Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/400

392 flames of fire, ashes, and embers; yea, and at the last stones of burning fire; and if they had not chanced to find a rock under which they had shadowed themselves, undoubtedly they had there been burned. Before the coming of Cortés, for ten years' space, it had left off expelling vapour or smoaksmoke [sic]; but in the year 1540 it began again to burn, and with the horrible noise thereof the people that dwelt four leagues from it were terrified."

We are told that Humboldt was the first who reached the crater brim in modern times; and the first really scientific examination of it was in 1856, by a Mexican engineer, General Caspar Sanchez Ochoa, who made the height, by barometer, to be 19,443 feet above sea level.

The entire depth, from the malacate to the plaza horizontal, or floor of the crater, is about three hundred metres, the floor itself being about two hundred metres in circumference, and the length of the acclivity some six hundred; the interior