His friends were, by this time, so accustomed to the professor's little peculiarities that no one thought of asking any questions, feeling sure that an explanation would come all in good time. Neither did they make any remark or evince any surprise, beyond a shrug of the shoulders and an amused elevation of the eyebrows, when the _savant_, glancing at his watch, hastily rose from the table, and, in his absent-mindedness carrying with him a fork with a morsel of venison-steak impaled upon its prongs, hurried away to the pilot-house. A moment or two later a gentle jar was felt as the ship came to the ground; but the mist was by this time so thick that it was difficult to see objects more than a couple of hundred feet distant, and all that could be clearly made out was that they had stopped close to a clump of bush of considerable extent. By the time that breakfast was over, the morning mist, true to its proverbially evanescent character, had completely passed away, and the travellers found that they had come to earth on the crest of a slight eminence, from which an uninterrupted view, of several miles extent over the surrounding plains, could be obtained in every direction save one, namely, that between which and the ship stretched the belt of bush. And now came the professor's explanation: "You have, doubtless, wondered, gentlemen," said he, "why I have thus early, and without warning, interrupted our journey. I will now tell you. I have lately been glancing through the book which, you will remember, I succeeded in recovering from the wreck of the _Daedalus_, and therein I met with a passage of a most surpassingly interesting character. This passage related to the rumoured penetration into this region of a certain unnamed traveller who is stated to have positively asserted that he here saw, on more than one occasion, an animal absolutely identical with the fabled unicorn. This remarkable statement at once reminded me that I had, many years ago, seen a paragraph in a Berlin paper to a similar effect. The statement was accompanied by an expression of strong doubt, if not of absolute incredulity, as to its veracity; an expression which impressed me at the time as being most cruel and unfair to the claimant for the honours of a new discovery in natural history; since the discovery was alleged to have been made in a region which had never before--nor, indeed, has since, until now--been penetrated by civilised man; or from which, at all events, no civilised traveller has ever again emerged, if indeed he had been successful in penetrating it. Such being the case, as the course we were pursuing would take us through the very heart of this unknown and unvisited region, I resolved to maintain a most careful watch for these creatures. I have done so, and I am sanguine that I have this morning actually seen a troop of them. Unfortunately, the mist and the distance together prevented a clear and distinct view of the animals to which I refer;