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.