farther
away, ran the Pterodactyl, with the winged hand, gliding or rather
sailing through the dense and compressed air like a huge bat.

Above all, near the leaden granitic sky, were immense birds, more
powerful than the cassowary and the ostrich, which spread their mighty
wings and fluttered against the huge stone vault of the inland sea.

I thought, such was the effect of my imagination, that I saw this whole
tribe of antediluvian creatures. I carried myself back to far ages, long
before man existed--when, in fact, the earth was in too imperfect a
state for him to live upon it.

My dream was of countless ages before the existence of man. The
mammifers first disappeared, then the mighty birds, then the reptiles of
the secondary period, presently the fish, the crustacea, the mollusks,
and finally the vertebrata. The zoophytes of the period of transition in
their turn sank into annihilation.

The whole panorama of the world's life before the historic period,
seemed to be born over again, and mine was the only human heart that
beat in this unpeopled world! There were no more seasons; there were no
more climates; the natural heat of the world increased unceasingly, and
neutralized that of the great radiant Sun.

Vegetation was exaggerated in an extraordinary manner. I passed like a
shadow in the midst of brushwood as lofty as the giant trees of
California, and trod underfoot the moist and humid soil, reeking with a
rank and varied vegetation.

I leaned against the huge column-like trunks of giant trees, to which
those of Canada were as ferns. Whole ages passed, hundreds upon hundreds
of years were concentrated into a single day.

Next, unrolled before me like a panorama, came the great and wondrous
series of terrestrial transformations. Plants disappeared; the granitic
rocks lost all trace of solidity; the liquid state was suddenly
substituted for that which had before existed. This was caused by
intense heat acting on the organic matter of the earth. The waters
flowed over the whole surface of the globe; they boiled; they were
volatilized, or turned into vapor; a kind of steam cloud wrapped the
whole earth, the globe itself becoming at last nothing but one huge
sphere of gas, indescribable in color, between white heat and red, as
big and as brilliant as the sun.

In the very centre of this prodigious mass, fourteen hundred thousand
times as large as our globe, I was whirled round in space, and brought
into clo