to rejoin Alumion; but experience of travel
had taught me that a man must not expect to have it all his own way, and
should know when to let his companions have theirs, and above all things
to keep his temper. I, therefore, decided to take their behaviour in
good part, more especially as we could always return to the capital as
quickly as we had come from it.

Apparently there was nobody in the car but myself. Wondering, and
perhaps a trifle uneasy at the dead stillness, I dressed rapidly and
went outside.

The welkin was wholly overcast with dense, murky vapours, which totally
hid the sun, and the air was excessively hot, moist, and sultry as
before a thunderstorm--an unusual phenomenon in Womla. Black boulders
and crags, speckled with lichens, and carpeted with coarse herbage, shut
out the prospect on every side but one, where the edge of the platform
on which the car was resting ran along the sky. I saw it all now. Gazen
and Carmichael had made a journey to the extreme verge of the country;
to the very summit of the precipice which surrounded the Crater Land.

Picking my steps over the rough rocks like one who treads on air, I
hastened to the brink of the platform. If the car were on the further
side of the summit I should be able to see the wide ocean, but if, as I
fondly hoped, it were on the hither side, I should enjoy a far-off
glimpse of the city and its holy island, which had become a heaven to
me. How different was the scene which met my view!

I was looking away over a vast plain towards a distant range of volcanic
mountains. A broad river wound through the midst between isolated
volcanoes, curling with smoke, and thick forests of a sable hue, or
expanded into marshy lakes half lost in brakes of grisly reeds, on the
margin of which living monsters were plashing in the mud, or soaring
into the air on dusky pinions.

My first shock of surprise passed into a fearful admiration for the
savage and gloomy grandeur of the primeval landscape; but as that
feeling wore away the old irritation against my fellow-travellers came
back. From all I had heard or seen there was no such place as this in
Womla, and as it dawned upon me that they had migrated to some other
island, or perhaps continent in Venus, I forgot my good resolution, and
shouted indignantly,

"Gazen, Gazen! Hallo there! Hallo!"

There was no response, and the dead silence that swallowed up my voice
was awful. Had anything happened to my companions,