and were
prepared to sacrifice themselves if they could only destroy the
inventor and his secret. A few months only would then be the life of
this prodigious aeronef, of whose superiority in aerial locomotion
they had such convincing proofs! The idea took such hold of them that
they thought of nothing else but how to put it into execution. And
how? By seizing on some of the explosives on board and simply blowing
her up. But could they get at the magazines?

Fortunately for them, Frycollin had no suspicion of their scheme. At
the thought of the "Albatross" exploding in midair, he would not have
shrunk from betraying his master.

It was on the 23rd of July that the land reappeared in the southwest
near Cape Virgins at the entrance of the Straits of Magellan. Under
the fifty-second parallel at this time of year the night was eighteen
hours long and the temperature was six below freezing.

At first the "Albatross," instead of keeping on to the south,
followed the windings of the coast as if to enter the Pacific. After
passing Lomas Bay, leaving Mount Gregory to the north and the
Brecknocks to the west, they sighted Puerto Arena, a small Chilean
village, at the moment the churchbells were in full swing; and a few
hours later they were over the old settlement at Port Famine.

If the Patagonians, whose fires could be seen occasionally, were
really above the average in stature, the passengers in the aeronef
were unable to say, for to them they seemed to be dwarfs. But what a
magnificent landscape opened around during these short hours of the
southern day! Rugged mountains, peaks eternally capped with snow,
with thick forests rising on their flanks, inland seas, bays deep set
amid the peninsulas, and islands of the Archipelago. Clarence Island,
Dawson Island, and the Land of Desolation, straits and channels,
capes and promontories, all in inextricable confusion, and bound by
the ice in one solid mass from Cape Forward, the most southerly point
of the American continent, to Cape Horn the most southerly point of
the New World.

When she reached Fort Famine the "Albatross" resumed her course to
the south. Passing between Mount Tam on the Brunswick Peninsula and
Mount Graves, she steered for Mount Sarmiento, an enormous peak
wrapped in snow, which commands the Straits of Magellan, rising six
thousand four hundred feet from the sea. And now they were over the
land of the Fuegians, Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire. Six months