The odor, easily recognized, was enough for the engineer to guess what the smoke was which at first, not without cause, had startled him.

“This fue,” said he, “or rather, this smoke is produced by nature alone.  There is a sulphur spring there, which will cure all our sore throats.”

“Captain!” cried Pencroft.  “What a pity that I haven’t got a cold!”

The settlers then directed their steps towards the place from which the smoke escaped.  They there saw a sulphur spring which flowed abundantly between the rocks, and its waters discharged a strong sulphuric acid odor, after having absorbed the oxygen of the air.

Cyrus Harding, dipping in his hand, felt the water oily to the touch.  He tasted it and found it rather sweet.  As to its temperature, that he estimated at ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit.  Herbert having asked on what he based this calculation,—­

“Its quite simple, my boy,” said he, “for, in plunging my hand into the water, I felt no sensation either of heat or cold.  Therefore it has the same temperature as the human body, which is about ninety-five degrees.”

The sulphur spring not being of any actual use to the settlers, they proceeded towards the thick border of the forest, which began some hundred paces off.

There, as they had conjectured, the waters of the stream flowed clear and limpid between high banks of red earth, the color of which betrayed the presence of oxide of iron.  From this color, the name of Red Creek was immediately given to the watercourse.

It was only a large stream, deep and clear, formed of the mountain water, which, half river, half torrent, here rippling peacefully over the sand, there falling against the rocks or dashing down in a cascade, ran towards the lake, over a distance of a mile and a half, its breadth varying from thirty to forty feet.  Its waters were sweet, and it was supposed that those of the lake were so also.  A fortunate circumstance, in the event of their finding on its borders a more suitable dwelling than the Chimneys.

As to the trees, which some hundred feet downwards shaded the banks of the creek, they belonged, for the most part, to the species which abound in the temperate zone of America and Tasmania, and no longer to those coniferae observed in that portion of the island already explored to some miles from Prospect Heights.  At this time of the year, the commencement of the month of April, which represents the month of October, in this hemisphere, that is, the beginning of autumn, they were still in full leaf.  They consisted principally of casuarinas and eucalypti, some of which next year would yield a sweet manna, similar to the manna of the East.  Clumps of Australian cedars rose on the sloping banks, which were also covered with the high grass called “tussac” in New Holland; but the cocoanut, so abundant in the archipelagoes of the Pacific, seemed to be wanting in the island, the latitude, doubtless, being too low.