“And yet there are people like you who say that there is no Providence!” ejaculated Bastin.

“I wonder what the views of Captain Astley and the crew are, or rather were, upon that matter,” interrupted Bickley.

“I don’t know,” answered Bastin, looking about him vaguely.  “It is true that I can’t see any of them, but if they are drowned no doubt it is because their period of usefulness in this world had ended.”

“Let’s get down and look about us,” I remarked, being anxious to avoid further argument.

So we scrambled from the remnant of the ship, like Noah descending out of the ark, as Bastin said, on to the beach beneath, where Tommy rushed to and fro, gambolling for joy.  Here we discovered a path which ran diagonally up the side of a cliff which was nowhere more than fifty or sixty feet in height, and possibly had once formed the shore of this land, or perhaps that of a lake.  Up this path we went, following the tracks of many human feet, and reaching the crest of the cliff, looked about us, basking as we did so in the beautiful morning sun, for the sky was now clear of clouds and with that last awful effort, which destroyed our ship, the cyclone had passed away.

We were standing on a plain down which ran a little stream of good water whereof Tommy drank greedily, we following his example.  To the right and left of this plain, further than we could see, stretched bushland over which towered many palms, rather ragged now because of the lashing of the gale.  Looking inland we perceived that the ground sloped gently downwards, ending at a distance of some miles in a large lake.  Far out in this lake something like the top of a mountain of a brown colour rose above the water, and on the edge of it was what from that distance appeared to be a tumbled ruin.

“This is all very interesting,” I said to Bickley.  “What do you make of it?”

“I don’t quite know.  At first sight I should say that we are standing on the lip of a crater of some vast extinct volcano.  Look how it curves to north and south and at the slope running down to the lake.”

I nodded.

“Lucky that the tidal wave did not get over the cliff,” I said.  “If it had the people here would have all been drowned out.  I wonder where they have gone?”

As I spoke Bastin pointed to the edge of the bush some hundreds of yards away, where we perceived brown figures slipping about among the trees.  I suggested that we should go back to the mouth of our path, so as to have a line of retreat open in case of necessity, and await events.  So we did and there stood still.  By degrees the brown figures emerged on to the plain to the number of some hundreds, and we saw that they were both male and female.  The women were clothed in nothing except flowers and a little girdle; the men were all armed with wooden weapons and also wore a girdle but no flowers.  The children, of whom there were many, were quite naked.