Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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We Were
Stopped By A Small Circular Wall Of Porphyritic Lava, With A Base
Of Pitchstone, Which Concealed From Us
The view of the crater.* (*
Called La Caldera, or the caldron of the peak, a denomination which
recalls to mind
The Oules of the Pyrenees.) The west wind blew with
such violence that we could scarcely stand. It was eight in the
morning, and we suffered severely from the cold, though the
thermometer kept a little above freezing point. For a long time we
had been accustomed to a very high temperature, and the dry wind
increased the feeling of cold, because it carried off every moment
the small atmosphere of warm and humid air, which was formed around
us from the effect of cutaneous perspiration.
The brink of the crater of the peak bears no resemblance to those
of most of the other volcanoes which I have visited: for instance,
the craters of Vesuvius, Jorullo, and Pichincha. In these the Piton
preserves its conic figure to the very summit: the whole of their
declivity is inclined the same number of degrees, and uniformly
covered with a layer of pumice-stone very minutely divided; when we
reach the top of these volcanoes, nothing obstructs the view of the
bottom of the crater. The peaks of Teneriffe and Cotopaxi, on the
contrary, are of very different construction. At their summit a
circular wall surrounds the crater; which wall, at a distance, has
the appearance of a small cylinder placed on a truncated cone.
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