While talking they were gradually ascending. The way was lengthened by detours around the obstacles which could not be directly surmounted. Sometimes, too, deep crevasses yawned across the ascent, and compelled them to return upon their track for a long distance, before they could find an available pathway. At noon, when the little company halted to dine at the foot of a great clump of firs, at whose foot babbled a tiny brook, they were still half way from the first plateau, and could hardly reach it before nightfall. From this point the sea stretched broad beneath their feet; but on the right their vision was arrested by the sharp promontory of the southeast, which left them in doubt whether there was land beyond. On the left they could see directly north for several miles; but the northwest was concealed from them by the crest of a fantastic spur, which formed a massive abutment to the central cone. They could, therefore, make no approach as yet to the solving of the great question. At 1 o’clock, the ascent was again begun. The easiest route slanted upwards towards the southwest, through the thick copse. There, under the trees, were flying about a number of gallinaceæ of the pheasant family. These were “tragopans,” adorned with a sort of fleshy wattles hanging over their necks and with two little cylindrical horns behind their eyes. Of these birds, which were about the size of a hen, the female was invariably brown, while the male was resplendent in a coat of red, with little spots of white. With a well-aimed stone Spilett killed one of the tragopans, which the hungry Pencroff looked at with longing eyes. Leaving the copse, the climbers, by mounting on each other’s shoulders, ascended for a hundred feet up a very steep hill, and reached a terrace, almost bare of trees, whose soil was evidently volcanic. From hence, their course was a zigzag towards the east, for the declivity was so steep that they had to take every point of vantage. Neb and Herbert led the way, then came Smith and the reporter; Pencroff was last. The animals who lived among these heights, and whose traces were not wanting, must have the sure foot and the supple spine of a chamois or an izard. They saw some to whom Pencroff gave a name of his own—“Sheep,” he cried. They all had stopped fifty feet from half-a-dozen large animals, with thick horns curved backwards and flattened at the end, and with woolly fleece, hidden under long silky fawn-colored hair. They were not the common sheep, but a species widely distributed through the mountainous regions of the temperate zone. Their name, according to Herbert, was _Moufflon_. “Have they legs and chops?” asked the sailor. “Yes,” replied Herbert. “Then they’re sheep,” said Pencroff. The animals stood motionless and astonished at their first sight of man. Then, seized with sudden fear, they fled, leaping away among the rocks.