All Around the Moon

  CHAPTER XVII.

  TYCHO.

  It was now exactly six o'clock in the evening. The Sun, completely clearof all contact with the lunar disc, steeped the whole Projectile in hisgolden rays. The travellers, vertically over the Moon's south pole,were, as Barbican soon ascertained, about 30 miles distant from it, theexact distance they had been from the north pole--a proof that theelliptic curve still maintained itself with mathematical rigor.

  For some time, the travellers' whole attention was concentrated on theglorious Sun. His light was inexpressibly cheering; and his heat, soonpenetrating the walls of the Projectile, infused a new and sweet lifeinto their chilled and exhausted frames. The ice rapidly disappeared,and the windows soon resumed their former perfect transparency.

  "Oh! how good the pleasant sunlight is!" cried the Captain, sinking on aseat in a quiet ecstasy of enjoyment. "How I pity Ardan's poor friendsthe Selenites during that night so long and so icy! How impatient theymust be to see the Sun back again!"

  "Yes," said Ardan, also sitting down the better to bask in the vivifyingrays, "his light no doubt brings them to life and keeps them alive.Without light or heat during all that dreary winter, they must freezestiff like the frogs or become torpid like the bears. I can't imaginehow they could get through it otherwise."

  "I'm glad _we're_ through it anyhow," observed M'Nicholl. "I may at onceacknowledge that I felt perfectly miserable as long as it lasted. I cannow easily understand how the combined cold and darkness killed DoctorKane's Esquimaux dogs. It was near killing me. I was so miserable thatat last I could neither talk myself nor bear to hear others talk."

  "My own case exactly," said Barbican--"that is," he added hastily,correcting himself, "I tried to talk because I found Ardan sointerested, but in spite of all we said, and saw, and had to think of,Byron's terrible dream would continually rise up before me:

  "The bright Sun was extinguished, and the Stars Wandered all darkling in the eternal space, Rayless and pathless, and the icy Earth Swung blind and blackening in the Moonless air. Morn came and went, and came and brought no day! And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation, and all hearts Were chilled into a selfish prayer for _light_!"

  As he pronounced these words in accents at once monotonous andmelancholy, Ardan, fully appreciative, quietly gesticulated in perfectcadence with the rhythm. Then the three men remained completely silentfor several minutes. Buried in recollection, or lost in thought, ormagnetized by the bright Sun, they seemed to be half asleep whilesteeping their limbs in his vitalizing beams.

  Barbican was the first to dissolve the reverie by jumping up. His sharpeye had noticed that the base of the Projectile, instead of keepingrigidly perpendicular to the lunar surface, turned away a little, so asto render the elliptical orbit somewhat elongated. This he made hiscompanions immediately observe, and also called their attention to thefact that from this point they could easily have seen the Earth had itbeen Full, but that now, drowned in the Sun's beams, it was quiteinvisible. A more attractive spectacle, however, soon engaged theirundivided attention--that of the Moon's southern regions, now broughtwithin about the third of a mile by their telescopes. Immediatelyresuming their posts by the windows, they carefully noted every featurepresented by the fantastic panorama that stretched itself out in endlesslengths beneath their wondering eyes.

  THEY SEEMED HALF ASLEEP.]

  Mount _Leibnitz_ and Mount _Doerfel_ form two separate groups developedin the regions of the extreme south. The first extends westwardly fromthe pole to the 84th parallel; the second, on the southeastern border,starting from the pole, reaches the neighborhood of the 65th. In theentangled valleys of their clustered peaks, appeared the dazzling sheetsof white, noted by Father Secchi, but their peculiar nature Barbicancould now examine with a greater prospect of certainty than theillustrious Roman astronomer had ever enjoyed.

  "They're beds of snow," he said at last in a decided tone.

  "Snow!" exclaimed M'Nicholl.

  "Yes, snow, or rather glaciers heavily coated with glittering ice. Seehow vividly they reflect the Sun's rays. Consolidated beds of lava couldnever shine with such dazzling uniformity. Therefore there must be bothwater and air on the Moon's surface. Not much--perhaps very little ifyou insist on it--but the fact that there is some can now no longer bequestioned."

  This assertion of Barbican's, made so positively by a man who neverdecided unless when thoroughly convinced, was a great triumph for Ardan,who, as the gracious reader doubtless remembers, had had a famousdispute with M'Nicholl on that very subject at Tampa.[D] His eyesbrightened and a smile of pleasure played around his lips, but, with agreat effort at self-restraint, he kept perfectly silent and would notpermit himself even to look in the direction of the Captain. As forM'Nicholl, he was apparently too much absorbed in _Doerfel_ and_Leibnitz_ to mind anything else.

