R 36

WHAT IS IT?

For a long and weary hour we tramped over this great bed of bones. We
advanced regardless of everything, drawn on by ardent curiosity. What
other marvels did this great cavern contain--what other wondrous
treasures for the scientific man? My eyes were quite prepared for any
number of surprises, my imagination lived in expectation of something
new and wonderful.

The borders of the great Central Ocean had for some time disappeared
behind the hills that were scattered over the ground occupied by the
plain of bones. The imprudent and enthusiastic Professor, who did not
care whether he lost himself or not, hurried me forward. We advanced
silently, bathed in waves of electric fluid.

By reason of a phenomenon which I cannot explain, and thanks to its
extreme diffusion, now complete, the light illumined equally the sides
of every hill and rock. Its seat appeared to be nowhere, in no
determined force, and produced no shade whatever.

The appearance presented was that of a tropical country at midday in
summer--in the midst of the equatorial regions and under the vertical
rays of the sun.

All signs of vapor had disappeared. The rocks, the distant mountains,
some confused masses of far-off forests, assumed a weird and mysterious
aspect under this equal distribution of the luminous fluid!

We resembled, to a certain extent, the mysterious personage in one of
Hoffmann's fantastic tales--the man who lost his shadow.

After we had walked about a mile farther, we came to the edge of a vast
forest not, however, one of the vast mushroom forests we had discovered
near Port Gretchen.

It was the glorious and wild vegetation of the Tertiary period, in all
its superb magnificence. Huge palms, of a species now unknown, superb
palmacites--a genus of fossil palms from the coal formation--pines,
yews, cypress, and conifers or cone-bearing trees, the whole bound
together by an inextricable and complicated mass of creeping plants.

A beautiful carpet of mosses and ferns grew beneath the trees. Pleasant
brooks murmured beneath umbrageous boughs, little worthy of this name,
for no shade did they give. Upon their borders grew small treelike
shrubs, such as are seen in the hot countries on our own inhabited
globe.

The one thing wanting in these plants, these shrubs, these trees--was
color! Forever deprived of the vivifying warmth of the sun, they were
vapid and colorless. All shade was lost in one uniform tint, of