Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/398

398 should come out on the belt of ashes; and so I told them. My peon also was of my opinion; and, as we combined had the food, drink, instruments, and pistols, I did not care whether the others came on or not. In Mexico, I had procured a double-handful of the famous coca leaves,—the stay and stimulant of the Indians of the Peruvian Andes,—and to these may be attributed, possibly, the fact that I made the ascent without fatigue. Whatever the reason, I went on, calmly chewing my cud of coca leaves; up, up, surmounting one snowy barrier after another, for four hours or more, until my faithful servant turned and said, "Señor, aqui esta el crater!"—"Here is the crater!"

Reaching the place where he stood, I suddenly came upon a black and yawning gulf, which even the dense mist could not conceal. Here, for the first time, there darted through my temples a severe pain, which remained for hours, even till I had descended to the rancho. Overcome by conflicting emotions, and needing no longer any further stimulus, I sank upon the crater's brim, breathless and panting from excitement. Then I rose exultingly, and discharged the six chambers of my revolver into the air, creating such a concussion in the crater that great stones rattled down its perpendicular sides, and the reverberation nearly deafened us. From "crag to crag" leaped the volumes of sound, like peals of thunder, and finally died away in receding murmurs, as though retreating farther and farther into the entrails of old Tlaloc, the god of storms, whose brow I now stood upon, at a height of nearly eighteen thousand feet above the sea.

The lip of the crater is a narrow rim of sand, lying above the black abyss and at the edge of the sea of snow, like the coral ledge composing an atoll of the southern seas. Its highest point is at the west, its lowest at the east, and the crater has somewhat the shape of an ellipse, four or five thousand feet in its longer diameter and over one thousand feet deep. The snow stopped abruptly at this wreath of sand, rising to a height of from six to eight feet, and curling over it, but prevented from advancing farther by the heat from the crater. "Thus far and no farther!"