  These mountains rose from plains of moderate extent, bounded by anindefinite succession of walled hollows and ring ramparts. They are theonly chains met in this region of ridge-brimmed craters and circles;distinguished by no particular feature, they project a few pointed peakshere and there, some of which exceed four miles and a half in height.This altitude, however, foreshortened as it was by the vertical positionof the Projectile, could not be noticed just then, even if correctobservation had been permitted by the dazzling surface.

  Once more again before the travellers' eyes the Moon's disc revealeditself in all the old familiar features so characteristic of lunarlandscapes--no blending of tones, no softening of colors, no graduationof shadows, every line glaring in white or black by reason of the totalabsence of refracted light. And yet the wonderfully peculiar characterof this desolate world imparted to it a weird attraction as strangelyfascinating as ever.

  Over this chaotic region the travellers were now sweeping, as if borneon the wings of a storm; the peaks defiled beneath them; the yawningchasms revealed their ruin-strewn floors; the fissured cracks untwistedthemselves; the ramparts showed all their sides; the mysterious holespresented their impenetrable depths; the clustered mountain summits andrings rapidly decomposed themselves: but in a moment again all hadbecome more inextricably entangled than ever. Everything appeared to bethe finished handiwork of volcanic agency, in the utmost purity andhighest perfection. None of the mollifying effects of air or water couldhere be noticed. No smooth-capped mountains, no gently winding riverchannels, no vast prairie-lands of deposited sediment, no traces ofvegetation, no signs of agriculture, no vestiges of a great city.Nothing but vast beds of glistering lava, now rough like immense pilesof scoriae and clinker, now smooth like crystal mirrors, and reflectingthe Sun's rays with the same intolerable glare. Not the faintest speckof life. A world absolutely and completely dead, fixed, still,motionless--save when a gigantic land-slide, breaking off the verticalwall of a crater, plunged down into the soundless depths, with all thefury too of a crashing avalanche, with all the speed of a Niagara, but,in the total absence of atmosphere, noiseless as a feather, as a snowflake, as a grain of impalpable dust.

  Careful observations, taken by Barbican and repeated by his companions,soon satisfied them that the ridgy outline of the mountains on theMoon's border, though perhaps due to different forces from those actingin the centre, still presented a character generally uniform. The samebulwark-surrounded hollows, the same abrupt projections of surface. Yeta different arrangement, as Barbican pointed out to his companions,might be naturally expected. In the central portion of the disc, theMoon's crust, before solidification, must have been subjected to twoattractions--that of the Moon herself and that of the Earth--acting,however, in contrary directions and therefore, in a certain sense,serving to neutralize each other. Towards the border of her disc, on thecontrary, the terrestrial attraction, having acted in a directionperpendicular to that of the lunar, should have exerted greater power,and therefore given a different shape to the general contour. But noremarkable difference had so far been perceived by terrestrialobservers; and none could
now be detected by our travellers. Thereforethe Moon must have found in herself alone the principle of her shape andof her superficial development--that is, she owed nothing to externalinfluences. "Arago was perfectly right, therefore," concluded Barbican,"in the remarkable opinion to which he gave expression thirty years ago:

  'No external action whatever has contributed to the formation of theMoon's diversified surface.'"

  "But don't you think, Barbican," asked the Captain, "that every force,internal or external, that might modify the Moon's shape, has ceasedlong ago?"

  "I am rather inclined to that opinion," said Barbican; "it is not,however, a new one. Descartes maintained that as the Earth is an extinctSun, so is the Moon an extinct Earth. My own opinion at present is thatthe Moon is now the image of death, but I can't say if she has ever beenthe abode of life."

  "The abode of life!" cried Ardan, who had great repugnance in acceptingthe idea that the Moon was no better than a heap of cinders and ashes;"why, look there! If those are not as neat a set of the ruins of anabandoned city as ever I saw, I should like to know what they are!"

  ONCE MORE THE PIPES OF AN AQUEDUCT.]

  He pointed to some very remarkable rocky formations in theneighborhood of _Short_, a ring mountain rising to an altitudeconsiderably higher than that of Mont Blanc. Even Barbican and M'Nichollcould detect some regularity and semblance of order in the arrangementof these rocks, but this, of course, they looked on as a mere freak ofnature, like the Lurlei Rock, the Giant's Causeway, or the Old Man ofthe Franconia Mountains. Ardan, however, would not accept such an easymode of getting rid of a difficulty.

