These were visible everywhere: on the land, in cities and cultivated fields and mighty constructions; on the sea, in floating craft, which appeared wherever I turned my eyes--boats like those of fishermen, ships long and low, some like galleys, propelled by a hundred oars, others provided with one huge square-sail, which enabled them to run before the wind.
They were unlike any ships which I had ever seen; for neither in the Mediterranean nor in Chinese waters were there any craft like these, and they reminded me rather of those ancient galleys which I had seen in pictures.
I was lost in wonder as to where I was, and what land this could be to which I had been brought.

I had not plunged into the interior of the earth, but I had been carried under the mountains, and had emerged again into the glad light of the sun.

Could it be possible, I thought, that Agnew's hope had been realized, and that I had been carried into the warm regions of the South Pacific Ocean?
Yet in the South Pacific there could be no place like this--no immeasurable expanse of waters, no horizon raised mountain high.

It seemed like a vast basin-shaped world, for all around me the surface appeared to rise, and I was in what looked like a depression; yet I knew that the basin and the depression were an illusion, and that this appearance was due to the immense extent of level surface with the environment of lofty mountains.

I had crossed the antarctic circle; I had been borne onward for an immense distance.