kept close to the new shore. This, since it had ceased to be formed
by the original river bank, had considerably altered its aspect.
Frequent landslips occurred, and in many places deep chasms rifted
the ground; great gaps furrowed the fields, and trees, half uprooted,
overhung the water, remarkable by the fantastic distortions of their
gnarled trunks, looking as though they had been chopped by a hatchet.

The sinuosities of the coast line, alternately gully and headland,
had the effect of making a devious progress for the travelers,
and at sunset, although they had accomplished more than twenty miles,
they had only just arrived at the foot of the Merdeyah Mountains,
which, before the cataclysm, had formed the extremity of the chain
of the Little Atlas. The ridge, however, had been violently ruptured,
and now rose perpendicularly from the water.

On the following morning Servadac and Ben Zoof traversed one of the
mountain gorges; and next, in order to make a more thorough acquaintance
with the limits and condition of the section of Algerian territory
of which they seemed to be left as the sole occupants, they dismounted,
and proceeded on foot to the summit of one of the highest peaks.
From this elevation they ascertained that from the base of the Merdeyah
to the Mediterranean, a distance of about eighteen miles, a new coast
line had come into existence; no land was visible in any direction;
no isthmus existed to form a connecting link with the territory of Tenes,
which had entirely disappeared. The result was that Captain Servadac
was driven to the irresistible conclusion that the tract of land which
he had been surveying was not, as he had at first imagined, a peninsula;
it was actually an island.

Strictly speaking, this island was quadrilateral, but the sides