  "See the ruins on that bluff," he exclaimed; "those steep sides musthave been washed by a great river in the prehistoric times. That was thefortress. Farther down lay the city. There are the dismantled ramparts;why, there's the very coping of a portico still intact! Don't you seethree broken pillars lying beside their pedestals? There! a little tothe left of those arches that evidently once bore the pipes of anaqueduct! You don't see them? Well, look a little to the right, andthere is something that you can see! As I'm a living man I have nodifficulty in discerning the gigantic butments of a great bridge thatformerly spanned that immense river!"

  Did he really see all this? To this day he affirms stoutly that he did,and even greater wonders besides. His companions, however, withoutdenying that he had good grounds for his assertion on this subject orquestioning the general accuracy of his observations, content themselveswith saying that the reason why they had failed to discover thewonderful city, was that Ardan's telescope was of a strange andpeculiar construction. Being somewhat short-sighted, he had had itmanufactured expressly for his own use, but it was of such singularpower that his companions could not use it without hurting their eyes.

  But, whether the ruins were real or not, the moments were evidently tooprecious to be lost in idle discussion. The great city of the Selenitessoon disappeared on the remote horizon, and, what was of far greaterimportance, the distance of the Projectile from the Moon's disc began toincrease so sensibly that the smaller details of the surface were soonlost in a confused mass, and it was only the lofty heights, the widecraters, the great ring mountains, and the vast plains that stillcontinued to give sharp, distinctive outlines.

  A little to their left, the travellers could now plainly distinguish oneof the most remarkable of the Moon's craters, _Newton_, so well known toall lunar astronomers. Its ramparts, forming a perfect circle, rise tosuch a height, at least 22,000 feet, as to seem insurmountable.

  "You can, no doubt, notice for yourselves," said Barbican, "that theexternal height of this mountain is far from being equal to the depth ofits crater. The enormous pit, in fact, seems to be a soundless sea ofpitchy black, the bottom of which the Sun's rays have never reached.There, as Humboldt says, reigns eternal darkness, so absolute thatEarth-shine or even Sunlight is never able to dispel it. Had Michael'sfriends the old mythologists ever known anything about it, they woulddoubtless have made it the entrance to the infernal regions. On thewhole surface of our Earth, there is no mountain even remotelyresembling it. It is a perfect type of the lunar crater. Like most ofthem, it shows that the peculiar formation of the Moon's surface is due,first, to the cooling of the lunar crust; secondly, to the cracking frominternal pressure; and, thirdly, to the violent volcanic action inconsequence. This must have been of a far fiercer nature than it hasever been with us. The matter was ejected to a vast height till greatmountains were formed; and still the action went on, until at last thefloor of the crater sank to a depth far lower than the level of theexternal plain."

  "You may be right," said Ardan by way of reply; "as for me, I'm lookingout for another city. But I'm sorry to say that our Projectile isincreasing its distance so fast that, even if one lay at my feet at thismoment, I doubt very much if I could see it a bit better than either youor the Captain."

  _Newton_ was soon passed, and the Projectile followed a course that tookit directly over the ring mountain _Moretus_. A little to the west thetravellers could easily distinguish the summits of _Blancanus_, 7,000feet high, and, towards seven o'clock in the evening, they wereapproaching the neighborhood of _Clavius_.

  This walled-plain, one of the most remarkable on the Moon, lies 55 deg. S.by 15 deg. E. Its height is estimated at 16,000 feet, but it is consideredto be about a hundred and fifty miles in diameter. Of this vast crater,the travellers now at a distance of 250 miles, reduced to 2-1/2 by theirtelescopes, had a magnificent bird's-eye view.

  "Our terrestrial volcanoes," said Barbican, "as you can now readilyjudge for yourselves, are no more than molehills when compared withthose of the Moon. Measure the old craters formed by the early eruptionsof Vesuvius and AEtna, and you will find them little more than threemiles in diameter. The crater of Cantal in central France is only aboutsix miles in width; the famous valley in Ceylon, called the _Crater_,though not at all due to volcanic action, is 44 miles across and isconsidered to be the greatest in the world. But even this is very littlein comparison to the diameter of _Clavius_ lying beneath us at thepresent moment."

  "How much is its diameter?" asked the Captain.

  "At least one hundred and forty-two miles," replied Barbican; "it isprobably the greatest in the Moon, but many others measure more than ahundred miles across."

