“Don’t bother,” said Drew. “I want to make out what those trees are in blossom. They must be—”
“Oh, bother your trees and flowers! Here, Oliver, lad, look at the great pieces of scoria and pumice. Why, that piece is smoking still. These must be some of the fragments we saw falling yesterday.”
“Can’t look,” said Oliver, “I want to know what those birds are, and there’s a great fish in that muddy pool yonder, and, if I’m not greatly mistaken, that’s a snake. Here, quick! Look amongst those trees. There’s a man—no, a boy—no. I see now; it’s alive, and—yes—it’s some kind of ape.”
“Well, we can’t go on fighting against each other, with every man for his own particular subject,” said Drew, “we must take our turns. We’ve been cast on a perfect naturalist’s paradise, with the world turned upside down, as if for our special advantage.”
“Yes,” said Panton; “we could not possibly have hit upon a place more full of tempting objects.”
“But what about our exploration in New Guinea?” said Oliver.
“This may be the western end of that island,” said Panton. “But where’s the volcano that has caused all this mischief?”
“Yonder,” said Oliver, pointing, “behind the cloud.”
The others looked at a dense curtain of mist which rose from the earth, apparently to the skies, and hid everything in that quarter, the desolation extending apparently for a couple of miles in the direction of the curtain, beyond that the ground rose in a glorious slope of uninjured verdure, and then came the great cloud of mist or smoke shutting off the mountain, or whatever was beyond.
“But where is the sea?” said Oliver.