On the morning of July the 15th, I rose by break of day to examine the mountain top, on which we had effected our lodgment in the dusk of the previous evening. The prevailing colour of everything about, was light yellow; the soil, something like a mixture of powdered clay and sand, plentifully strewed with blocks of trachyte. These exhibited generally some appearance of stratification; and the ground about them was thinly, or rather distantly, dotted with alternate bushes of codeso and retama; both of them very stunted, and oftener dead than alive.

So far, there was nothing very different in the physiognomy of the place, to what any ordinary hill top,—even the top of a very petty hill, of rounded outline and sober unimposing aspect, as well as quiet Neptunian formation,—might present. Yet not more than ten paces towards the north, there commenced the edge of a tremendous precipice, in its several ledges more than 1500 feet deep, running along all that side of the mountain, and forming in fact part of the internal wall of the great crater. The sudden discovery of this characteristic feature of a volcano, and in such close proximity to our tent, was calculated to make one tread the ground with more reverence.