thing."

"Nor am I!" replied Phil Evans. "But be calm, Uncle Prudent, be calm."

"Be calm!"

"And keep your temper until it is wanted."

By five o'clock they had crossed the Black Mountains covered with
pines and cedars, and the "Albatross" was over the appropriately
named Bad Lands of Nebraska--a chaos of ochre-colored hills, of
mountainous fragments fallen on the soil and broken in their fall. At
a distance these blocks take the most fantastic shapes. Here and
there amid this enormous game of knucklebones there could be traced
the imaginary ruins of medieval cities with forts and dungeons,
pepper-box turrets, and machicolated towers. And in truth these Bad
Lands are an immense ossuary where lie bleaching in the sun myriads
of fragments of pachyderms, chelonians, and even, some would have us
believe, fossil men, overwhelmed by unknown cataclysms ages and ages
ago.

When evening came the whole basin of the Platte River had been
crossed, and the plain extended to the extreme limits of the horizon,
which rose high owing to the altitude of the "Albatross."

During the night there were no more shrill whistles of locomotives or
deeper notes of the river steamers to trouble the quiet of the starry
firmament. Long bellowing occasionally reached the aeronef from the
herds of buffalo that roamed over the prairie in search of water and
pasturage. And when they ceased, the trampling of the grass under