Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children

And then, my dear child, I fell into a more serious mood.  I said to myself, “If that stream had been a little, only a little stronger, or if the rock above it had been only a little weaker, it would have been no laughing matter then; the village might have been shaken to the ground; the rocks hurled into the torrent; jets of steam and of hot water, mixed, it may be, with deadly gases, have roared out of the riven ground; that might have happened here, in short, which has happened and happens still in a hundred places in the world, whenever the rocks are too weak to stand the pressure of the steam below, and the solid earth bursts as an engine boiler bursts when the steam within it is too strong.”  And when those thoughts came into my mind, I was in no humour to jest any more about “young earthquakes,” or “Madam How’s boilers;” but rather to say with the wise man of old, “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed.”

Most strange, most terrible also, are the tricks which this underground steam plays.  It will make the ground, which seems to us so hard and firm, roll and rock in waves, till people are sea-sick, as on board a ship; and that rocking motion (which is the most common) will often, when it is but slight, set the bells ringing in the steeples, or make the furniture, and things on shelves, jump about quaintly enough.  It will make trees bend to and fro, as if a wind was blowing through them; open doors suddenly, and shut them again with a slam; make the timbers of the floors and roofs creak, as they do in a ship at sea; or give men such frights as one of the dock-keepers at Liverpool got in the earthquake in 1863, when his watchbox rocked so, that he thought some one was going to pitch him over into the dock.  But these are only little hints and warnings of what it can do.  When it is strong enough, it will rock down houses and churches into heaps of ruins, or, if it leaves them standing, crack them from top to bottom, so that they must be pulled down and rebuilt.

You saw those pictures of the ruins of Arica, about which our talk began; and from them you can guess well enough for yourself what a town looks like which has been ruined by an earthquake.  Of the misery and the horror which follow such a ruin I will not talk to you, nor darken your young spirit with sad thoughts which grown people must face, and ought to face.  But the strangeness of some of the tricks which the earthquake shocks play is hardly to be explained, even by scientific men.  Sometimes, it would seem, the force runs round, making the solid ground eddy, as water eddies in a brook.  For it will make straight rows of trees crooked; it will twist whole walls round—or rather the ground on which the walls stand—without throwing them down; it will shift the stones of a pillar one on the other sideways, as if a giant had been trying to spin it like a teetotum, and so screwed it half in pieces.  There is a story told by a wise man, who saw the place himself, of the whole furniture of one house being hurled away by an earthquake, and buried under the ruins of another house; and of things carried hundreds of yards off, so that the neighbours went to law to settle who was the true owner of them.  Sometimes, again, the shock seems to come neither horizontally in waves, nor circularly in eddies, but vertically, that is, straight up from below; and then things—and people, alas! sometimes—are thrown up off the earth high into the air, just as things spring up off the table if you strike it smartly enough underneath.  By that same law (for there is a law for every sort of motion) it is that the earthquake shock sometimes hurls great rocks off a cliff into the valley below.  The shock runs through the mountain till it comes to the cliff at the end of it; and then the face of the cliff, if it be at all loose, flies off into the air.  You may see the very same thing happen, if you will put marbles or billiard-balls in a row touching each other, and strike the one nearest you smartly in the line of the row.  All the balls stand still, except the last one, and that flies off.  The shock, like the earthquake shock, has run through them all; but only the end one, which had nothing beyond it but soft air, has been moved; and when you grow old, and learn mathematics, you will know the law of motion according to which that happens, and learn to apply what the billiard-balls have taught you, to explain the wonders of an earthquake.  For in this case, as in so many more, you must watch Madam How at work on little and common things, to find out how she works in great and rare ones.  That is why Solomon says that “a fool’s eyes are in the ends of the earth,” because he is always looking out for strange things which he has not seen, and which he could not understand if he saw; instead of looking at the petty commonplace matters which are about his feet all day long, and getting from them sound knowledge, and the art of getting more sound knowledge still.

