The soil we were treading had been ravaged, wrecked, torn by convulsion.

It was black, a cindery black, as though it had been vomited from the earth under the action of Plutonian forces; it suggested that some appalling and irresistible cataclysm had overturned the whole of its surface.
Not one of the animals mentioned in the narrative was to be seen, and even the penguins which abound in the Antarctic regions had fled from this uninhabitable land.

Its stern silence and solitude made it a hideous desert.

No human being was to be seen either on the coast or in the interior.

Did any chance of finding William Guy and the survivors of the fane exist in the midst of this scene of desolation?
I looked at Captain Len Guy.