reader insists upon a name, he may call it Cayambe, and fancy he sees the ghost of La Condamine stepping off an arc of the Equator on its shoulders, and blowing his icy fingers as he parts the snow to find the line. But Cayambe perhaps does its share in carrying the girdle of the world. It has been useful enough in a scientific way, and need not take the artistic responsibility of resembling this pictured peak. Besides, compared to this, Cayambe is but a stunted hillock, being only some nineteen thousand feet high. The snow line of the equatorial Andes is at sixteen thousand feet, and Cayambe’s three thousand feet of snow would be but a narrow belt on this mountain’s breadth of golden fields of winter. Chimborazo then! — clarum et venerabile nomen — is it Chimborazo? Alas those revolutionary South American republics! — they have allowed El Chimborazo to be dethroned. Once he was chieftain of the long line from Tierra del Fuego to Arctic ice. Then fickle men revolted and set up two temporary bullies, a doubtful duumvirate, Sorato and Illimani. Finally, some uneasy radical rummaged out Aconcagua from modest retirement in the Chilian Andes, and pronounced his ermine to be broadest, unless his brother Tupungato should pretend to rival him. This mountain, dominant at the “Heart of the Andes,” is not then Cayambe or Chimborazo, or any other peak of the equatorial group. It is each and all of them, and more than any. It is the type of the great trachytic domes of the Andes, which stand in such solemn
