How great was the contrast between the southern and the northern portions of this coast! The one wooded and verdant, the other harsh and savage! It was what they call in certain countries, an “iron-bound coast,” and its tempestuous aspect seemed to indicate a sudden crystallization of the boiling basalt in the geologic epochs. How appalling would this hideous mass have been to the colonists if they had chanced to have been thrown on this part of the island! When they were on Mount Franklin, their position had been too elevated for them to recognize the awfully forbidding aspect of this shore; but, viewed from the sea, it presented an appearance, the like of which cannot be seen, perhaps, in any portion of the globe. The sloop passed for half a mile before this coast. It was composed of blocks of all dimensions from twenty to thirty feet high, and of all sorts of shapes, towers, steeples, pyramids, obelisks, and cones. The ice-bergs of the polar seas could not have been thrown together in more frightful confusion! Here, the rocks formed bridges, there, nave-like arches, of indistinguishable depth; in one place, were excavations resembling monumental vaults, in another a crowd of points outnumbering the pinnacles of a Gothic cathedral. All the caprices of nature, more varied than those of the imagination, were here displayed over a distance of eight or nine miles. Smith and companions gazed with a surprise approaching stupefaction. But, though they rested mute, Top kept up an incessant barking, which awoke a thousand echoes. The engineer noticed the same strangeness in the dog’s action as he showed at the month of the well in Granite House. “Go alongside,” said Smith. And the Good Luck ran in as close to the rocks as possible. Perhaps there was some cavern here which it would be well to explore. But Smith saw nothing, not even a hollow which could serve as a retreat for any living thing, and the base of the rocks was washed by the surf of the sea. After a time the dog stopped barking, and the sloop kept off again at some cable lengths from the shore. In the northwest portion of the island the shore became flat and sandy. A few trees rose above the low and swampy ground, the home of myriads of aquatic birds. In the evening the sloop moored in a slight hollow of the shore, to the north of the island. She was close into the bank, as the water here was of great depth. The breeze died away with nightfall, and the night passed without incident. The next morning Spilett and Herbert went ashore for a couple of hours and brought back many bunches of ducks and snipe, and by 8 o’clock the Good Luck, with a fair, freshening breeze, was speeding on her way to North Mandible Cape. “I should not be surprised,” said Pencroff, “if we had a squall. Yesterday the sun set red, and, this morning, the cats-tails foreboded no good.”