If the Patagonians, whose fires could be seen occasionally, were
really above the average in stature, the passengers in the aeronef
were unable to say, for to them they seemed to be dwarfs. But what a
magnificent landscape opened around during these short hours of the
southern day! Rugged mountains, peaks eternally capped with snow,
with thick forests rising on their flanks, inland seas, bays deep set
amid the peninsulas, and islands of the Archipelago. Clarence Island,
Dawson Island, and the Land of Desolation, straits and channels,
capes and promontories, all in inextricable confusion, and bound by
the ice in one solid mass from Cape Forward, the most southerly point
of the American continent, to Cape Horn the most southerly point of
the New World.

When she reached Fort Famine the "Albatross" resumed her course to
the south. Passing between Mount Tam on the Brunswick Peninsula and
Mount Graves, she steered for Mount Sarmiento, an enormous peak
wrapped in snow, which commands the Straits of Magellan, rising six
thousand four hundred feet from the sea. And now they were over the
land of the Fuegians, Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire. Six months
later, in the height of summer, with days from fifteen to sixteen
hours long, how beautiful and fertile would most of this country be,
particularly in its northern portion! Then, all around would be seen
valleys and pasturages that could form the feeding-grounds of
thousands of animals; then would appear virgin forests, gigantic
trees-birches, beeches, ash-trees, cypresses, tree-ferns--and broad
plains overrun by herds of guanacos, vicunas, and ostriches. Now
there were armies of penguins and myriads of birds; and, when the
"Albatross" turned on her electric lamps the guillemots, ducks, and
geese came crowding on board enough to fill Tapage's larder a hundred