Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

XX AMBATO 227
were in the churches the buildings that suffered
most. On that day Dr. Taylor of Riobamba
and his son were my guests, and (along with my
lad) we were riding down the valley to eat peaches
at a neighbouring farm. Singularly enough, neither
we nor our horses felt the shock, although
it was
a very long one ; but all on a sudden we saw
people running out of their houses, and clouds of
dust rising up among the hills. A little way farther
on several tons of earth had been shaken down
across our path, and we passed the debris with
difficulty, and not without risk that more might fall
and crush us. Below the farm, the cliff bounding
the valley had slid down for a length of 200
yards, and the people
of the farm had been half
choked and blinded with the dust raised by the fall.
In the town of Ambato itself no damage was done
beyond the cracking of a few very old and of some
very new walls. On the following day, about 2 P.M.,
I was startled by hearing the family of my neigh-
bour (and landlord) run shrieking into the yard,
crying out "Temblor! temblor!" I ran out myself
just in time to see the walls of an unfinished house,
which an ambitious shopkeeper had been rearing
close by to the imprudent height of three stories,
crumble to the ground. The adobes had not got
" set," and the earthquake had cracked several of
them; hence the downfall of the whole. Fortunately,
nobody was injured by
the (all.
I have been entrusted by
the India Govern-
ment with the charge of obtaining seeds and young
plants of the different sorts of Cinchona (Peruvian
Bark) found in the Ouitonian Ancles for transporting
to our Eastern possessions, where it is proposed to