I now turned my attention to the manuscripts. The first that attracted my notice was of an intensely absorbing character, and very ancient—so ancient, indeed, that not only had the original long crumbled away, but many of the succeeding facsimiles shared the same fate, the one I had before me being about the five-thousandth that had been taken, and it was calculated that the average life of each manuscript was about twenty thousand years. The original was supposed to have been written by one of the brothers Ylpa, who migrated from Neuroomia in a small vessel of their own, the Orino, during one of those terrible earthquakes which at very long intervals of time shattered portions of the great icefield. They sailed in a northerly direction till they came to the shores of another continent, which they explored and sketched, but the coast line, which ran, according to the plan, in a westerly direction for probably three or four thousand miles, was not like that of any of the continents known to our maps. It was evidently the coast of some unknown land, but what land could that be?
Was it all fiction? I asked of myself. No; that was impossible, for several things in the sketch and description proved conclusively that they were not the work of imagination. The capes, headlands,
