he
original river bank, had considerably altered its aspect. Frequent
landslips occurred, and in many places deep chasms rifted the ground;
great gaps furrowed the fields, and trees, half uprooted, overhung the
water, remarkable by the fantastic distortions of their gnarled trunks,
looking as though they had been chopped by a hatchet.

The sinuosities of the coast line, alternately gully and headland,
had the effect of making a devious progress for the travelers, and at
sunset, although they had accomplished more than twenty miles, they had
only just arrived at the foot of the Merdeyah Mountains, which, before
the cataclysm, had formed the extremity of the chain of the Little
Atlas. The ridge, however, had been violently ruptured, and now rose
perpendicularly from the water.

On the following morning Servadac and Ben Zoof traversed one of the
mountain gorges; and next, in order to make a more thorough acquaintance
with the limits and condition of the section of Algerian territory of
which they seemed to be left as the sole occupants, they dismounted, and
proceeded on foot to the summit of one of the highest peaks. From this
elevation they ascertained that from the base of the Merdeyah to the
Mediterranean, a distance of about eighteen miles, a new coast line had
come into existence; no land was visible in any direction; no isthmus
existed to form a connecting link with the territory of Tenes, which had
entirely disappeared. The result was that Captain Servadac was driven
to the irresistible conclusion that the tract of land which he had been
surveying was not, as he had at first imagined, a peninsula; it was
actually an island.

Strictly speaking, this island was quadrilateral, but the sides were so
irregular that it was much more nearly a triangle, the comparison of the
sides exhibiting these proportions: The section of the right bank of the
Shelif, seventy-two miles; the southern boundary from the Shelif to the
chain of the Little Atlas, twenty-one miles; from the Little Atlas to
the Mediterranean, eighteen miles; and sixty miles of the shore of the
Mediterranean itself, making in all an entire circumference of about 171
miles.

"What does it all mean?" exclaimed the captain, every hour growing more
and more bewildered.

"The will of Providence, and we must submit," replied Ben Zoof, calm and
undisturbed. With this reflection, the two men silently descended the
mountain and remounted their horses. Before evening