Another terrible destruction which the earthquake brings, when it is close to the seaside, is the wash of a great sea wave, such as swept in last year upon the island of St. Thomas, in the West Indies; such as swept in upon the coast of Peru this year.  The sea moans, and sinks back, leaving the shore dry; and then comes in from the offing a mighty wall of water, as high as, or higher than, many a tall house; sweeps far inland, washing away quays and houses, and carrying great ships in with it; and then sweeps back again, leaving the ships high and dry, as ships were left in Peru this year.

Now, how is that wave made?  Let us think.  Perhaps in many ways.  But two of them I will tell you as simply as I can, because they seem the most likely, and probably the most common.

Suppose, as the earthquake shock ran on, making the earth under the sea heave and fall in long earth-waves, the sea-bottom sank down.  Then the water on it would sink down too, and leave the shore dry; till the sea-bottom rose again, and hurled the water up again against the land.  This is one way of explaining it, and it may be true.  For certain it is, that earthquakes do move the bottom of the sea; and certain, too, that they move the water of the sea also, and with tremendous force.  For ships at sea during an earthquake feel such a blow from it (though it does them no harm) that the sailors often rush upon deck fancying that they have struck upon a rock; and the force which could give a ship, floating in water, such a blow as that, would be strong enough to hurl thousands of tons of water up the beach, and on to the land.

But there is another way of accounting for this great sea wave, which I fancy comes true sometimes.

Suppose you put an empty india-rubber ball into water, and then blow into it through a pipe.  Of course, you know, as the ball filled, the upper side of it would rise out of the water.  Now, suppose there were a party of little ants moving about upon that ball, and fancying it a great island, or perhaps the whole world—what would they think of the ball’s filling and growing bigger?

If they could see the sides of the basin or tub in which the ball was, and were sure that they did not move, then they would soon judge by them that they themselves were moving, and that the ball was rising out of the water.  But if the ants were so short-sighted that they could not see the sides of the basin, they would be apt to make a mistake, because they would then be like men on an island out of sight of any other land.  Then it would be impossible further to tell whether they were moving up, or whether the water was moving down; whether their ball was rising out of the water, or the water was sinking away from the ball.  They would probably say, “The water is sinking and leaving the ball dry.”

Do you understand that?  Then think what would happen if you pricked a hole in the ball.  The air inside would come hissing out, and the ball would sink again into the water.  But the ants would probably fancy the very opposite.  Their little heads would be full of the notion that the ball was solid and could not move, just as our heads are full of the notion that the earth is solid and cannot move; and they would say, “Ah! here is the water rising again.”  Just so, I believe, when the sea seems to ebb away during the earthquake, the land is really being raised out of the sea, hundreds of miles of coast, perhaps, or a whole island, at once, by the force of the steam and gas imprisoned under the ground.  That steam stretches and strains the solid rocks below, till they can bear no more, and snap, and crack, with frightful roar and clang; then out of holes and chasms in the ground rush steam, gases—often foul and poisonous ones—hot water, mud, flame, strange stones—all signs that the great boiler down below has burst at last.

Then the strain is eased.  The earth sinks together again, as the ball did when it was pricked; and sinks lower, perhaps, than it was before: and back rushes the sea, which the earth had thrust away while it rose, and sweeps in, destroying all before it.

Of course, there is a great deal more to be said about all this: but I have no time to tell you now.  You will read it, I hope, for yourselves when you grow up, in the writings of far wiser men than I.  Or perhaps you may feel for yourselves in foreign lands the actual shock of a great earthquake, or see its work fresh done around you.  And if ever that happens, and you be preserved during the danger, you will learn for yourself, I trust, more about earthquakes than I can teach you, if you will only bear in mind the simple general rules for understanding the “how” of them which I have given you here.

But you do not seem satisfied yet?  What is it that you want to know?

Oh!  There was an earthquake here in England the other night, while you were asleep; and that seems to you too near to be pleasant.  Will there ever be earthquakes in England which will throw houses down, and bury people in the ruins?

