PART SECOND

HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD COMPLETED THEIR SCIENTIFIC LABORS

A week later the expedition camped in the midst of a collection of wonderful curiosities.  These were a sort of vast caverns of stone that rose singly and in bunches out of the plain by the side of the river which they had first seen when they emerged from the forest.  These caverns stood in long, straight rows on opposite sides of broad aisles that were bordered with single ranks of trees.  The summit of each cavern sloped sharply both ways.  Several horizontal rows of great square holes, obstructed by a thin, shiny, transparent substance, pierced the frontage of each cavern.  Inside were caverns within caverns; and one might ascend and visit these minor compartments by means of curious winding ways consisting of continuous regular terraces raised one above another.  There were many huge, shapeless objects in each compartment which were considered to have been living creatures at one time, though now the thin brown skin was shrunken and loose, and rattled when disturbed.  Spiders were here in great number, and their cobwebs, stretched in all directions and wreathing the great skinny dead together, were a pleasant spectacle, since they inspired with life and wholesome cheer a scene which would otherwise have brought to the mind only a sense of forsakenness and desolation.  Information was sought of these spiders, but in vain.  They were of a different nationality from those with the expedition, and their language seemed but a musical, meaningless jargon.  They were a timid, gentle race, but ignorant, and heathenish worshipers of unknown gods.  The expedition detailed a great detachment of missionaries to teach them the true religion, and in a week’s time a precious work had been wrought among those darkened creatures, not three families being by that time at peace with each other or having a settled belief in any system of religion whatever.  This encouraged the expedition to establish a colony of missionaries there permanently, that the work of grace might go on.

But let us not outrun our narrative.  After close examination of the fronts of the caverns, and much thinking and exchanging of theories, the scientists determined the nature of these singular formations.  They said that each belonged mainly to the Old Red Sandstone period; that the cavern fronts rose in innumerable and wonderfully regular strata high in the air, each stratum about five frog-spans thick, and that in the present discovery lay an overpowering refutation of all received geology; for between every two layers of Old Red Sandstone reposed a thin layer of decomposed limestone; so instead of there having been but one Old Red Sandstone period there had certainly been not less than a hundred and seventy-five!  And by the same token it was plain that there had also been a hundred and seventy-five floodings of the earth