"As we drew nearer I descried a slant incline from the open excavation down which the blocks of stone were slid. They were brought to the surface by hoisting cranes, and just as our little porcelain cockle-shell glided to the dock, an enormous fragment rudely shaped into a cubical form, was moving down the metal road bed to the edge of the canal. "Here we landed, and a crowd of people hailed us, and amongst them were many of the prehistoric people, the short, sturdy brown or copper colored northerners who work in the quarries and mines. It was nightfall. Their day's work was over, and they crowded around us with interest. They were good-natured, but quiet, and dressed in a kind of overalls that was made in one garment from head to feet. "Chapman pushed amongst them, followed by me. We made our way to a pleasant house, built of the quarried volcanic rock, alternating with the white stone of the quarry, and covered with an almost flat roof of the blue metal. In this house we were received by the Superintendent of Quarries, a supernatural, who still retained a mechanical aptitude, brought with him from the earth. The greetings were pleasant, and as the Superintendent spoke his former earth language, which had been French, we got along intelligibly. "The rooms of this house were large, square apartments, simply furnished with the white chairs, tables and couches I had seen in the City of Light, but on its walls were drawings and photographs of the quarry, the country, and groups of the workmen. Amongst the pictures were some wonderful large scenes of an ice country, and the lustrous high wall of a gigantic glacier. I pointed these out to Chapman. He told me that to the north of the mountains lay the great northern sea, in winter a sea of ice, and that from continental elevations within it glacial masses pushed outward, invading the southern country. A road led over the mountain from Sinsi to regions beyond, where there were fertile intervals and plains inhabited by populations of the small, early people we had met. "Here were their settlements, from which the workmen of the quarries had been brought. Beyond this again lay the margins of the polar sea. The Superintendent--his name was Alca--had visited this region, and probably made the pictures I wondered at. The Superintendent said we should visit the great quarry in the morning before we started again for Scandor. And he showed us, as the darkness descended about us, a marvellous phenomenon. Standing on the roof of his house, we looked up the mountain side to the immense opening forced in its flank, and it had become a great surface of palpitating, rising and falling light. The waves of glorious soft radiance bathed the village about us, the waters of the canal, and the arid crusts of rock beyond, the circle of encompassing darkness straining like a great black wall, on its spent edges.