Full text: Martinique flood of fire and burning rain

  
  
  
THE GUATEMALAN EARTHQUAKES 209 
canal of Nicarauga. Coseguina could have filled up ten times 
in one hour a canal prism which the contractors, with all their 
boasted labor-saving devices and the employment of tens of thous- 
ands of hands, would require-eight years to excavate. 
Another active volcano, with its last eruption as recent as 
1883, dominates the island in Lake Nicaragua which every ship 
will skirt on the passage from Greytown to Brito. . This is Mount 
Ometepe. On the same island is a second volcanic peak, that of 
Madera. In 1844, nine years after the explosion of Coseguina, 
occurred the great earthquake which destroyed the city of Rivas, 
near the Pacific shore, and wrought great damage even at Grey- 
town, a hundred and fifty miles away on the Atlantic side. The 
line surveyed for the Nicaragua canal between the lake and Brito 
runs only five miles from Rivas and has its Atlantic terminus at 
Greytown. 
PANAMA EARTHQUAKES 
The danger of such convulsions at Panama is far less. We 
are told by M. Bunau-Varilla, a distinguished French engineer, that 
in Panama there is within a distance of one hundred and eighty 
miles from the canal no volcano, even extinct. The Isthmus there, 
since its formation in the early quarternary period, before man 
appeared on the earth, has not been modified. It lies in an “ angle 
of stability,” so called by seismographers. Except for rare and not 
very violent seismic vibrations, originating at distant centres, the 
Isthmus of Panama has never been affected by volcanic disturb- 
ances. One earthquake of some violence, indeed, has occurred 
there during the historic period, that of 1621, when the greater 
part of Panama city was shaken down. Aside from this the most 
destructive earthquake known in the history of Panama was that 
of September 7, 1882. It lasted only a minute, but in that time 
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