El Salvador’s Izalco in particular was celebrated as perhaps “the most remarkable volcano on earth.”13 It was renowned not only for the frequency and regularity of its eruptions, but also because it had risen from the ground in the same time as Manchester’s chimneys: from a crack in the middle of a cattle estate to a perfectly formed five-thousand-foot cone in a century. Geologists hypothesized that Izalco was born from “a deviation of the subterranean fire which animated the neighboring system of extinct volcanoes clustered around the great peak of Santa Ana,” less than three miles away.
