vors must eat on the morrow. The house,
albeit considerably shaken, was still intact, but several of the doors
were so tightly jammed that I had to break them open with my hatchet.

When breakfast was ready I woke Angela.

"Is it real, or have I been dreaming?" she asked, with a shudder, looking
wildly round.

"It is only too real," I said, pointing to the smoking crater.

"_Misericordia!_ what shall we do?"

"First of all, we must go down to the oasis and see whether any of the
people are left alive."

"You are right. When we have done what we can for the others it will be
time enough to think about ourselves."

"Are there any others?" I thought, for I greatly doubted whether we should
find any alive, except, perhaps, Yawl and the three or four men who were
helping him. But I kept my misgivings to myself, and after breakfast we
set off. Angela and myself were mounted, and I assigned a mule to Kidd.
The man might be useful, and, circumstanced as we were, it would have been
bad policy to give him the cold shoulder. We also took with us provisions,
clothing, and a tent, for I was by no means sure that we should find
either food or shelter on the oasis.

As we passed the volcano I looked into the crater. Nearly level with the
breach made by the water was a great mass of seething lava, which I
regarded as a sure sign that another eruption might take place at any
moment. The valley lake had disappeared; banks, trees, soil, dwellings,
all were gone, leaving only bare rocks and burning lava. Of San Cristobal
there was not a vestige; the oasis had been converted into a damp and
steaming gully, void of vegetation and animal life. But, as I had
anticipated, the force of the flood was spent before it reached the coast.
Much of the water had overflowed into the desert and been absorbed by the
sand, and the little that remained was now sinking into the earth and
being evaporated by the sun.

For hours Angela and I rode on in silence; our distress was too deep for
words.

"Quipai is gone," she murmured at length, shuddering and looking at me
with tear-filled eyes.

"Yes, gone and forever. As entirely as if it had never been. It is worse
than the carnage of a great battle. These poor people! Nature is more
cruel than man."

"But surely! will you not try to restore the oasis and re-create Quipai?"

"To do that, _cara mia_, would require another Abbe Balthazar and sixty
years of life. And to what end? Sooner or later our