My dear child, I think you may set your heart at rest upon that point.  As far as the history of England goes back, and that is more than a thousand years, there is no account of any earthquake which has done any serious damage, or killed, I believe, a single human being.  The little earthquakes which are sometimes felt in England run generally up one line of country, from Devonshire through Wales, and up the Severn valley into Cheshire and Lancashire, and the south-west of Scotland; and they are felt more smartly there, I believe, because the rocks are harder there than here, and more tossed about by earthquakes which happened ages and ages ago, long before man lived on the earth.  I will show you the work of these earthquakes some day, in the tilting and twisting of the layers of rock, and in the cracks (faults, as they are called) which run through them in different directions.  I showed you some once, if you recollect, in the chalk cliff at Ramsgate—two set of cracks, sloping opposite ways, which I told you were made by two separate sets of earthquakes, long, long ago, perhaps while the chalk was still at the bottom of a deep sea.  But even in the rocky parts of England the earthquake-force seems to have all but died out.  Perhaps the crust of the earth has become too thick and solid there to be much shaken by the gases and steam below.  In this eastern part of England, meanwhile, there is but little chance that an earthquake will ever do much harm, because the ground here, for thousands of feet down, is not hard and rocky, but soft—sands, clays, chalk, and sands again; clays, soft limestones, and clays again—which all act as buffers to deaden the earthquake shocks, and deaden too the earthquake noise.

And how?

Put your ear to one end of a soft bolster, and let some one hit the other end.  You will hear hardly any noise, and will not feel the blow at all.  Put your ear to one end of a hard piece of wood, and let some one hit the other.  You will hear a smart tap; and perhaps feel a smart tap, too.  When you are older, and learn the laws of sound, and of motion among the particles of bodies, you will know why.  Meanwhile you may comfort yourself with the thought that Madam How has (doubtless by command of Lady Why) prepared a safe soft bed for this good people of Britain—not that they may lie and sleep on it, but work and till, plant and build and manufacture, and thrive in peace and comfort, we will trust and pray, for many a hundred years to come.  All that the steam inside the earth is likely to do to us, is to raise parts of this island (as Hartford Bridge Flats were raised, ages ago, out of the old icy sea) so slowly, probably, that no man can tell whether they are rising or not.  Or again, the steam-power may be even now dying out under our island, and letting parts of it sink slowly into the sea, as some wise friends of mine think that the fens in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire are sinking now.  I have shown you where that kind of work has gone on in Norfolk; how the brow of Sandringham Hill was once a sea-cliff, and Dersingham Bog at its foot a shallow sea; and therefore that the land has risen there.  How, again, at Hunstanton Station there is a beach of sea-shells twenty feet above high-water mark, showing that the land has risen there likewise.  And how, farther north again, at Brancaster, there are forests of oak, and fir, and alder, with their roots still in the soil, far below high-water mark, and only uncovered at low tide; which is a plain sign that there the land has sunk.  You surely recollect the sunken forest at Brancaster, and the beautiful shells we picked up in its gullies, and the millions of live Pholases boring into the clay and peat which once was firm dry land, fed over by giant oxen, and giant stags likewise, and perhaps by the mammoth himself, the great woolly elephant whose teeth the fishermen dredge up in the sea outside?  You recollect that?  Then remember that as that Norfolk shore has changed, so slowly but surely is the whole world changing around us.  Hartford Bridge Flat here, for instance, how has it changed!  Ages ago it was the gravelly bottom of a sea.  Then the steam-power underground raised it up slowly, through long ages, till it became dry land.  And ages hence, perhaps, it will have become a sea-bottom once more.  Washed slowly by the rain, or sunk by the dying out of the steam-power underground, it will go down again to the place from whence it came.  Seas will roll where we stand now, and new lands will rise where seas now roll.  For all things on this earth, from the tiniest flower to the tallest mountain, change and change all day long.  Every atom of matter moves perpetually; and nothing “continues in one stay.”  The solid-seeming earth on which you stand is but a heaving bubble, bursting ever and anon in this place and in that.  Only above all, and through all, and with all, is One who does not move nor change, but is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.  And on Him, my child, and not on this bubble of an earth, do you and I, and all mankind, depend.

