“The scene was here forbidding and desolate.  We moved for miles through the waste of a ruined world.  The whole region had been the stage of great volcanic activity, and the monticules of scoriaceous rock, the broad plains excavated with deep pools that reflected their dismal, untenanted borders in the black depths of unruffled water, spoke of meteorological conditions long prolonged and intense.  It was a weird, strange place, silent and dead.  But amongst these vast ejections, these truncated fossil craters were embedded masses of the rare self-luminous stone that made the City of Light.  Chapman told me how in pockets or huge amygdaloidal cavities, this white phosphorescent substance was quarried, brought up bodily perhaps in the slow upheaval of the region from the deep-seated sources of this mineral flood.

“The canal passed along for miles in the depression between two folds of the surface.  Finally, gazing ahead, there slowly came into view a huge rictus, a gaping rent in the side of the black and gray and red walls to our right, and a minute movement of living forms, scarcely discernible, revealed the first quarry near the little town of Sinsi.

“As we drew nearer I descried a slant incline from the open excavation down which the blocks of stone were slid.  They were brought to the surface by hoisting cranes, and just as our little porcelain cockle-shell glided to the dock, an enormous fragment rudely shaped into a cubical form, was moving down the metal road bed to the edge of the canal.

“Here we landed, and a crowd of people hailed us, and amongst them were many of the prehistoric people, the short, sturdy brown or copper colored northerners who work in the quarries and mines.  It was nightfall.  Their day’s work was over, and they crowded around us with interest.  They were good-natured, but quiet, and dressed in a kind of overalls that was made in one garment from head to feet.

“Chapman pushed amongst them, followed by me.  We made our way to a pleasant house, built of the quarried volcanic rock, alternating with the white stone of the quarry, and covered with an almost flat roof of the blue metal.  In this house we were received by the Superintendent of Quarries, a supernatural, who still retained a mechanical aptitude, brought with him from the earth.  The greetings were pleasant, and as the Superintendent spoke his former earth language, which had been French, we got along intelligibly.

“The rooms of this house were large, square apartments, simply furnished with the white chairs, tables and couches I had seen in the City of Light, but on its walls were drawings and photographs of the quarry, the country, and groups of the workmen.  Amongst the pictures were some wonderful large scenes of an ice country, and the lustrous high wall of a gigantic glacier.  I pointed these out to Chapman.  He told me that to the north of the mountains lay the great northern sea, in winter a sea of ice, and that from continental elevations within it glacial masses pushed outward, invading the southern country.  A road led over the mountain from Sinsi to regions beyond, where there were fertile intervals and plains inhabited by populations of the small, early people we had met.