is now) a deep blue lake, with walls of rock around 800 feet in
height, reminding one traveller of the Lake of Albano. {44} But for
twelve months it had given warning, by frequent earthquake shocks,
that it had its part to play in the great subterranean battle
between rock and steam; and on the 27th of April 1812 the battle
began.

A negro boy--he is said to be still alive in St. Vincent--was
herding cattle on the mountain-side. A stone fell near him; and
then another. He fancied that other boys were pelting him from the
cliffs above, and began throwing stones in return. But the stones
fell thicker: and among them one, and then another, too large to
have been thrown by human hand. And the poor little fellow woke up
to the fact that not a boy, but the mountain, was throwing stones at
him; and that the column of black cloud which was rising from the
crater above was not harmless vapour, but dust, and ash, and stone.
He turned, and ran for his life, leaving the cattle to their fate,
while the steam mitrailleuse of the Titans--to which all man's
engines of destruction are but pop-guns--roared on for three days
and nights, covering the greater part of the island in ashes,
burying crops, breaking branches off the trees, and spreading ruin
from which several estates never recovered; and so the 30th of April
dawned in darkness which might be felt.

Meanwhile, on that same day, to change the scene of the campaign two
hundred and ten leagues, 'a distance,' as Humboldt says, 'equal to
that between Vesuvius and Paris,' 'the inhabitants, not only of
Caraccas, but of Calabozo, situate in the midst of the Llanos, over
a space of four thousand square leagues, were terrified by a
subterranean noise, which resembled frequent discharges of the
loudest cannon. It was accompanied by no shock: and, what is very
remarkable, was as loud on the coast as at eighty leagues' distance
inland; and at Caraccas, as well as at Calabozo, preparations were
made to put the place in defence against an enemy who seemed to be
advancing with heavy artillery.' They might as well have copied the
St. Vincent herd-boy, and thrown their stones, too, at the Titans;
for the noise was, there can be no doubt, nothing else than the
final explosion in St. Vincent far away. The same explosion was
heard in Venezuela, the same at Martinique and Guadaloupe: but
there, too, there were no earthquake shocks. The volcanoes of