But I have not yet told you why the Peruvians ought to have expected an earthquake.  True.  I will tell you another time.

CHAPTER III—VOLCANOS

You want to know why the Spaniards in Peru and Ecuador should have expected an earthquake.

Because they had had so many already.  The shaking of the ground in their country had gone on perpetually, till they had almost ceased to care about it, always hoping that no very heavy shock would come; and being, now and then, terribly mistaken.

For instance, in the province of Quito, in the year 1797, from thirty to forty thousand people were killed at once by an earthquake.  One would have thought that warning enough: but the warning was not taken: and now, this very year, thousands more have been killed in the very same country, in the very same way.

They might have expected as much.  For their towns are built, most of them, close to volcanos—some of the highest and most terrible in the world.  And wherever there are volcanos there will be earthquakes.  You may have earthquakes without volcanos, now and then; but volcanos without earthquakes, seldom or never.

How does that come to pass?  Does a volcano make earthquakes?  No; we may rather say that earthquakes are trying to make volcanos.  For volcanos are the holes which the steam underground has burst open that it may escape into the air above.  They are the chimneys of the great blast-furnaces underground, in which Madam How pounds and melts up the old rocks, to make them into new ones, and spread them out over the land above.

And are there many volcanos in the world?  You have heard of Vesuvius, of course, in Italy; and Etna, in Sicily; and Hecla, in Iceland.  And you have heard, too, of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, and of Pele’s Hair—the yellow threads of lava, like fine spun glass, which are blown from off its pools of fire, and which the Sandwich Islanders believed to be the hair of a goddess who lived in the crater;—and you have read, too, I hope, in Miss Yonge’s Book of Golden Deeds, the noble story of the Christian chieftainess who, in order to persuade her subjects to become Christians also, went down into the crater and defied the goddess of the volcano, and came back unhurt and triumphant.

But if you look at the map, you will see that there are many, many more.  Get Keith Johnston’s Physical Atlas from the schoolroom—of course it is there (for a schoolroom without a physical atlas is like a needle without an eye)—and look at the map which is called “Phenomena of Volcanic Action.”

You will see in it many red dots, which mark the volcanos which are still burning: and black dots, which mark those which have been burning at some time or other, not very long ago, scattered about the world.  Sometimes they are single, like the red dot at Otaheite, or at Easter Island in the Pacific.  Sometimes the are in groups, or clusters, like the cluster at the Sandwich Islands, or in the Friendly Islands, or in New Zealand.  And if we look in the Atlantic, we shall see four clusters: one in poor half-destroyed Iceland, in the far north, one in the Azores, one in the Canaries, and one in the Cape de Verds.  And there is one dot in those Canaries which we must not overlook, for it is no other than the famous Peak of Teneriffe, a volcano which is hardly burnt out yet, and may burn up again any day, standing up out of the sea more than 12,000 feet high still, and once it must have been double that height.  Some think that it is perhaps the true Mount Atlas, which the old Greeks named when first they ventured out of the Straits of Gibraltar down the coast of Africa, and saw the great peak far to the westward, with the clouds cutting off its top; and said that it was a mighty giant, the brother of the Evening Star, who held up the sky upon his shoulders, in the midst of the Fortunate Islands, the gardens of the daughter of the Evening Star, full of strange golden fruits; and that Perseus had turned him into stone, when he passed him with the Gorgon’s Head.

But you will see, too, that most of these red and black dots run in crooked lines; and that many of the clusters run in lines likewise.

Look at one line: by far the largest on the earth.  You will learn a good deal of geography from it.

