nd. With the majority of the inhabitants,
however, it fared otherwise. The loss of life in the city, and
throughout the district most convulsed, was enormous, 40,000 persons
altogether having perished.

Of Riobamba itself the ruin was complete. When Humboldt took a plan of
the place after the catastrophe, he could find nothing but heaps of
stones eight or ten feet high; although the city had contained
churches and convents, with many private houses several stories in
height. The town of Quero was likewise entirely overthrown.

At Tacunga the ruin was nearly as thorough, not a building having been
left standing save an arch in the great square, and part of a
neighboring house. The churches of St. Augustin, St. Domingo, and La
Merced were at the moment thronged with people hearing mass. Not one
escaped alive. All were buried, along with the objects of their
worship, under the ruins of their consecrated buildings. In several
parts of the town and its neighborhood there were opened larger
fissures in the ground, whence quantities of water poured forth. The
village of St. Philip, near Tacunga, containing a school in which
upwards of forty children were assembled at the time, disappeared
bodily in a chasm. A great many other villages with their inhabitants
were destroyed, by being either overthrown or engulfed.

Even at Quito, although so distant from the centre of the disturbance,
a great deal of damage was done to the churches and other public
buildings by the shock, several being wholly ruined. The private
houses and other buildings of moderate height, however, were spared.
The superstitious inhabitants of this fair city, having been greatly
alarmed by an unwonted display of luminous meteors, had devoted the
previous day to carrying in procession through their streets the
graven images and relics of their saints, in the vain hope of
appeasing divine wrath. They were doomed to learn by experience that
these idols were powerless to protect even the consecrated edifices
dedicated to their honor, and in which they were enshrined.

The Bay of Caracas was the scene of a dreadful earthquake in 1812. The
city of Caracas was totally destroyed, and ten thousand of its
inhabitants were buried beneath its ruins.

The shock was most severe in the northern part of the town, nearest
to the mountain of La Silla, which rises like a vast dome, with steep
cliffs in the direction of the sea. The churches of the Trinity and
Alta Gracia,