  "Dear boys," said Ardan, half to himself, half to the others, "onlyimagine the delicious state of things on the surface of the gentle Moonwhen these craters, brimming over with hissing lava, were vomitingforth, all at the same time, showers of melted stones, clouds ofblinding smoke, and sheets of blasting flame! What an intenselyoverpowering spectacle was here presented once, but now, how are themighty fallen! Our Moon, as at present beheld, seems to be nothing morethan the skinny spectre left after a brilliant display of fireworks,when the spluttering crackers, the glittering wheels, the hissingserpents, the revolving suns, and the dazzling stars, are all 'playedout', and nothing remains to tell of the gorgeous spectacle but a fewblackened sticks and half a dozen half burned bits of pasteboard. Ishould like to hear one of you trying to explain the cause, the reason,the principle, the philosophy of such tremendous cataclysms!"

  Barbican's only reply was a series of nods, for in truth he had notheard a single word of Ardan's philosophic explosion. His ears were withhis eyes, and these were obstinately bent on the gigantic ramparts of_Clavius_, formed of concentric mountain ridges, which were actuallyleagues in depth. On the floor of the vast cavity, could be seenhundreds of smaller craters, mottling it like a skimming dish, andpierced here and there by sharp peaks, one of which could hardly be lessthan 15,000 feet high.

  All around, the plain was desolate in the extreme. You could notconceive how anything could be barrener than these serrated outlines, orgloomier than these shattered mountains--until you looked at the plainthat encircled them. Ardan hardly exaggerated when he called it thescene of a battle fought thousands of years ago but still white with thehideous bones of overthrown peaks, slaughtered mountains and mutilatedprecipices!
/>
  "Hills amid the air encountered hills, Hurled to and fro in jaculation dire,"

  murmured M'Nicholl, who could quote you Milton quite as readily as theBible.

  "This must have been the spot," muttered Barbican to himself, "where thebrittle shell of the cooling sphere, being thicker than usual, offeredgreater resistance to an eruption of the red-hot nucleus. Hence thesepiled up buttresses, and these orderless heaps of consolidated lava andejected scoriae."

  The Projectile advanced, but the scene of desolation seemed to remainunchanged. Craters, ring mountains, pitted plateaus dotted withshapeless wrecks, succeeded each other without interruption. For levelplain, for dark "sea," for smooth plateau, the eye here sought in vain.It was a Swiss Greenland, an Icelandic Norway, a Sahara of shatteredcrust studded with countless hills of glassy lava.

  At last, in the very centre of this blistered region, right too at itsvery culmination, the travellers came on the brightest and mostremarkable mountain of the Moon. In the dazzling _Tycho_ they found itan easy matter to recognize the famous lunar point, which the world willfor ever designate by the name of the distinguished astronomer ofDenmark.

  This brilliant luminosity of the southern hemisphere, no one that evergazes at the Full Moon in a cloudless sky, can help noticing. Ardan, whohad always particularly admired it, now hailed it as an old friend, andalmost exhausted breath, imagination and vocabulary in the epithets withwhich he greeted this cynosure of the lunar mountains.

  "Hail!" he cried, "thou blazing focus of glittering streaks, thoucoruscating nucleus of irradiation, thou starting point of raysdivergent, thou egress of meteoric flashes! Hub of the silver wheel thatever rolls in silent majesty over the starry plains of Night! Paragon ofjewels enchased in a carcanet of dazzling brilliants! Eye of theuniverse, beaming with heavenly resplendescence!

  "Who shall say what thou art? Diana's nimbus? The golden clasp of herfloating robes? The blazing head of the great bolt that rivets the lunarhemispheres in union inseverable? Or cans't thou have been some errantbolide, which missing its way, butted blindly against the lunar face,and there stuck fast, like a Minie ball mashed against a cast-irontarget? Alas! nobody knows. Not even Barbican is able to penetrate thymystery. But one thing _I_ know. Thy dazzling glare so sore my eyes hathmade that longer on thy light to gaze I do not dare. Captain, have youany smoked glass?"

  In spite of this anti-climax, Ardan's companions could hardly considerhis utterings either as ridiculous or over enthusiastic. They couldeasily excuse his excitement on the subject. And so could we, if we onlyremember that _Tycho_, though nearly a quarter of a million milesdistant, is such a luminous point on the lunar disc, that almost anymoonlit night it can be easily perceived by the unaided terrestrial eye.What then must have been its splendor in the eyes of our travellerswhose telescopes brought it actually four thousand times nearer! Nowonder that with smoked glasses, they endeavored to soften off itseffulgent glare! Then in hushed silence, or at most uttering atintervals a few interjections expressive of their intense admiration,they remained for some time completely engrossed in the overwhelmingspectacle. For the time being, every sentiment, impression, thought,feeling on their part, was concentrated in the eye, just as at othertimes under violent excitement every throb of our life is concentratedin the heart.

