The next link in the chain, as the steamer runs southward, is St. Vincent; a single volcano peak, like St. Kitts, or the Basse Terre of Guadaloupe.  Very grand are the vast sheets, probably of lava covered with ash, which pour down from between two rounded mountains just above the town.  Rich with green canes, they contrast strongly with the brown ragged cliffs right and left of them, and still more with the awful depths beyond and above, where, underneath a canopy of bright white clouds, scowls a purple darkness of cliffs and glens, among which lies, unseen, the Souffriere.

In vain, both going and coming, by sunlight, and again by moonlight, when the cane-fields gleamed white below and the hills were pitch-black above, did we try to catch a sight of this crater-peak.  One fact alone we ascertained, that like all, as far as I have seen, of the West Indian volcanoes, it does not terminate in an ash-cone, but in ragged cliffs of blasted rock.  The explosion of April 27, 1812, must have been too violent, and too short, to allow of any accumulation round the crater.  And no wonder; for that single explosion relieved an interior pressure upon the crust of the earth, which had agitated sea and land from the Azores to the West Indian islands, the coasts of Venezuela, the Cordillera of New Grenada, and the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio.  For nearly two years the earthquakes had continued, when they culminated in one great tragedy, which should be read at length in the pages of Humboldt. {43b} On March 26, 1812, when the people of Caraccas were assembled in the churches, beneath a still and blazing sky, one minute of earthquake sufficed to bury, amid the ruins of churches and houses, nearly 10,000 souls.  The same earthquake wrought terrible destruction along the whole line of the northern Cordilleras, and was felt even at Santa Fe de Bogota, and Honda, 180 leagues from Caraccas.  But the end was not yet.  While the wretched survivors of Caraccas were dying of fever and starvation, and wandering inland to escape from ever-renewed earthquake shocks, among villages and farms, which, ruined like their own city, could give them no shelter, the almost forgotten volcano of St. Vincent was muttering in suppressed wrath.  It had thrown out no lava since 1718; if, at least, the eruption spoken of by Moreau de Jonnes took place in the Souffriere.  According to him, with a terrific earthquake, clouds of ashes were driven into the air with violent detonations from a mountain situated at the eastern end of the island.  When the eruption had ceased, it was found that the whole mountain had disappeared.  Now there is no eastern end to St. Vincent, nor any mountain on the east coast:  and the Souffriere is at the northern end.  It is impossible, meanwhile, that the wreck of such a mountain should not have left traces visible and notorious to this day.  May not the truth be, that the Souffriere had once a lofty