To this message I received the following extraordinary reply: 

“All right—­another bottle of—­ice goes:  push on—­this cheese is too—­spare no effort to—­hand me those nuts—­learn all you can—­damn you!”

His most gracious Majesty was being served with dessert, and served badly.

I now resolved to go directly north toward the source of the ice-flow and investigate its cause, but examining my barometer found that I was more than 8,000 coprets below the sea-level; the moving ice had not only ground down the face of the country, planing off the eminences and filling the depressions, but its enormous weight had caused the earth’s crust to sag, and with the lessening of the weight from evaporation it had not recovered.

I had no desire to continue in this depression, as I should in going north, for I should find nothing but lakes, marshes and ferneries, infested with the same primitive and monstrous forms of life.  So I continued my course eastward and soon had the satisfaction to find myself meeting the sluggish current of such streams as I encountered in my way.  By vigorous use of the new double-distance telepode, which enables the wearer to step eighty surindas instead of forty, as with the instrument in popular use, I was soon again at a considerable elevation above the sea-level and nearly 200 prastams from “Pike’s Peak.”  A little farther along the water courses began to flow to the eastward.  The flora and fauna had again altered in character, and now began to grow sparse; the soil was thin and arid, and in a week I found myself in a region absolutely destitute of organic life and without a vestige of soil.  All was barren rock.  The surface for hundreds of prastams, as I continued my advance, was nearly level, with a slight dip to the eastward.  The rock was singularly striated, the scratches arranged concentrically and in helicoidal curves.  This circumstance puzzled me and I resolved to take some more instrumental observations, bitterly regretting my improvidence in not availing myself of the Ahkoond’s permission to bring with me such apparatus and assistants as would have given me knowledge vastly more copious and accurate than I could acquire with my simple pocket appliances.

I need not here go into the details of my observations with such instruments as I had, nor into the calculations of which these observations were the basic data.  Suffice it that after two months’ labor I reported the results to his Majesty in Sanf Rachisco in the words following: 

“Sire: It is my high privilege to apprise you of my arrival on the western slope of a mighty depression running through the center of the continent north and south, formerly known as the Mississippi Valley.  It was once the seat of a thriving and prosperous population known as the Pukes, but is now a vast expanse of bare rock, from which every particle of soil and everything movable, including people, animals