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had no doubt that each of the cables was attached to the foot of one of the metal trees.
    Thus all electrical energy harnessed by those thousands and thousands of lightning rods was absorbed and utilized—for what task?—by the unknown and formidable being that I had called the Leviathan, for lack of another word to more clearly define it!
    I was so preoccupied with the discovery that I had just made that without being aware of it I passed the square paved in glass. I entered into the metal forest, where the slightest breeze made the branches vibrate like Aeolian harps.
    “What on earth can this current really be used for?” I cried aloud.
    And, while monologizing, like all people who are under the empire of a fascinating idea, I continued to walk quickly.
    I must have walked for a long time thus, because, as I calculated since, the forest, at this spot, was around a league wide, with a length three times greater.
    I only stopped in a stony and bare spot because a stream barred the path; I had crossed the width of the electric wood and I saw, at a small distance, the first foothills of the volcano.
    The lava field was sewn with pumice stones, ashes and scoria.
    I prepared to step over the stream when I noticed that its water exhaled a thick steam. I dipped my hand in; its water was boiling hot; by a strange bit of luck, my hypothesis was right, I had before me one of those hot springs so common in the environs of volcanoes, and I was able to say that this discovery had not cost me great difficulty.
    I would be able to patch up at my ease the sides of my tortoiseshell bark. I couldn’t get over the luck that I had had and I was going to get myself underway to go look for my skiff, when I had the fancy to follow the course of the stream which ran toward the base of the mountain, whose assizes it bathed for a while.
    On the way, it received the tribute of a small spring whose waters, of a dirty yellow and with a pungent odor showed me that I had before me a stream of acid, a phenomenon moreover as common in the volcanic regions as a jet of hot water.
    I remembered that Humboldt reported in the Andes a “natural” source of sulfuric acid weighing a degree rather elevated on the Baume aerometer.
    But, in the way in which the vitrified lava of the banks was hollowed and as if dissolved, it wasn’t this substance that I was dealing with: it had to be instead hydrofluoric acid, the most corrosive of all the substances, since it even ate away the glass decanters in which it was put.
    In mixing with the stream, the spring communicated to it its corrosive qualities and, when I arrived at the place where it was in close contact with the mountain, I perceived that the uninterrupted work of the waters had hollowed into the quartz a recess of around a meter in height.
    The current entered into that miniscule grotto, from which it came out a few steps farther along, to be lost in a swamp, stinking with a smell of sulfur, which reminded me of the surroundings of Etna, which I had visited in the past.
    I had stopped before the grotto and I examined the stone that I had taken for quartz and which formed all the surface of the mountain; in the places where it had been eaten into by the action of the acid, it was completely like the stone with pink and gray glints of which my mask was made and which I had taken to be opal.
    It was one more enigma to decipher; but at first I didn’t attach to it any importance.
    Curiosity led me to enter into the little grotto, of which a few stones sewn into the current permitted access rather easily. I forgot for a moment all my fears.
    I came in under the vault, bowing, and I advanced a few steps, first in the darkness, then in the middle of a weak light, similar to that of moonlight. The grotto was no more than ten steps deep, it ended in a rounded alcove from which the lunar light emanated.
    I came near, I looked like one looks through a foggy windowpane and, first of all, I saw only a heap of