Page:The British Empire in the nineteenth century Volume VI.djvu/19

 Rh above, gleams in the sunshine with a grass-green hue, while waves that are crested with snowy foam are moving across the surface dead against the wind, and breaking, noiselessly to the distant ear, on the shore below. All sides of the vast abyss are one glorious fernery, broken only for about a mile on the south by a forest of small, leafless, black, dead trees killed by the "Little Eruption" of 1814. The new crater formed two* years previously has a smooth grassy bottom higher in level than the lake, with a triangular pond of transparent water fed by a tiny stream. The sides of this later vent are mostly black and charred, and the two craters are separated by a knife-edge of rock over 700 feet in height. The historic "Great Eruption" of 1812 was a most convincing proof of the part played by volcanic action in the sterner work of nature's forces. For the two years prior to March, 1812, a great internal pressure upon the earth's crust had been seeking some outlet, and causing an agitation of sea and land over an area half as large as Europe, from the Azores to the West Indies and the coast of Venezuela, and from the Cordillera chain of New Grenada to the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio. These earthquakings reached their height of violence in the terrible catastrophe of March 26th, 1812, the day on which, in that year, Holy Thursday fell, when the people of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, were assembled in the churches, and the troops were drawn up and the processions formed to honour the occasion, beneath a serene and blazing sky. Then, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, came the tragedy described in the pages of Humboldt. The troops, in one minute of earthquake, were crushed to death by the fall of their barracks; the worshippers were buried in the ruins of their churches; the houses fell in and fell out, smiting to death the home-stayers and people in the streets. The whole loss of life reached from 10,000 to 12,000, the former being Humboldt's estimate. A month or more had elapsed at mourning Caracas, when the survivors were startled, on April 3Oth, by a subterranean noise resembling frequent discharges of the largest cannon. No shock was felt, but the sound was heard over a space of 4000 square leagues, from Martinique and Guadeloupe to the Llanos or grassy plains of the Orinoco. Preparations were made to resist a foe supposed to be advancing with heavy cannon. The cause of the portentous noise was afterwards found to lie five hundred miles