According to Dr. Lombard, mountain districts favor the development of diseases of the heart; and contagious diseases are not arrested by the atmosphere of lofty regions. This is true in Quito. But while nervous diseases are rare in the inhabited highlands of Europe, in Quito they are common. Sleep is said to be more tranquil and refreshing, and the circulation more regular at high altitudes; but our experience does not sustain this. Goître is quite common among the mountains. It is a sign of constitutional weakness, for the children of goîtred parents are usually deaf and dumb, and the succeeding generation idiots. Boussingault thinks it is owing to the lack of atmospheric air in the water; but why is it nearly confined to the women? In the southern provinces about Cuenca, cutaneous affections are quite frequent. In the highlands generally, scrofulous diseases are more common than in the plains. There are three hospitals for lepers; one at Cuenca with two hundred patients, one at Quito with one hundred and twelve patients, and one at Ambato. Near Riobamba is a community of dwarfs.
D'Orbigny made a post-mortem examination of some Indians from the highest regions, and found the lungs of extraordinary dimensions, the cells larger and more in number. Hence the unnatural proportion of the trunk, which is plainly out of harmony with the extremities. The expanded chest of the mountaineers is evidently the result of larger inspirations to secure the requisite amount of oxygen, which is much less in a given space at Quito than on the coast. This is an instance, observes Prichard, of long-continued habit, and the result of external agencies modifying the structure of the body, and with it the state of the most important functions of life. We tried the experiment of burning a candle one hour at Guayaquil, and another part of the same candle for the same period at Quito. Temperature at Guayaquil, 80°; at Quito, 62°. The loss at Guayaquil was 140 grains; at Quito, 114, or 26 grains less at the elevation of 9500 feet. Acoustics will also illustrate the thinness of the air. M. Godin found (1745) that a nine-pounder could not be heard at the distance of 121,537 feet; and that an eight-pounder at Paris, at the distance of 102,664 feet, was louder than a nine-pounder at Quito at the distance of 67,240 feet.
According to Dr. Archibald Smith, the power of muscular exertion in a native of the coast is greatly increased by living at the height of 10,000 feet. But it is also asserted by observing travelers that dogs and bulls lose their combativeness at 12,000 feet, and that hence there can never be a good bull-fight or dog-fight on the Sierras. This is literally true: the dogs seem to partake of the tameness of their masters. Cats do not flourish at all in high altitudes; and probably the lion, transplanted from the low jungle to the table-lands, would lose much of his ferocity. Still, cock-fights seem to prosper; and the battle of Pichincha was fought on an elevation of nearly 11,000 feet. Bolivar and the Spaniards, also, fought like tigers on the high plain of Junin.[36]
The sickness felt by some travelers at great elevations—violent headache and disposition to vomit—is called veta; and the difficulty of breathing from the rarity of the air is termed puna. Gerard complained of severe headache and depression of spirits at the height of 15,000 feet on the Himalayas; Dr. Barry, in ascending Mont Blanc (15,700 feet), speaks of great thirst, great dryness and constriction of skin, loss of appetite, difficult breathing, tendency to syncope, and utter indifference. Baron Müller, in his ascent of Orizava (17,800 feet), found great difficulty in breathing, and experienced the sensation of a red-hot iron searing his lungs, and agonizing pains in the chest, followed by fainting-fits and torrents of blood from his mouth; Humboldt, in scaling Chimborazo, suffered from nausea akin to sea-sickness, and a flow of blood from the nose and lips; while Herndon, on the slope of Puy-puy (15,700 feet), said he thought his heart would break from his breast with its violent agitation. Though ascending the Andes to the height of 16,000 feet, and running up the last few rods, we experienced nothing of this except a temporary difficulty in respiration. We were exhilarated rather than depressed. The experience of Darwin on the Portillo ridge (14,000 feet) was only "a slight tightness across the head and chest." "There was some imagination even in this (he adds); for, upon finding fossil shells on the highest ridge, I entirely forgot the puna in my delight." De Saussure says truly: "The strength is repaired as speedily as it has been exhausted. Merely a cessation of movement for three or four minutes, without even seating one's self, seems to restore the strength so perfectly that, on resuming progress, one feels able to climb at a single stretch to the very peak of the mountain."
[CHAPTER VI.]
Astronomic Virtues of Quito.— Flora and Fauna of the Valley of Quito.— Primeval Inhabitants of the Andes.— Quichua Indians.
Quito, with a position unparalleled for astronomical purposes, has no observatory. The largest telescope in the city is about five feet long, but the astute professor of natural philosophy in the Jesuit College who has charge of it had not the most distant idea that an eclipse of the sun would occur on the 29th of August, and an eclipse of the moon fifteen days later. In ancient days this "holy city" had within it the Pillar of the Sun, which cast no shadow at noon, and a temple was built for the god of light. The title of the sovereign Inca was the Child of the Sun; but there was very little knowledge of astronomy, for, being the national religion, it was beyond the reach of scientific speculation.
The atmosphere of Quito is of transparent clearness. Humboldt saw the poncho of a horseman with the naked eye at a horizontal distance of ninety thousand feet. The sky is of a dark indigo color; the azure is less blended with white because of the extreme dryness of the air. The stars stand out with uncommon brilliancy, and the dark openings between them the great German compared to "tubes through which we look into the remotest depths of space." It is true at Quito, as Humboldt noticed at Cumana, that the stars do not twinkle when they are more than fifteen degrees high; "the soft planetary light" of the stars overhead is not mere rhetoric.