Chapter 37 - Page 2

laid his handupon my shoulder.

"We shall not sail until to-morrow," he said.

I made a movement intended to express resignation.

"I must neglect nothing," he said; "and since my fate has driven meon this part of the coast, I will not leave it until I have examinedit."

To understand what followed, it must be borne in mind that, throughcircumstances hereafter to be explained, we were not really where theProfessor supposed we were. In fact we were not upon the north shoreof the sea.

"Now let us start upon fresh discoveries," I said.

And leaving Hans to his work we started off together. The spacebetween the water and the foot of the cliffs was considerable. Ittook half an hour to bring us to the wall of rock. We trampled underour feet numberless shells of all the forms and sizes which existedin the earliest ages of the world. I also saw immense carapaces morethan fifteen feet in diameter. They had been the coverings of thosegigantic glyptodons or armadilloes of the pleiocene period, of whichthe modern tortoise is but a miniature representative. [1] The soilwas besides this scattered with stony fragments, boulders rounded bywater action, and ridged up in successive lines. I was therefore ledto the conclusion that at one time the sea must have covered theground on which we were treading. On the loose and scattered rocks,now out of the reach of the highest tides, the waves had leftmanifest traces of their power to wear their way in the hardest stone.

This might up to a certain point explain the existence of an oceanforty leagues beneath the surface of the globe. But in my opinionthis liquid mass would be lost by degrees farther and farther withinthe interior of the earth, and it certainly had its origin in thewaters of the ocean overhead, which had made their way hither throughsome fissure. Yet it must be believed that that fissure is nowclosed, and that all this cavern or immense reservoir was filled in avery short time. Perhaps even this water, subjected to the fierceaction of central heat, had partly been resolved into vapour. Thiswould explain the existence of those clouds suspended over our headsand the development of that electricity which raised such tempestswithin the bowels of the earth.

This theory of the phenomena we had witnessed seemed satisfactory tome; for however great and stupendous the phenomena of nature, fixedphysical laws will or may always explain them.

We were therefore walking upon sedimentary soil, the deposits of thewaters of former ages. The Professor was carefully examining everylittle fissure in the rocks. Wherever he saw a hole he always wantedto know the depth of it. To him this was important.

We had traversed the shores of the Liedenbrock sea for a mile when weobserved a sudden change in the appearance of the soil. It seemedupset, contorted, and convulsed by a violent upheaval of the lowerstrata. In many places