Niagara often fails to meet one's expectations. But Chimborazo is sure of a wors.h.i.+per the moment its overwhelming grandeur breaks upon the traveler. You feel that you are in the presence-chamber of the monarch of the Andes. There is sublimity in his kingly look, of which the ocean might be proud.
”All that expands the spirit, yet appals, Gathers around this summit, as if to show How earth may pierce to heaven, yet leave vain man below.”
Well do we remember our disappointment as we stood before that wonder of the world--St. Peter's. We mounted the pyramid of steps and looked up, but were not overcome by the magnificence. We read in our guide-book that the edifice covers eight acres, and to the tip-top of the cross is almost five hundred feet; that it took three hundred and fifty years and twelve successive artists to finish it, and an expenditure of $50,000,000, and now costs $30,000 per annum to keep it in repair; still we did not appreciate its greatness. We pushed aside the curtain and walked in--walked a day's journey across the transept and up and down the everlasting nave, and yet continued heterodox. We tried hard to believe it was very vast and sublime, and knew we ought to feel its grandeur, but somehow we did not. Then we sat down by the Holy of Holies, and there we were startled into a better judgment by the astounding fact that the Cathedral of St. Paul--the largest edifice in Great Britain--could stand upright, spire, dome, body, and all, inside of St. Peter's! that the letters of the inscription which run around the _base_ of the dome, though apparently but an inch, are in reality six feet high! Then, for the first time, the scales fell from our eyes; the giant building began to grow; higher and higher still it rose, longer and deeper it expanded, yet in perfect proportions; the colossal structure, now a living temple, put on its beautiful garments and the robe of majesty. And that dome! the longer we looked at it the vaster it grew, till finally it seemed to be a temple not made with hands; the s.p.a.cious canopy became the firmament; the mosaic figures of cherubim and seraphim were endowed with life; and as we fixed our eyes on the zenith where the Almighty is represented in glory, we thought we had the vision of Stephen. Long we gazed upward into this heaven of man's creation, and gazed again till we were lost in wonder.
But the traveler needs no such steps to lift him up to the grand conception of the divine Architect as he beholds the great white dome of Chimborazo. It looks lofty from the very first. Now and then an expanse of thin, sky-like vapor would cut the mountain in twain, and the dome, islanded in the deep blue of the upper regions, seemed to belong more to heaven than to earth. We knew that Chimborazo was more than twice the alt.i.tude of Etna. We could almost see the great Humboldt struggling up the mountain's side till he looked like a black speck moving over the mighty white, but giving up in despair four thousand feet below the summit. We see the intrepid Bolivar mounting still higher; but the hero of Spanish-American independence returns a defeated man. Last of all comes the philosophic Boussingault, and attains the prodigious elevation of nineteen thousand six hundred feet--the highest point reached by man without the aid of a balloon; but the dome remains unsullied by his foot. Yet none of these facts increase our admiration. The mountain has a tongue which speaks louder than all mathematical calculations.
There must be something singularly sublime about Chimborazo, for the spectator at Riobamba is already nine thousand feet high, and the mountain is not so elevated above him as Mont Blanc above the vale of Chamouni, when, in reality, that culminating point of Europe would not reach up even to the snow-limit of Chimborazo by two thousand feet.[69]
It is only while sailing on the Pacific that one sees Chimborazo in its complete proportions. Its very magnitude diminishes the impression of awe and wonder, for the Andes on which it rests are heaved to such a vast alt.i.tude above the sea, that the relative elevation of its summit becomes reduced by comparison with the surrounding mountains. Its alt.i.tude is 21,420 feet, or forty-five times the height of Strasburg Cathedral; or, to state it otherwise, the fall of one pound from the top of Chimborazo would raise the temperature of water 30. One fourth of this is perpetually covered with snow, so that its ancient name, Chimpurazu--the mountain of snow--is very appropriate.[70] It is a stirring thought that this mountain, now mantled with snow, once gleamed with volcanic fires. There is a hot spring on the north side, and an immense amount of debris covers the slope below the snow-limit, consisting chiefly of fine-grained, iron-stained trachyte and coa.r.s.e porphyroid gray trachyte; very rarely a dark vitreous trachyte.
Chimborazo is very likely not a solid mountain: trachytic volcanoes are supposed to be full of cavities. Bouguer found it made the plumb-line deviate 7” or 8”.
[Footnote 69: But Chimborazo is steeper than the Alp-king; and steepness is a quality more quickly appreciated than mere ma.s.siveness. ”Mont Blanc (says a writer in _Frazer's Magazine_) is scarcely admired, because he is built with a certain regard to stability; but the apparently reckless architecture of the Matterhorn brings the traveler fairly on his knees, with a respect akin to that felt for the leaning tower of Pisa, or the soaring pinnacles of Antwerp.”]
[Footnote 70: ”White Mountain” is the natural and almost uniform name of the highest mountains in all countries: thus Himalaya, Mont Blanc, Hocmus, Sierra Nevada, Ben Nevis, Snowdon, Lebanon, White Mountains of United States, Chimborazo, and Illimani.]
