At about half-past five in the evening the hilly character of the country gave place to that of a wide-stretching level plain, thickly overgrown with long rank grass, with occasional isolated clumps of bush, and here and there a tall feathery palm, or a grove of wild plantains or bamboo. The faint grey glimmer of the sea appeared on the utmost verge of the distant horizon, and certain huge shapeless irregularities in the extreme distance gradually revealed themselves as the colossal remains of what must at one time have been a city of extraordinary extent and magnificence. The ship was brought to earth and secured exactly at six o'clock, at a distance of some eight or nine miles from the sea, and the travellers then found themselves surrounded on all sides by gigantic ruined walls, arches, columns, erect and overturned, huge fragments of pediments, shattered entablatures, ruined capitals, splintered pedestals, and crumbling mutilated statues of men and animals, all of colossal proportions, the buildings being of a massive but ornate and imposing style of architecture, quite unknown to civilisation. The ship had found a resting-place as nearly as possible in the centre of the ruins, which extended all round her for a distance of nearly three miles, the eastern half being all aglow with the golden radiance of the sunset, whilst the western half loomed up black, imposing, and solemnly mysterious against the clear orange of the evening sky. "Well," said the professor, as the party slowly paced the deck, watching in almost silent rapture the swiftly changing glories of the dying day, the rapid but exquisite gradations of tint on the mouldering ruins which accompanied the fading light, and the almost instantaneous appearance of the stars in the darkening heavens--"well, I am equally surprised and delighted at the result of our resolve to come hither. Here we find ourselves in the very heart of savagedom surrounded by the vast remains of a remote but civilised and evidently highly cultivated race; and though at present we have nothing more than the merest surmise to help us to their identification, I have little doubt that the result of our explorations and investigations will be to satisfy us that we have in very deed found in these ponderous ruins the remains of Ancient Ophir." CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. A NATIVE CHIEFTAIN'S VISIT TO CLOUDLAND.