Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 1.djvu/290

 more fertile, richer, quicker producing than the others, will become some great kingdom, where discoveries will be made even more wonderful than steam and the electric telegraph."

"Ah, sir," said Joe, "I should like to see all that."

"You were born a trfle too soon," said the doctor.

"After all, that will be perhaps a more tiresome period, in which industry will absorb all to its profit. In consequence of inventing machines, men will be devoured by them. I am always picturing to myself that the last day of the world will be when some immense boiler, heated up to three thousand millions of atmospheres, will blow our globe into space."

"And I daresay the Americans will not be the last to work at the machine," said Joe. "In fact, those people are wonderful tinkers; but, without letting ourselves be carried away by such discussions, let us admire the 'Land of the Moon,' since we are in a position to see it."

The sun was pouring his last rays beneath the heaped-up masses of cloud, and was gilding the small elevations with a golden crest. The huge trees, arborescent herbs, the cut corn, all had a share of the luminous rays. The earth, gently undulating, rose here and there into little conical hills. There were no mountains to break the horizon. Immense brambly palisades, impassable hedges, thorny jungles separated the clear spaces in which numerous villages were spread out. The gigantic euphorbia surrounded them with natural fortifications, entwining themselves with the coral-like branches of the shrubs.

They soon came in sight of the Malagazari, the principal tributary of Lake Tanganyika, which wound round the verdant masses of vegetation. Into this river ran numerous watercourses, born of the torrents overflowed during the great rising of the waters, or from ponds hollowed out in the clayey soil. It appeared to the observers, elevated as they were, that a regular network of rivulets was flowing over the face of the country.

Immense beasts with humps were feeding in the prairies, and occasionally disappeared altogether in the long grass; the forests, of a wonderful species of trees, appeared like enormous bouquets, but in these bouquets, lions, leopards, hyenas, and tigers took refuge from the declin-