Thus it happened that the wild animals, jaguars, wild boars, capybaras, koalas, and game of every kind, mad with terror, had fled to the banks of the Mercy and to the Tadorn Marsh, beyond the road to Port Balloon.  But the colonists were too much occupied with their task to pay any attention to even the most formidable of these animals.  They had abandoned Granite House, and would not even take shelter at the Chimneys, but encamped under a tent, near the mouth of the Mercy.

Each day Cyrus Harding and Gideon Spilett ascended the plateau of Prospect Heights.  Sometimes Herbert accompanied them, but never Pencroft, who could not bear to look upon the prospect of the island now so utterly devastated.

It was, in truth, a heart-rending spectacle.  All the wooded part of the island was now completely bare.  One single clump of green trees raised their heads at the extremity of Serpentine Peninsula.  Here and there were a few grotesque blackened and branchless stumps.  The side of the devastated forest was even more barren than Tadorn Marsh.  The eruption of lava had been complete.  Where formerly sprang up that charming verdure, the soil was now nothing but a savage mass of volcanic tufa.  In the valleys of the Falls and Mercy rivers no drop of water now flowed towards the sea, and should Lake Grant be entirely dried up, the colonists would have no means of quenching their thirst.  But, fortunately the lava had spared the southern corner of the lake, containing all that remained of the drinking water of the island.  Towards the northwest stood out the rugged and well-defined outlines of the sides of the volcano, like a gigantic claw hovering over the island.  What a sad and fearful sight, and how painful to the colonists, who, from a fertile domain covered with forests, irrigated by watercourses, and enriched by the produce of their toils, found themselves, as it were, transported to a desolate rock, upon which, but for their reserves of provisions, they could not even gather the means of subsistence!

“It is enough to break one’s heart!” said Gideon Spilett, one day.

“Yes, Spilett,” answered the engineer.  “May God grant us the time to complete this vessel, now our sole refuge!”

“Do not you think, Cyrus, that the violence of the eruption has somewhat lessened?  The volcano still vomits forth lava, but somewhat less abundantly, if I mistake not.”

“It matters little,” answered Cyrus Harding.  “The fire is still burning in the interior of the mountain, and the sea may break in at any moment.  We are in the condition of passengers whose ship is devoured by a conflagration which they cannot extinguish, and who know that sooner or later the flames must reach the powder-magazine.  To work, Spilett, to work, and let us not lose an hour!”

During eight days more, that is to say until the 7th of February, the lava continued to flow, but the eruption was confined within the previous limits.  Cyrus Harding feared above all lest the liquefied matter should overflow the shore, for in that event the dockyard could not escape.  Moreover, about this time the colonists felt in the frame of the island vibrations which alarmed them to the highest degree.