but when she found that the earth
did not shake any more, she had thanked the great God, and had soon made
herself very happy living with Marzy. She had enough food, she said, and
had been waiting for a boat to fetch her, and now a boat had come and
she was quite ready to go away; only they must let her goat go with her:
they would both like so much to get back to the old farm.

"Here, at least, is one nice little inhabitant of Gallia," said Captain
Servadac, as he caressed the child and conducted her to the boat.

Half an hour later, both Nina and Marzy were safely quartered on board
the yacht. It is needless to say that they received the heartiest of
welcomes. The Russian sailors, ever superstitious, seemed almost to
regard the coming of the child as the appearance of an angel; and,
incredible as it may seem, more than one of them wondered whether she
had wings, and amongst themselves they commonly referred to her as "the
little Madonna."

Soon out of sight of Madalena, the _Dobryna_ for some hours held a
southeasterly course along the shore, which here was fifty leagues in
advance of the former coast-line of Italy, demonstrating that a new
continent must have been formed, substituted as it were for the old
peninsula, of which not a vestige could be identified. At a latitude
corresponding with the latitude of Rome, the sea took the form of a deep
gulf, extending back far beyond the site of the Eternal City; the
coast making a wide sweep round to the former position of Calabria, and
jutting far beyond the outline of "the boot," which Italy resembles.
But the beacon of Messina was not to be discerned; no trace, indeed,
survived of any portion of Sicily; the very peak of Etna, 11,000 feet as
it had reared itself above the level of the sea, had vanished utterly.

Another sixty leagues to the south, and the _Dobryna_ sighted the
entrance of the strait which had afforded her so providential a refuge
from the tempest, and had conducted her to the fragmentary relic of
Gibraltar. Hence to the Gulf of Cabes had been already explored, and as
it was universally allowed that it was unnecessary to renew the search
in that direction, the lieutenant started off in a transverse course,
towards a point hitherto uninvestigated. That point was reached on the
3rd of March, and thence the coast was continuously followed, as it led
through what had been Tunis, across the province of Constantine, away
to the oasis of Ziban; where, taking