For a while nothing could be discerned, and then the whole country, to the limits of blackness, was glowing with phosphorescent fire, and times without number the rocks rose and fell as though floating on an angry sea, completely hidden by the forms above. And all the while the ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ lights were dancing their mad flight, and the rocks, in their apparent endeavour to trap them, rent themselves apart and crashed together, always too late, or too soon, for the lights invariably fled elsewhere, whilst the rocks were but welded firmly into larger and more compact masses. It was a world in chaos—a nightmare of evolution—where the ghosts and spirits of creation tossed and tumbled in their fevered, restless efforts to build themselves into solid shape; where earth and rock were spun and pounded together as clay in the hands of the potter; pounded this way and that in an ever-turning churn, becoming more and more compact as gigantic masses of earth and rock crashed together and became absorbed one in the other, and were again packed into less than half their bulk, mountain after mountain becoming little more than a hill; and when no further compression seemed possible, they would tumble upside down, their bases uppermost, their jagged roots, which had seemed so firmly embedded in the ground, showing in the flickering light like awful teeth, the sight of which made the flesh creep; their peaks also, now twisted and awry with the shock, were wounded and beseeching, for the beautiful mountains had become deformed monstrosities. So would they heave as in an agony of physical pain, tumbling and twisting about to obtain relief; travelling over and under other mountains which they exposed and lifted up as they dug underneath them, they being momentarily hidden. Some of these did not rise again, but were plunged into the depths below, in which they became fixed; others, after being slowly and irresistibly pounded into compactness, would suddenly become disintegrated and spread themselves out as though some mighty roller were crushing them into slabs, and during the process they would resume some semblance of their original form and become dense, hard, invincible rock with precipitous sides. Chain after chain of hills would turn to valleys and long sweeps of undulating country; these undulations would then become more pronounced, then involved, and then suddenly rise; the next moment they were hundreds of miles of forbidding, death-inviting mountain ranges, with craggy sides on which no human being could find a foothold, or if found, could keep. Over the range would pass a gentle shiver, and without a sound would follow an awful earthquake, swallowing up hundreds of enormous hills, and for the space of fully five minutes there yawned beneath the ship a bottomless gulf, with sides as straight as if cut, into which the whole mass of the hills seemed to tumble.