had so many times admired in books.

The three alighted in the station of Battipaglia in order to take the
train for Paestum. It was a rather long wait, and the sailor invited
them to go into the restaurant, a little wooden shanty impregnated with
the double odor of resin and wine.

This shack reminded both Ferragut and the young woman of the houses
improvised on the South American deserts; and again they began to speak
of their oceanic voyage. She finally consented to satisfy the captain's
curiosity.

"My husband was a professor, a scholar like the doctor.... We were a
year in Patagonia, making scientific explorations."

She had made the dangerous journey through an ocean of desert plains
that had spread themselves out before them as the expedition advanced;
she had slept in ranch houses whose roofs shed bloodthirsty insects;
she had traveled on horseback through whirlwinds of sand that had
shaken her from the saddle; she had suffered the tortures of hunger and
thirst when losing the way, and she had passed nights in intemperate
weather with no other bed than her poncho and the trappings of the
horses. Thus they had explored those lakes of the Andes between
Argentina and Chile that guard in their pure and untouched desert
solitude the mystery of the earliest days of creation.

Rovers over these virgin lands, shepherds and bandits, used to talk of
glimpses of gigantic animals at nightfall on the shores of the lakes
devouring entire meadows with one gulp; and the doctor, like many other
sages, had believed in the possibility of finding a surviving
prehistoric animal, a beast of the monstrous herds anterior to the
coming of man, still dwelling in this unexplored section of the planet.

They saw skeletons dozens of yards long in the foot-hills of the
Cordilleras so frequently agitated by volcanic cataclysms. In the
neighborhood of the lakes the guides pointed out to them the hides of
devoured herds, and enormous mountains of dried material that appeared
to have been deposited by some monster. But no matter how far they
penetrated into the solitude, they were always unable to find any
living descendant of prehistoric fauna.

The sailor listened absent-mindedly, thinking of something else that
was quickening his curiosity.

"And you, what is your name?" he said suddenly.

The two women laughed at this question, amusing because so unexpected.

"Call me Freya. It is a Wagnerian name. It means the earth, and at the