wheat and ninety-nine pounds of potatoes require as much space of ground as will produce four thousand pounds of bananas.” They bear fruit but once and die, but the roots are perennial and every year bring forth new plants. Then, when the traveler has crossed the coast strip, he comes to the foothills and begins the steep, tortuous ascent. On either side of this highland but ever green series of plateaux, crossed by _nudos_ and ascending like steps to the one in which the capital lies, tower mountains, the crests of forty-two of which are more than ten thousand feet high. Twenty of them are higher than Pike’s Peak in Colorado; fourteen are higher than the Alpine giant, Mont Blanc. It was in this vast, magnificent “Avenue of Volcanoes” that the celebrated artist, Frederick E. Church, painted his wonderful picture, “The Heart of the Andes.” Here, he declared, is the grandest mountain scenery in the world. The most majestic of them all is snow-covered Chimborazo, near the center of the Western Cordillera, and fortunately almost constantly in view, for it is along its spurs that the road between Guayaquil and Quito ascends. One would not imagine its summit so very hard to reach, as it appears from the mountain pass at an elevation of fourteen thousand feet; yet many explorers, from Von Humboldt down, strove for the honor, only to fail until Edward Whymper, an Englishman, finally achieved it in 1879. For years, with its known altitude of 21,420 feet, it was famed as the highest point in America; now the mighty Aconcagua in Argentina, which is recorded at the Harvard Observatory at Arequipa as measuring 24,760 feet, has been awarded the palm. It is from shipboard on the Pacific, though, on a clear day, rather than from the plateau, that Chimborazo is to be seen in all the majesty of its complete proportions, particularly when the evening shadow’s mellowing tint creeps upward to the summit—a vision of gold, vermilion, purple, followed by the glory of the brief tropical sunset—in the few minutes before darkness covers the earth and “the haste of stars, trembling with excess of light, bursts suddenly into view over the peaks,” when the waters of the sea become so impregnated with phosphorescent flashes that each wave seems tipped with silver and the foam that follows in the vessel’s wake is like a stream of fire. Conspicuous among the crests of the eastern range are Tunguragua, with its perfect cone and great cataract tumbling down fifteen hundred feet from the snow line to the valley beneath; fierce, Plutonic Sangai, the most active volcano in the world; and the beautiful Altar, as it was called by the Spaniards, which is said to have been higher than Chimborazo a few years before the Conquest, but has since collapsed. Now its summit presents the appearance of a superb crown, pointed with eight jagged peaks; its snowy mantle is relieved by rents or fissures in the rock that seem to be colored dark blue in contrast with the white.