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Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley
page 44 of 242 (18%)
Peak of Teneriffe, a volcano which is hardly burnt out yet, and may burn
up again any day, standing up out of the sea more than 12,000 feet high
still, and once it must have been double that height. Some think that it
is perhaps the true Mount Atlas, which the old Greeks named when first
they ventured out of the Straits of Gibraltar down the coast of Africa,
and saw the great peak far to the westward, with the clouds cutting off
its top; and said that it was a mighty giant, the brother of the Evening
Star, who held up the sky upon his shoulders, in the midst of the
Fortunate Islands, the gardens of the daughter of the Evening Star, full
of strange golden fruits; and that Perseus had turned him into stone,
when he passed him with the Gorgon's Head.

But you will see, too, that most of these red and black dots run in
crooked lines; and that many of the clusters run in lines likewise.

Look at one line: by far the largest on the earth. You will learn a good
deal of geography from it.

The red dots begin at a place called the Terribles, on the east side of
the Bay of Bengal. They run on, here and there, along the islands of
Sumatra and Java, and through the Spice Islands; and at New Guinea the
line of red dots forks. One branch runs south-east, through islands
whose names you never heard, to the Friendly Islands, and to New Zealand.
The other runs north, through the Philippines, through Japan, through
Kamschatka; and then there is a little break of sea, between Asia and
America: but beyond it, the red dots begin again in the Aleutian Islands,
and then turn down the whole west coast of America, down from Mount Elias
(in what was, till lately, Russian America) towards British Columbia.
Then, after a long gap, there are one or two in Lower California (and we
must not forget the terrible earthquake which has just shaken San
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