The royal personage required a comfortable passage between them. More than a thousand miles of steep, rugged mountains separate Quito and Cusco. The king was pleased with his new digs but now faced a second problem. The palace was bigger and more luxurious than the first. His new capital was near the Equator, in what is today Quito, Ecuador. With a word he could command thousands of his subjects to build a second capital. Fortunately for Huayna Capac, he was king. Running the empire obliged him to spend a lot of time in the chilly capital city. Unfortunately, Cusco was the center of the Inca Empire, and he was the empire’s supreme ruler. Give Mauna Kea a fair start by moving it to the Himalayas, and it would be by far the highest peak on Earth.Huayna Capac had a problem: He didn’t like his hometown, Cusco, in the bracing heights of southern Peru. The problem, of course, is that the Hawaiian mountain’s “base camp” sleeps with the fishes at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Everest only rises about 13,000 feet above its base, less than half of Mauna Kea’s 33,000-foot rise. Hawaiians are quick to point out that Mauna Kea, the volcano that forms the peak of the state’s big island, is also taller than Everest-if you measure from its base. So, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, “what I told you was true-from a certain point of view.” If we take the equatorial bulge into account-in other words, if we measure what peak is farthest from the center of the Earth-Chimborazo sticks more than 7,000 feet farther into space than any of the Himalayas do, since they’re located thousands of miles north of the Equator. Chimborazo tops out at 20,702 feet, almost two miles lower than Everest. This bulge isn’t huge-a deviation of about one part in 300 from a perfect sphere-but it’s enough to mess with cartography. The resulting shape is often called an “oblate ellipsoid”: slightly flatter at the poles and bulgier at the equator than you’d expect. Imagine hula-hooping for a few hours after a big Thanksgiving dinner and you’ll get the idea. The combined effects of gravity and rotational centrifugal force have pushed the Earth’s mass outward around its middle. Well, it’s round- ish, but it’s not a sphere. So how is the 30-somethingth highest mountain in the Andes simultaneously the highest point on Earth? The central problem here is that Pythagoras, Columbus, and your elementary school teachers were all wrong: Earth isn’t really round. In fact, there are almost 40 more impressive mountains in South America, many of which (like Aconcagua, the continent’s highest peak) are located farther south, near the Chile-Argentina border.

Chimborazo is Ecuador’s highest point, but in terms of elevation, it’s far from the highest peak in the Andes. Mount Chimborazo is an Andean stratovolcano in central Ecuador, looming so impressively over the country that, on a clear day, you can see it all the way from the large port city of Guayaquil, 90 miles away.

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