travail, monstrous birth!  But it lasts not long:  all at once the Marie Meyer commences to pitch and roll violently, and the sea, a moment since calm, is now rough! and at the same time, through the white vapour, we see a dark shadow slowly rising—­the shadow of a mighty back, a new-born land, bearing upwards ten flames of fire, slowly, steadily, out of the sea, into the clouds.  At the moment when that sublime emergence ceases, or seems to cease, the grand thought that smites me is this:  “I, Albert Tissu, am immortalised:  my name shall never perish from among men!” I rush down, I write it.  The latitude is 16 deg. 21’ 13” South; the longitude 176 deg. 58’ 19” West[1].  There is a great deal of running about on the decks—­they are descending.  There is surely a strange odour of almonds—­I only hope—­it is so dark, mon D——­’

So the Frenchman, Tissu.

[Footnote 1:  This must be French reckoning, from meridian of Paris.]

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With all that region I would have no more to do:  for all here, it used to be said, lies a great sunken continent; and I thought it would be rising and shewing itself to my eyes, and driving me stark mad:  for the earth is full of these contortions, sudden monstrous grimaces and apparitions, which are like the face of Medusa, affrighting a man into spinning stone; and nothing could be more appallingly insecure than living on a planet.

I did not stop till I had got so far northward as the Philippine Islands, where I was two weeks—­exuberant, odorous places, but so hilly and rude, that at one place I abandoned all attempt at travelling in the motor, and left it in a valley by a broad, shallow, noisy river, full of mossy stones:  for I said:  ‘Here I will live, and be at peace’; and then I had a fright, for during three days I could not re-discover the river and the motor, and I was in the greatest despair, thinking:  ’When shall I find my way out of these jungles and vastnesses?’ For I was where no paths were, and had lost myself in deeps where the lure of the earth is too strong and rank for a single man, since in such places, I suppose, a man would rapidly be transformed into a tree, or a snake, or a tiger.  At last, however, I found the place, to my great joy, but I would not shew that I was glad, and to hide it, fell upon a front wheel of the car with some kicks.  I could not make out who the people were that lived here:  for the relics of some seemed quite black, like New Zealand races, and I could still detect the traces of tattooing, while others suggested Mongolian types, and some looked like pigmies, and some like whites.  But I cannot detail the two-years’ incidents of that voyage:  for it is past, and like a dream:  and not to write of that—­of all that—­have I taken this pencil in hand after seventeen long, long years.

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