e that you made a good observation when you
took the altitude yesterday?"

"Certainly."

"So that your point--"

"Gave 83 deg. 20' of latitude and 43 deg. 5' of longitude."

"Exactly?"

"Exactly."

"There is, then, no doubt that we are on Tsalal Island?"

"None, Mr. Jeorling, if Tsalal Island lies where Arthur Pym places
it."

This was quite true, there could be no doubt on the point, and yet
of all that Arthur Pym described nothing existed, or rather, nothing
was any longer to be seen. Not a tree, not a shrub, not a plant was
visible in the landscape. There was no sign of the wooded hills
between which the village of Klock-Klock ought to lie, or of the
streams from which the crew of the fane had not ventured to drink.
There was no water anywhere; but everywhere absolute, awful drought.

Nevertheless, Hunt walked on rapidly, without showing any
hesitation. It seemed as though he was led by a natural instinct,
"a bee's flight," as we say in America. I know not what
presentiment induced us to follow him as the best of guides, a
Chingachgook, a Renard-Subtil. And why not? Was not he the
fellow-countryman of Fenlmore Coopet's heroes?

But, I must repeat that we had not before our eyes that fabulous
land which Arthur Pym described. The soil we were treading had been
ravaged, wrecked, torn by convulsion. It was black, a cindery black,
as though it had been vomited from the earth under the action of
Plutonian forces; it suggested that some appalling and irresistible
cataclysm had overturned the whole of its surface.

Not one of the animals mentioned in the narrative was to be seen,
and even the penguins which abound in the Antarctic regions had fled
from this uninhabitable land. Its stern silence and solitude made it
a hideous desert. No human being was to be seen either on the coast
or in the interior. Did any chance of finding William Guy and the
survivors of the fane exist in the midst of this scene of desolation?

I looked at Captain Len Guy. His pale face, dim eyes, and knit brow
told too plainly that hope was beginning to die within his breast.

And then the population of Tsalal Island, the almost naked men,
armed with clubs and lances, the tall, well-made, upstanding women,
endowed with grace and freedom of bearing not to be found in a
civilized society--those are the expressions of Arthur Pym--and
the crowd of children accompanying them, what had become of all
these? Where were the multitude of native