The red dots begin at a place called the Terribles, on the east side of the Bay of Bengal.  They run on, here and there, along the islands of Sumatra and Java, and through the Spice Islands; and at New Guinea the line of red dots forks.  One branch runs south-east, through islands whose names you never heard, to the Friendly Islands, and to New Zealand.  The other runs north, through the Philippines, through Japan, through Kamschatka; and then there is a little break of sea, between Asia and America: but beyond it, the red dots begin again in the Aleutian Islands, and then turn down the whole west coast of America, down from Mount Elias (in what was, till lately, Russian America) towards British Columbia.  Then, after a long gap, there are one or two in Lower California (and we must not forget the terrible earthquake which has just shaken San Francisco, between those two last places); and when we come down to Mexico we find the red dots again plentiful, and only too plentiful; for they mark the great volcanic line of Mexico, of which you will read, I hope, some day, in Humboldt’s works.  But the line does not stop there.  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.  South of them again, there is a long gap, and then another line of red dots—Arequiba, Chipicani, Gualatieri, Atacama,—as high as, or higher than those in Quito; and this, remember, is the other country which has just been shaken.  On the sea-shore below those volcanos stood the hapless city of Arica, whose ruins we saw in the picture.  Then comes another gap; and then a line of more volcanos in Chili, at the foot of which happened that fearful earthquake of 1835 (besides many more) of which you will read some day in that noble book The Voyage of the Beagle; and so the line of dots runs down to the southernmost point of America.

What a line we have traced!  Long enough to go round the world if it were straight.  A line of holes out of which steam, and heat, and cinders, and melted stones are rushing up, perpetually, in one place and another.  Now the holes in this line which are near each other have certainly something to do with each other.  For instance, when the earth shook the other day round the volcanos of Quito, it shook also round the volcanos of Peru, though they were 600 miles away.  And there are many stories of earthquakes being felt, or awful underground thunder heard, while volcanos were breaking out hundreds of miles away.  I will give you a very curious instance of that.

If you look at the West Indies on the map, you will see a line of red dots runs through the Windward Islands: there are two volcanos in them, one in Guadaloupe, and one in St. Vincent (I will tell you a curious story, presently, about that last), and little volcanos (if they have ever been real volcanos at all), which now only send out mud, in Trinidad.  There the red dots stop: but then begins along the north coast of South America a line of mountain country called Cumana, and Caraccas, which has often been horribly shaken by earthquakes.  Now once, when the volcano in St. Vincent began to pour out a vast stream of melted lava, a noise like thunder was heard underground, over thousands of square miles beyond those mountains, in the plains of Calabozo, and on the banks of the Apure, more than 600 miles away from the volcano,—a plain sign that there was something underground which joined them together, perhaps a long crack in the earth.  Look for yourselves at the places, and you will see that (as Humboldt says) it is as strange as if an eruption of Mount Vesuvius was heard in the north of France.

So it seems as if these lines of volcanos stood along cracks in the rind of the earth, through which the melted stuff inside was for ever trying to force its way; and that, as the crack got stopped up in one place by the melted stuff cooling and hardening again into stone, it was burst in another place, and a fresh volcano made, or an old one re-opened.

Now we can understand why earthquakes should be most common round volcanos; and we can understand, too, why they would be worst before a volcano breaks out, because then the steam is trying to escape; and we can understand, too, why people who live near volcanos are glad to see them blazing and spouting, because then they have hope that the steam has found its way out, and will not make earthquakes any more for a while.  But still that is merely foolish speculation on chance.  Volcanos can never be trusted.  No one knows when one will break out, or what it will do; and those who live close to them—as the city of Naples is close to Mount Vesuvius—must not be astonished if they are blown up or swallowed up, as that great and beautiful city of Naples may be without a warning, any day.