  _Tycho_ belongs to the system of lunar craters that is called_radiating_, like _Aristarchus_ or _Copernicus_, which had been alreadyseen and highly admired by our travellers at their first approach to theMoon. But it is decidedly the most remarkable and conspicuous of themall. It occupies the great focus of disruption, whence it sends outgreat streaks thousands of miles in length; and it gives the mostunmistakable evidence of the terribly eruptive nature of those forcesthat once shattered the Moon's solidified shell in this portion of thelunar surface.

  Situated in the southern latitude of 43 deg. by an eastern longitude of 12 deg.,_Tycho's_ crater, somewhat elliptical in shape, is 54 miles in diameterand upwards of 16,000 feet in depth. Its lofty ramparts are buttressedby other mountains, Mont Blancs in size, all grouped around it, and allstreaked with the great divergent fissures that radiate from it as acentre.

  Of what this incomparable mountain really is, with all these lines ofprojections converging towards it and with all these prominent pointsof relief protruding within its crater, photography has, so far, beenable to give us only a very unsatisfactory idea. The reason too is verysimple: it is only at Full Moon that _Tycho_ reveals himself in all hissplendor. The shadows therefore vanishing, the perspectiveforeshortenings disappear and the views become little better than a deadblank. This is the more to be regretted as this wonderful region is wellworthy of being represented with the greatest possible photographicaccuracy. It is a vast agglomeration of holes, craters, ring formations,a complicated intersection of crests--in short, a distracting volcanicnetwork flung over the blistered soil. The ebullitions of the centraleruption still evidently preserve their original form. As they firstappeared, so they lie. Crystallizing as they cooled, they havestereotyped in imperishable characters the aspect formerly presented bythe whole Moon's surface under the influences of recent plutonicupheaval.

  Our travellers were far more fortunate than the photographers. Thedistance separating them from the peaks of _Tycho's_ concentric terraceswas not so considerable as to conceal the principal details from a verysatisfactory view. They could easily distinguish the annular ramparts ofthe external circumvallation, the mountains buttressing the giganticwalls internally as well as externally, the vast esplanades descendingirregularly and abruptly to the sunken plains all around. They couldeven detect a difference of a few hundred feet in altitude in favor ofthe western or right hand side over the eastern. They could also seethat these dividing ridges were actually inaccessible and completelyunsurmountable, at least by ordinary terrestrian efforts. No system ofcastrametation ever devised by Polybius or Vauban could bear theslightest comparison with such vast fortifications, A city built on thefloor of the circular cavity could be no more reached by the outsideLunarians than if it had been built in the planet Mars.

  This idea set Ardan off again. "Yes," said he, "such a city would be atonce completely inaccessible, and still not inconveniently situated in aplateau full of aspects decidedly picturesque. Even in the depths ofthis immense crater, Nature, as you can see, has left no flat and emptyvoid. You can easily trace its special oreography, its various mountainsystems which turn it into a regular world on a small scale. Notice itscones, its central hills, its valleys, its substructures already cut anddry and therefore quietly prepared to receive the masterpieces ofSelenite architecture. Down there to the left is a lovely spot for aSaint Peter's; to the right, a magnificent site for a Forum; here aLouvre could be built capable of entrancing Michael Angelo himself;there a citadel could be raised to which even Gibraltar would be amolehill! In the middle rises a sharp peak which can hardly be less thana mile in height--a grand pedestal for the statue of some SeleniteVincent de Paul or George Washington. And around them all is a mightymountain-ring at least 3 miles high, but which, to an eye looking fromthe centre of our vast city, could not appear to be more than five orsix hundred feet. Enormous circus, where mighty Rome herself in herpalmiest days, though increased tenfold, would have no reason tocomplain for want of room!"

  He stopped for a few seconds, perhaps to take breath, and then resumed:

  "Oh what an abode of serene happiness could be constructed within thisshadow-fringed ring of the mighty mountains! O blessed refuge,unassailable by aught of human ills! What a calm unruffled life could beenjoyed within thy hallowed precincts, even by those cynics, thosehaters of humanity, those disgusted reconstructors of society, thosemisanthropes and misogynists old and young, who are continually writingwhining verses in odd corners of the newspapers!"

  "Right at last, Ardan, my boy!" cried M'Nicholl, quietly rubbing theglass of his spectacles; "I should like to see the whole lot of themcarted in there without a moment's delay!"

  "It couldn't hold the ha
lf of them!" observed Barbican drily.

  [Footnote D: BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, pp. 295 _et seq._]