"What is the matter with him?" asked Captain Len Guy, who was observing Hunt attentively. "I don't know what is the matter with him, captain. But, as you are aware, everything about this man is odd: his ways are inexplicable, and on certain sides of him he seems to belong to those strange beings whom Arthur Pym asserts that he found on this island. One would even say that--" "That--" repeated the captain. And then, without finishing my sentence, I said,-- "Captain, are you sure that you made a good observation when you took the altitude yesterday?" "Certainly." "So that your point--" "Gave 83° 20' of latitude and 43° 5' of longitude." "Exactly?" "Exactly." "There is, then, no doubt that we are on Tsalal Island?" "None, Mr. Jeorling, if Tsalal Island lies where Arthur Pym places it." This was quite true, there could be no doubt on the point, and yet of all that Arthur Pym described nothing existed, or rather, nothing was any longer to be seen. Not a tree, not a shrub, not a plant was visible in the landscape. There was no sign of the wooded hills between which the village of Klock-Klock ought to lie, or of the streams from which the crew of the _Jane_ had not ventured to drink. There was no water anywhere; but everywhere absolute, awful drought. Nevertheless, Hunt walked on rapidly, without showing any hesitation. It seemed as though he was led by a natural instinct, "a bee's flight," as we say in America. I know not what presentiment induced us to follow him as the best of guides, a Chingachgook, a Renard-Subtil. And why not? Was not he the fellow-countryman of Fenimore Cooper's heroes? But, I must repeat that we had not before our eyes that fabulous land which Arthur Pym described. The soil we were treading had been ravaged, wrecked, torn by convulsion. It was black, a cindery black, as though it had been vomited from the earth under the action of Plutonian forces; it suggested that some appalling and irresistible cataclysm had overturned the whole of its surface. Not one of the animals mentioned in the narrative was to be seen, and even the penguins which abound in the Antarctic regions had fled from this uninhabitable land. Its stern silence and solitude made it a hideous desert. No human being was to be seen either on the coast or in the interior. Did any chance of finding William Guy and the survivors of the _Jane_ exist in the midst of this scene of desolation? I looked at Captain Len Guy. His pale face, dim eyes, and knit brow told too plainly that hope was beginning to die within his breast.