If the corridors of our abode possess this wealth and splendour, what shall we say of the dwelling-places, or of the cities? They are filled with heaps of artistic marvels, of frescoes, enamels, gold and silver plate, bronzes and pictures, the acme and quintessence of musical emotions, of philosophic conceptions, of poetic dreams, enough to baffle all description, and weary all admiration. We have difficulty in believing that the labyrinth of galleries, subterranean palaces and marble catacombs, all named and numbered, whose manifold nomenclature recalls all the geography and history of the past, have been excavated in so few centuries. That is what perseverance can do! However accustomed we may be to this extraordinary sight, it still at times happens when wandering alone, during the hours of the siesta, in this sort of infinite cathedral, with its irregular and endless architecture, through this forest of lofty columns, massive or in close formation, displaying in turn the most diversified and grandiose styles, Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Gothic, and reminiscent of all the vanished and venerated floras and faunas, when it is not above all profoundly original ... it happens, I repeat, that panting, and beside ourselves with ecstasy, we come to a standstill, like the traveller of yore when he entered the twilight of a virgin forest, or of the pillared hall of Karnak. To those who on reading the ancient accounts of travels might perchance have regretted the wanderings of caravans across the deserts or the discoveries of new worlds, our universe can offer boundless excursions under the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans frozen to their very lowest depths. Venturesome explorers, I was going to say discoverers, have in every direction and in the easiest imaginable fashion honeycombed these immense ice-caps with endless passages much in the same way as the termites, according to our palæontologists, bored through the floors of our fathers. We extend at will these fantastic galleries of crystal, which, wherever they cross one another, form so many crystal palaces, by casting on the walls a ray of intense heat which makes them melt. We take good care to drain the water due to the liquefaction into one of those bottomless pits which here and there yawn hideously beneath our feet. Thanks to this method and the improvements it has undergone we have succeeded in cutting, hewing and carving the solidified sea-water. We are able to glide through it, to manoeuvre in it, to course through it on skates or velocipedes with an ease and agility that are always admired in spite of our being accustomed to it. The severe cold of these regions is scarcely tempered by millions of electric lamps which are mirrored in these emerald-green icicles with their velvet-like tints and renders a permanent stay impossible. It would even prevent us crossing them if, by good luck, the earliest pioneers had not discovered in them