The valleys which furrow the flank of Chimborazo are in keeping with its colossal size. Narrower, but deeper than those of the Alps, the mind swoons and sinks in the effort to comprehend their grim majesty. The mountain appears to have been broken to pieces like so much thin crust, and the strata thrown on their vertical edges, revealing deep, dark chasms, that seem to lead to the confines of the lower world. The deepest valley in Europe, that of the Ordesa in the Pyrenees, is 3200 feet deep; but here are rents in the side of Chimborazo in which Vesuvius could be put away out of sight. As you look down into the fathomless fissure, you see a white fleck rising out of the gulf, and expanding as it mounts, till the wings of the condor, fifteen feet in spread, glitter in the sun as the proud bird fearlessly wheels over the dizzy chasm, and then, ascending above your head, sails over the dome of Chimborazo.[71] Could the condor speak, what a glowing description could he give of the landscape beneath him when his horizon is a thousand miles in diameter. If
”Twelve fair counties saw the blaze from Malvern's lonely height,”
what must be the panorama from a height fifteen times higher!
[Footnote 71: Humboldt's statement that the condor flies higher than Chimborazo has been questioned; but we have seen numbers hovering at least a thousand feet above the summit of Pichincha. Baron Muller, in his ascent of Orizaba, saw two falcons flying at the height of full 18,000 feet; Dr. Hooker found crows and ravens on the Himalayas at 16,500 feet; and flocks of wild geese are said to fly over the peak of Kintschinghow, 22,756 feet.]
Chimborazo was long supposed to be the tallest mountain on the globe, but its supremacy has been supplanted by Mount Everest in Asia, and Aconcagua in Chile.[72] In mountain gloom and glory, however, it still stands unrivaled. The Alps have the avalanche, ”the thunderbolt of snow,” and the glaciers, those icy Niagaras so beautiful and grand. Here they are wanting.[73] The monarch of the Andes sits motionless in calm serenity and unbroken silence. The silence is absolute and actually oppressive. The road from Guayaquil to Quito crosses Chimborazo at the elevation of fourteen thousand feet. Save the rush of the trade wind in the afternoon, as it sweeps over the Andes, not a sound is audible; not the hum of an insect, nor the chirp of a bird, nor the roar of the puma, nor the music of running waters. Mid-ocean is never so silent. You can almost hear the globe turning on its axis. There was a time when the monarch deigned to speak, and spoke with a voice of thunder, for the lava on its sides is an evidence of volcanic activity. But ever since the morning stars sang together over man's creation, Chimbo has sat in sullen silence, satisfied to look ”from his throne of clouds o'er half the world.” There is something very suggestive in this silence of Chimborazo. It was once full of noise and fury; it is now a _completed_ mountain, and thunders no more. How silent was Jesus, a completed character! The reason we are so noisy is that we are so full of wants; we are _unfinished_ characters. Had we perfect fullness of all things, the beat.i.tude of being without a want, we should lapse into the eternal silence of G.o.d.
[Footnote 72: Mount Everest is 29,000 feet, and Aconcagua 23,200.
Schlagintweit enumerates thirteen Himalayan summits over 25,000 feet, and forty-six above 20,000. We have little confidence in the estimates of the Bolivian mountains. Chimborazo has nearly the same lat.i.tude and alt.i.tude as the loftiest peak in Africa, Kilima Njaro.]
[Footnote 73: Humboldt ascribes the absence of glaciers in the Andes to the extreme steepness of the sides, and the excessive dryness of the air. Dr. Loomis, above quoted, mentions indications of glacial action--moraines, and polished and striated rocks--on the crest of the Cordillera, between Peru and Bolivia, lat. 21 S.]
Chimborazo is a leader of a long train of ambitious crags and peaks; but as he who comes after the king must not expect to be noticed, we will only take a glimpse of these lesser lights as we pa.s.s up the Western Cordillera, and then down the Eastern.
The first after leaving the monarch is Caraguairazo. The Indians call it ”the wife of Chimborazo.” They are separated only by a very narrow valley. One hundred and seventy years ago the top of this mountain fell in, and torrents of mud flowed out containing mult.i.tudes of fishes. It is now over seventeen thousand feet high, and is one of the most Alpine of the Quitonian volcanoes, having sharp pinnacles instead of the smooth trachytic domes--usually double domes--so characteristic of the Andean summits. And now we pa.s.s in rapid succession numerous picturesque mountains, some of them extinct volcanoes, as Iliniza, presenting two pyramidal peaks, the highest seventeen thousand feet above the sea, and Corazon, so named from its heart-shaped summit, till we reach Pichincha, whose smoking crater is only five miles distant in a straight line from the city of Quito, or eleven by the traveled route.
The crown of this mountain presents three groups of rocky peaks. The most westerly one is called Rucu-Pichincha, and alone manifests activity. To the northeast of Rucu is Guagua-Pichincha, a ruined flue of the same fiery furnace; and between the two is Cundur-guachana.[74]