“But, destructive as are the eruptions of the volcano when it belches forth ashes, cinders, and lava, it is even more so when its terrific operations are followed by deluges of water and avalanches of mud, carrying along with them immense blocks of ice and rock to great distances, causing death and devastation all along their course. Such an eruption took place in 1877, and, so great was the velocity of the angry flood, that it swept the plain with the momentum of an express train, carrying before it bridges, buildings, and everything that stood in its path. The very day of the eruption the irresistible torrent reached the mouth of the Esmeralda River, nearly three hundred miles distant. The catastrophe had been announced the preceding evening by an enormous column of black ashes, which the roaring mountain projected more than three miles above the crater, and which an east wind carried far out over the Pacific. Vessels going from Guayaquil to Panamá were suddenly enveloped in a cloud of dust and transmitted to Europe and the United States the first news of the disaster. After this eruption of ash, there was a welling of molten lava over the rim of the crater which melted the ice and snow and transformed them at once into tremendous avalanches of mud. At the same time immense blocks of ice were transported across the plain of Latacunga to a distance of thirty miles, where they remained several months before they were entirely melted. The foregoing is only one of many similar eruptions that occurred during the last century.” “But why, it will be asked, do people live in a land in which they are constantly exposed to such sudden and awful disasters?” he continues—“where thousands of victims are sacrificed in a single moment? Why do people cling around the rich flanks of Kilauea and Mauna Loa and huddle around the treacherous slopes of vine-clad Etna and Vesuvius, or pitch their tents on quaking, incandescent Stromboli? Let philosophers reply.” But, in the neighborhood of Quito itself no more of these arid stretches are to be seen. “Notwithstanding the ever-menacing volcano towering above it, Quito,” he tells us, “was always to the Ecuadorian of the interior one of the world’s most favored cities. It was what Damascus and Bagdad in their halcyon days were to the Arabs, what Cordova and Granada were to the Moors. It was ‘_Quito bonito_’—charming Quito—the city above the clouds, ‘the navel of the world, the home of the _continua primavera_—perpetual spring—evergreen, magnificent Quito.’ It was like Heaven—_Como de Cielo_—where there is neither heat nor cold. It was the Paradise of delights. Had Columbus discovered the beautiful valley which it overlooks, he would, we are assured, have pronounced it the site of the Garden of Eden.”