"It was a marvellous and splendid scene. It lasted till the dawn. We
remained almost unchanged in position, while the tiny comets crowded the
sky with their uninterrupted march, and the air was shot through with
intermingled lanes of light.
"As the morning broke, we had passed the great gorge in the canal, and
had entered a wild, savage, almost treeless country. Great weathered
columns of rock stood alone in the debris of their own dismemberment,
the bare gray or rusty and jagged expanses sloping up steeply from the
edge of the canal, sparingly dotted over with gray bushes, and covered
with an ashen colored lichen.
"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.
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