uffian's face at seeing this
implacable archangel descending from the skies. All the same, rapidly
though he worked, he realized by six o'clock in the evening that he
could scarcely finish before night and that, under these conditions,
it would be better to put off the start until next morning. He
therefore completed his repairs and carefully tested the machine,
while Dolores moved away to prepare their camp. When twilight fell,
his task was finished. Happy and smiling, he followed the path on his
right which he had seen the girl take.

The plain fell away suddenly beyond the ridge on which the aeroplane
had stranded; and a deeper gully, between two sand-hills, led Simon to
a lower, basin-shaped plain, in the hollow of which shone a sheet of
water so limpid that he could see the bed of black rock at the bottom.

This was the first landscape in which Simon perceived a certain charm,
a touch of terrestrial and almost human poetry; and at the far end of
the lake there stood the most incredible thing that could be imagined
in this region which only a few days earlier had been buried under the
sea: a structure which seemed to have been raised by human hands and
which was supported by columns apparently covered with fine carving!

Dolores stepped out of it. Tall and shapely, with slow, sedate
movements, she walked in to the water, among some stones standing
upright in the lake, filled a glass and, bending backwards, drank a
few sips. Near by, a trace of steam, rising from a pannikin on a
spirit-stove, hovered in the air.

Seeing Simon, she smiled and said:

"Everything's ready. Here's tea, white bread and butter."

"Do you mean it?" he said, laughing. "So there were inhabitants at the
bottom of the sea, people who grew wheat?"

"No, but there was some food in that poor airman's box."

"Very well; but this house, this prehistoric palace?"

It was a very primitive palace, a wall of great stones touching one
another and surmounted by a great slab like those which top the Druid
dolmans. The whole thing was crude and massive, covered with carvings
which, when examined closely, were merely thousands of holes bored by
molluscs.

"Lithophagic molluscs, Old Sandstone would call them. By Jove, how
excited he would be to see these remains of a dwelling which dates
thousands and thousands of centuries back and which perhaps has others
buried in the sand near it . . . a whole village, I dare say! And
isn't this positive proof