第83章

The latter was less abrupt, but the former more wooded.The engineer ascertained by consulting his pocket-compass that the direction of the river from the first turn was obviously southwest and northeast, and nearly straight for a length of about three miles.But it was to be supposed that this direction changed beyond that point, and that the Mercy continued to the north-west, towards the spurs of Mount Franklin, among which the river rose.

During one of these excursions, Gideon Spilett managed to get hold of two couples of living gallinaceae.They were birds with long, thin beaks, lengthened necks, short wings, and without any appearance of a tail.

Herbert rightly gave them the name of tinamous, and it was resolved that they should be the first tenants of their future poultry-yard.

But till then the guns had not spoken, and the first report which awoke the echoes of the forest of the Far West was provoked by the appearance of a beautiful bird, resembling the kingfisher.

"I recognize him!" cried Pencroft, and it seemed as if his gun went off by itself.

"What do you recognize?" asked the reporter.

"The bird which escaped us on our first excursion, and from which we gave the name to that part of the forest.""A jacamar!" cried Herbert.

It was indeed a jacamar, of which the plumage shines with a metallic luster.A shot brought it to the ground, and Top carried it to the canoe.

At the same time half a dozen lories were brought down.The lory is of the size of a pigeon, the plumage dashed with green, part of the wings crimson, and its crest bordered with white.To the young boy belonged the honor of this shot, and he was proud enough of it.Lories are better food than the jacamar, the flesh of which is rather tough, but it was difficult to persuade Pencroft that he had not killed the king of eatable birds.It was ten o'clock in the morning when the canoe reached a second angle of the Mercy, nearly five miles from its mouth.Here a halt was made for breakfast under the shade of some splendid trees.The river still measured from sixty to seventy feet in breadth, and its bed from five to six feet in depth.The engineer had observed that it was increased by numerous affluents, but they were unnavigable, being simply little streams.As to the forest, including Jacamar Wood, as well as the forests of the Far West, it extended as far as the eye could reach.In no place, either in the depths of the forests or under the trees on the banks of the Mercy, was the presence of man revealed.The explorers could not discover one suspicious trace.It was evident that the woodman's axe had never touched these trees, that the pioneer's knife had never severed the creepers hanging from one trunk to another in the midst of tangled brushwood and long grass.If castaways had landed on the island, they could not have yet quitted the shore, and it was not in the woods that the survivors of the supposed shipwreck should be sought.

The engineer therefore manifested some impatience to reach the western coast of Lincoln Island, which was at least five miles distant according to his estimation.

The voyage was continued, and as the Mercy appeared to flow not towards the shore, but rather towards Mount Franklin, it was decided that they should use the boat as long as there was enough water under its keel to float it.It was both fatigue spared and time gained, for they would have been obliged to cut a path through the thick wood with their axes.But soon the flow completely failed them, either the tide was going down, and it was about the hour, or it could no longer be felt at this distance from the mouth of the Mercy.They had therefore to make use of the oars.Herbert and Neb each took one, and Pencroft took the scull.The forest soon became less dense, the trees grew further apart and often quite isolated.But the further they were from each other the more magnificent they appeared, profiting, as they did, by the free, pure air which circulated around them.

What splendid specimens of the flora of this latitude! Certainly their presence would have been enough for a botanist to name without hesitation the parallel which traversed Lincoln Island.

"Eucalypti!" cried Herbert.

They were, in fact, those splendid trees, the giants of the extratropical zone, the congeners of the Australian and New Zealand eucalyptus, both situated under the same latitude as Lincoln Island.Some rose to a height of two hundred feet.Their trunks at the base measured twenty feet in circumference, and their bark was covered by a network of farrows containing a red, sweet-smelling gum.Nothing is more wonderful or more singular than those enormous specimens of the order of the myrtaceae, with their leaves placed vertically and not horizontally, so that an edge and not a surface looks upwards, the effect being that the sun's rays penetrate more freely among the trees.

The ground at the foot of the eucalypti was carpeted with grass, and from the bushes escaped flights of little birds, which glittered in the sunlight like winged rubies.