For what happened to that same Mount Vesuvius nearly 1800 years ago, in the old Roman times?  For ages and ages it had been lying quiet, like any other hill.  Beautiful cities were built at its foot, filled with people who were as handsome, and as comfortable, and (I am afraid) as wicked, as people ever were on earth.  Fair gardens, vineyards, olive-yards, covered the mountain slopes.  It was held to be one of the Paradises of the world.  As for the mountain’s being a burning mountain, who ever thought of that?  To be sure, on the top of it was a great round crater, or cup, a mile or more across, and a few hundred yards deep.  But that was all overgrown with bushes and wild vines, full of boars and deer.  What sign of fire was there in that?  To be sure, also, there was an ugly place below by the sea-shore, called the Phlegræn fields, where smoke and brimstone came out of the ground, and a lake called Avernus over which poisonous gases hung, and which (old stories told) was one of the mouths of the Nether Pit.  But what of that?  It had never harmed any one, and how could it harm them?

So they all lived on, merrily and happily enough, till, in the year A.D. 79 (that was eight years, you know, after the Emperor Titus destroyed Jerusalem), there was stationed in the Bay of Naples a Roman admiral, called Pliny, who was also a very studious and learned man, and author of a famous old book on natural history.  He was staying on shore with his sister; and as he sat in his study she called him out to see a strange cloud which had been hanging for some time over the top of Mount Vesuvius.  It was in shape just like a pine-tree; not, of course, like one of our branching Scotch firs here, but like an Italian stone pine, with a long straight stem and a flat parasol-shaped top.  Sometimes it was blackish, sometimes spotted; and the good Admiral Pliny, who was always curious about natural science, ordered his cutter and went away across the bay to see what it could be.  Earthquake shocks had been very common for the last few days; but I do not suppose that Pliny had any notion that the earthquakes and the cloud had aught to do with each other.  However, he soon found out that they had, and to his cost.  When he got near the opposite shore some of the sailors met him and entreated him to turn back.  Cinders and pumice-stones were falling down from the sky, and flames breaking out of the mountain above.  But Pliny would go on: he said that if people were in danger, it was his duty to help them; and that he must see this strange cloud, and note down the different shapes into which it changed.  But the hot ashes fell faster and faster; the sea ebbed out suddenly, and left them nearly dry, and Pliny turned away to a place called Stabiæ, to the house of his friend Pomponianus, who was just going to escape in a boat.  Brave Pliny told him not to be afraid, ordered his bath like a true Roman gentleman, and then went into dinner with a cheerful face.  Flames came down from the mountain, nearer and nearer as the night drew on; but Pliny persuaded his friend that they were only fires in some villages from which the peasants had fled, and then went to bed and slept soundly.  However, in the middle of the night they found the courtyard being fast filled with cinders, and, if they had not woke up the Admiral in time, he would never have been able to get out of the house.  The earthquake shocks grew stronger and fiercer, till the house was ready to fall; and Pliny and his friend, and the sailors and the slaves, all fled into the open fields, amid a shower of stones and cinders, tying pillows over their heads to prevent their being beaten down.  The day had come by this time, but not the dawn—for it was still pitch dark as night.  They went down to their boats upon the shore; but the sea raged so horribly that there was no getting on board of them.  Then Pliny grew tired, and made his men spread a sail for him, and lay down on it; but there came down upon them a rush of flames, and a horrible smell of sulphur, and all ran for their lives.  Some of the slaves tried to help the Admiral upon his legs; but he sank down again overpowered with the brimstone fumes, and so was left behind.  When they came back again, there he lay dead, but with his clothes in order and his face as quiet as if he had been only sleeping.  And that was the end of a brave and learned man—a martyr to duty and to the love of science.

