nhabitants of the place were lulled into security. On the night between
the 28th and 29th of September, however, the subterranean noises
were renewed with greater loudness than before, and the ground shook
severely. The Indian servants living on the place started from their
beds in terror, and fled to the neighboring mountains. Thence gazing
upon their master's farm they beheld it, along with a tract of ground
measuring between three and four square miles, in the midst of which it
stood, rise up bodily, as if it had been inflated from beneath like a
bladder. At the edges this tract was uplifted only about 39 feet above
the original surface, but so great was its convexity that toward the
middle it attained a height of no less than 524 feet.

The Indians who beheld this strange phenomenon declared that they saw
flames issuing from several parts of this elevated tract, that the
entire surface became agitated like a stormy sea, that great clouds
of ashes, illuminated by volcanic fires glowing beneath them, rose at
several points, and that white-hot stones were thrown to an immense
height. Vast chasms were at the same time opened in the ground, and
into these the two small rivers above mentioned plunged. Their waters,
instead of extinguishing the subterranean conflagration, seemed only
to add to its intensity. Quantities of mud, enveloping balls of basalt,
were then thrown up, and the surface of the elevated ground became
studded with small cones, from which volumes of dense vapor, chiefly
steam, were emitted, some of the jets rising from 20 to 30 feet in
height.

These cones the Indians called ovens, and in many of them was long heard
a subterranean noise resembling that of water briskly boiling. Out of a
great chasm in the midst of those ovens there were thrown up six larger
elevations, the highest being 1,640 feet above the level of the plain,
4,315 above sea level, and now constituting the principal volcano of
Jorullo. The smallest of the six was 300 feet in height; the others of
intermediate elevation. The highest of these hills had on its summit
a regular volcanic crater, whence there have been thrown up great
quantities of dross and lava, containing fragments of older rocks. The
ashes were transported to immense distances, some of them having fallen
on the houses at Queretaro, more than forty-eight leagues from Jorullo.
The volcano continued in this energetic state of activity for about four
months; in the following