And then there is the still more superb Cotopaxi, 19,613 feet, without a rival in height or symmetry among the active volcanoes of the old world. Some faint idea of its grandeur may be conceived by those who have seen Vesuvius, for instance, when it is realized that it is more than fifteen thousand feet—nearly three miles—higher, and that, when in eruption, it vomits forth its fires, with ominous rumblings that can be heard for a hundred miles, from a cone which itself is higher than Vesuvius. Mr. Whymper, who also succeeded here in making the perilous ascent where Von Humboldt and others had failed, described the crater as an enormous amphitheater with a rugged crest surrounded by overhanging cliffs, some snow-clad, others encrusted with sulphur. “Cavernous recesses,” he says, “belched forth smoke; the sides of the cracks and chasms shone with ruddy light. At the bottom, probably twelve thousand feet below us, there was a ruddy circular spot about one-tenth the diameter of the crater; it was the pipe of the volcano, its channel of communication with the lower regions, and was filled with incandescent if not molten lava, glowing and burning, lighted by tongues of flame that issued from cracks in the surrounding slopes.” On the side of the mountain is a huge rock called the “Inca’s Head.” Tradition has it that this was the original summit, hurled down by an eruption on the very day that Pizarro caused Atahualpa to be strangled. The great eruption of 1859 was succeeded by an earthquake that wrought terrible destruction and loss of life, and by a tidal wave, which in its devastating course carried a United States warship a mile inland, over the roofs of the houses of a town on the coast of Peru and left it high and dry on a sandy plain. Just now the volcano is in a state of “solemn and thoughtful suspense”; only thin clouds of smoke escape from its crater.