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that a whim of the monster hidden in that mountain would have been enough so that I might be sucked in, and devoured like one of the microscopic animals upon which whales in certain periods nourished themselves.
    I wondered how it was that I was still alive. The same fervent desire to flee took hold of me, I thought that I owed my life only to the torpor in which, during its digestion, the mysterious leviathan suffered.
    To flee. . . But that was impossible for me; I threw a desperate look at my blood-drenched legs and at the debris of my bark. I couldn’t set back to sea without healing and resting and without having mended, somehow or other, my skiff.
    I was absorbed in these sad reflections when I had the idea that the cordial of my keg would be an excellent dressing for my wounds; its balsamic scent encouraged me to use it and I experienced almost immediately the good effect; the distressing smarting of the cuts relented and, while still limping a little, I felt more solid on my legs.
    I used the rest of the day to rest and to recover what I could of my provisions. In giving myself over to this work I noticed, half-buried in the sand, the opal mask which must have come off at the moment of the shipwreck; this discovery caused me great joy.
    I put it in safety in a hole in the rock with what I had saved. I lit a fire thanks to the lens and I cooked a sea turtle with a serpent’s neck that I had captured in the sand.
    I won’t speak of the daily storm which arose as soon as the sun set, and against which I sheltered myself as best I could. Exhaustion and, perhaps, the properties of my cordial made me enjoy a profound slumber. Upon awakening, I found myself nearly refreshed, in any case ready to set to work; the idea that the digestion process of the Leviathan must make it harmless for several days in a row had greatly comforted me.
    First of all, the debris of my fire, near which were scattered the remains of the sea turtle, made me think that with the aid of a certain number of similar shells, softened by the heat, I would easily be able to repair my craft. But the shells shriveled in the fire and I remembered that, in comb-making, it was boiling water that was made use of to soften the material before working it, and I had nothing which could replace a vase proper to containing it.
    I was discouraged. I took my axe and headed in the direction of the crystallized forest; in the other direction I glimpsed the crater crowned with a plume of smoke.
    The environs of the volcano gave me hope, rather vague for that matter, of finding a source of hot water.
    I moved forward into the empty space which was found between the mountain and the forest. I noticed then—I was no longer keeping count of the surprises and I was blasé about the most extraordinary phenomena—that the trees were not at all, as I had believed, petrified fossils, that they weren’t trees, but actually metal masts where the smallest bars came to fuse at right angles. These bars were forked into metallic sticks sharpened into very fine points.
    The whole had the appearance of a fir tree with a pointed treetop. The base of each of the masts, which served as a trunk, was securely fixed into a large plate of glass.
    I had before me a non-vegetal and completely artificial forest, a forest of lightning rods!
    I was no longer surprised now by the electric fires that I had seen fluttering about during the storm above these strange branches. But what became of the enormous quantity of current thus harnessed during each storm, that is to say each evening?
    I lost myself in conjectures.
    I continued to follow alongside the forest and I arrived at a vast square, paved with large plates of transparent glass, below which I heard a murmur of running water. I kneeled and through the thickness of the paving, I distinguished a large metal beam to which were connected a multitude of smaller cables and which were immersed in the water of a lake or of a subterranean canal.
    I