We stood still and looked about us. This was what we saw. All the after part of the ship from forward of the bridge had vanished utterly; there was not a trace of it; she had as it were been cut in two. More, we were some considerable distance from the sea which was still raging over a quarter of a mile away where great white combers struck upon a reef and spouted into the air. Behind us was a cliff, apparently of rock but covered with earth and vegetation, and against this cliff, in which the prow of the ship was buried, she, or what remained of her, had come to anchor for the last time. “You see what has happened,” I said. “A great tidal wave has carried us up here and retreated.” “That’s it,” exclaimed Bickley. “Look at the debris,” and he pointed to torn-up palms, bushes and seaweed piled into heaps which still ran salt water; also to a number of dead fish that lay about among them, adding, “Well, we are saved anyhow.” “And yet there are people like you who say that there is no Providence!” ejaculated Bastin. “I wonder what the views of Captain Astley and the crew are, or rather were, upon that matter,” interrupted Bickley. “I don’t know,” answered Bastin, looking about him vaguely. “It is true that I can’t see any of them, but if they are drowned no doubt it is because their period of usefulness in this world had ended.” “Let’s get down and look about us,” I remarked, being anxious to avoid further argument. So we scrambled from the remnant of the ship, like Noah descending out of the ark, as Bastin said, on to the beach beneath, where Tommy rushed to and fro, gambolling for joy. Here we discovered a path which ran diagonally up the side of a cliff which was nowhere more than fifty or sixty feet in height, and possibly had once formed the shore of this land, or perhaps that of a lake. Up this path we went, following the tracks of many human feet, and reaching the crest of the cliff, looked about us, basking as we did so in the beautiful morning sun, for the sky was now clear of clouds and with that last awful effort, which destroyed our ship, the cyclone had passed away. We were standing on a plain down which ran a little stream of good water whereof Tommy drank greedily, we following his example. To the right and left of this plain, further than we could see, stretched bushland over which towered many palms, rather ragged now because of the lashing of the gale. Looking inland we perceived that the ground sloped gently downwards, ending at a distance of some miles in a large lake. Far out in this lake something like the top of a mountain of a brown colour rose above the water, and on the edge of it was what from that distance appeared to be a tumbled ruin. “This is all very interesting,” I said to Bickley. “What do you make of it?”