But what was going on in the meantime?  Under clouds of ashes, cinders, mud, lava, three of those happy cities were buried at once—Herculaneum, Pompeii, Stabiæ.  They were buried just as the people had fled from them, leaving the furniture and the earthenware, often even jewels and gold, behind, and here and there among them a human being who had not had time to escape from the dreadful deluge of dust.  The ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii have been dug into since; and the paintings, especially in Pompeii, are found upon the walls still fresh, preserved from the air by the ashes which have covered them in.  When you are older you perhaps will go to Naples, and see in its famous museum the curiosities which have been dug out of the ruined cities; and you will walk, I suppose, along the streets of Pompeii and see the wheel-tracks in the pavement, along which carts and chariots rumbled 2000 years ago.  Meanwhile, if you go nearer home, to the Crystal Palace and to the Pompeian Court, as it is called, you will see an exact model of one of these old buried houses, copied even to the very paintings on the wells, and judge for yourself, as far as a little boy can judge, what sort of life these thoughtless, luckless people lived 2000 years ago.

And what had become of Vesuvius, the treacherous mountain?  Half or more than half of the side of the old crater had been blown away, and what was left, which is now called the Monte Somma, stands in a half circle round the new cone and new crater which is burning at this very day.  True, after that eruption which killed Pliny, Vesuvius fell asleep again, and did not awake for 134 years, and then again for 269 years but it has been growing more and more restless as the ages have passed on, and now hardly a year passes without its sending out smoke and stones from its crater, and streams of lava from its sides.

And now, I suppose, you will want to know what a volcano is like, and what a cone, and a crater, and lava are?

What a volcano is like, it is easy enough to show you; for they are the most simply and beautifully shaped of all mountains, and they are alike all over the world, whether they be large or small.  Almost every volcano in the world, I believe, is, or has been once, of the shape which you see in the drawing opposite; even those volcanos in the Sandwich Islands, of which you have often heard, which are now great lakes of boiling fire upon flat downs, without any cone to them at all.  They, I believe, are volcanos which have fallen in ages ago: just as in Java a whole burning mountain fell in on the night of the 11th of August, in the year 1772.  Then, after a short and terrible earthquake, a bright cloud suddenly covered the whole mountain.  The people who dwelt around it tried to escape; but before the poor souls could get away the earth sunk beneath their feet, and the whole mountain fell in and was swallowed up with a noise as if great cannon were being fired.  Forty villages and nearly 3000 people were destroyed, and where the mountain had been was only a plain of red-hot stones.  In the same way, in the year 1698, the top of a mountain in Quito fell in in a single night, leaving only two immense peaks of rock behind, and pouring out great floods of mud mixed with dead fish; for there are underground lakes among those volcanos which swarm with little fish which never see the light.

But most volcanos as I say, are, or have been, the shape of the one which you see here.  This is Cotopaxi, in Quito, more than 19,000 feet in height.  All those sloping sides are made of cinders and ashes, braced together, I suppose, by bars of solid lava-stone inside, which prevent the whole from crumbling down.  The upper part, you see, is white with snow, as far down as a line which is 15,000 feet above the sea; for the mountain is in the tropics, close to the equator, and the snow will not lie in that hot climate any lower down.  But now and then the snow melts off and rushes down the mountain side in floods of water and of mud, and the cindery cone of Cotopaxi stands out black and dreadful against the clear blue sky, and then the people of that country know what is coming.  The mountain is growing so hot inside that it melts off its snowy covering; and soon it will burst forth with smoke and steam, and red-hot stones and earthquakes, which will shake the ground, and roars that will be heard, it may be, hundreds of miles away.

And now for the words cone, crater, lava.  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.  The lava is the ore which is being melted in the furnace below, that it may flow out over the surface of the old land, and make new land instead.

And where is the furnace itself?  Who can tell that?  Under the roots of the mountains, under the depths of the sea; down “the path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s eye hath not seen: the lion’s whelp hath not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it.  There He putteth forth His hand upon the rock; He overturneth the mountain by the roots; He cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and His eye seeth every precious thing”—while we, like little ants, run up and down outside the earth, scratching, like ants, a few feet down, and calling that a deep ravine; or peeping a few feet down into the crater of a volcano, unable to guess what precious things may lie below—below even the fire which blazes and roars up through the thin crust of the earth.  For of the inside of this earth we know nothing whatsoever: we only know that it is, on an average, several times as heavy as solid rock; but how that can be, we know not.