ten o’clock
Top quickly started them , but his master soon called him back , for the time had not come to commence hunting ; that would be attended to later . The engineer was not a man who would allow himself to be diverted from his fixed idea . It might even have been said that he did not observe the country at all , either in its configuration or in its natural productions , his great aim being to climb the mountain before him , and therefore straight towards it he went . At ten o'clock a halt of a few minutes was made . On leaving the forest , the mountain system of the country appeared before the explorers . The mountain was composed of two cones ; the first , truncated at a height of about two thousand five hundred feet , was sustained by buttresses , which appeared to branch out like the talons of an immense claw set on the ground . Between these were narrow valleys , bristling with trees , the last clumps of which rose to the top of the lowest cone .