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