All Around the Moon Part 30

"Indeed! Five thousand feet lower than Mount Everest--still for a lunar mountain, it is quite a respectable alt.i.tude."

"Respectable! Why it's an enormous alt.i.tude, my dear friend, if you compare it with the Moon's diameter. The Earth's diameter being more than 3-1/2 times greater than the Moon's, if the Earth's mountains bore the same ratio to those of the Moon, Everest should be more than sixteen miles high, whereas it is not quite six."

"How do the general heights of the Himalayahs compare with those of the highest lunar mountains?" asked Ardan, wondering what would be his next question.

"Fifteen peaks in the eastern or higher division of the Himalayahs, are higher than the loftiest lunar peaks," replied Barbican. "Even in the western, or lower section of the Himalayahs, some of the peaks exceed _Doerfel_."

"Which are the chief lunar mountains that exceed Mont Blanc in alt.i.tude?" asked Ardan, bravely suppressing a yawn.

"The following dozen, ranged, if my memory does not fail me, in the exact order of their respective heights;" replied Barbican, never wearied in answering such questions: "_Newton_, _Curtius_, _Casatus_, _Rheita_, _Short_, _Huyghens_, _Bianca.n.u.s_, _Tycho_, _Kircher_, _Clavius_, _Endymion_, and _Catharina_."

"Now those not quite up to Mont Blanc?" asked Ardan, hardly knowing what to say.

"Here they are, about half a dozen of them: _Moretus_, _Theophilus_, _Harpalus_, _Eratosthenes_, _Werner_, and _Piccolomini_," answered Barbican as ready as a schoolboy reciting his lesson, and pointing them out on the map as quickly as a compositor distributing his type.

"The next in rank?" asked Ardan, astounded at his friend's wonderful memory.

"The next in rank," replied Barbican promptly, "are those about the size of the Matterhorn, that is to say about 2-3/4 miles in height. They are _Macrobius_, _Delambre_, and _Conon_. Come," he added, seeing Ardan hesitating and at a loss what other question to ask, "don't you want to know what lunar mountains are about the same height as the Peak of Teneriffe? or as aetna? or as Mount Washington? You need not be afraid of puzzling me. I studied up the subject thoroughly, and therefore know all about it."

"Oh! I could listen to you with delight all day long!" cried Ardan, enthusiastically, though with some embarra.s.sment, for he felt a twinge of conscience in acting so falsely towards his beloved friend. "The fact is," he went on, "such a rational conversation as the present, on such an absorbing subject, with such a perfect master--"

"The Sun!" cried M'Nicholl starting up and cheering. "He's cleared the disc completely, and he's now himself again! Long life to him! Hurrah!"

"Hurrah!" cried the others quite as enthusiastically (Ardan did not seem a bit desirous to finish his sentence).

They tossed their maps aside and hastened to the window.

CHAPTER XVII.

TYCHO.

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

For some time, the travellers' whole attention was concentrated on the glorious Sun. His light was inexpressibly cheering; and his heat, soon penetrating the walls of the Projectile, infused a new and sweet life into 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 a seat in a quiet ecstasy of enjoyment. "How I pity Ardan's poor friends the Selenites during that night so long and so icy! How impatient they must be to see the Sun back again!"

"Yes," said Ardan, also sitting down the better to bask in the vivifying rays, "his light no doubt brings them to life and keeps them alive.

Without light or heat during all that dreary winter, they must freeze stiff like the frogs or become torpid like the bears. I can't imagine how they could get through it otherwise."

"I'm glad _we're_ through it anyhow," observed M'Nicholl. "I may at once acknowledge that I felt perfectly miserable as long as it lasted. I can now easily understand how the combined cold and darkness killed Doctor Kane's Esquimaux dogs. It was near killing me. I was so miserable that at 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 so interested, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sions in the dread Of this their desolation, and all hearts Were chilled into a selfish prayer for _light_!"

As he p.r.o.nounced these words in accents at once monotonous and melancholy, Ardan, fully appreciative, quietly gesticulated in perfect cadence with the rhythm. Then the three men remained completely silent for several minutes. Buried in recollection, or lost in thought, or magnetized by the bright Sun, they seemed to be half asleep while steeping their limbs in his vitalizing beams.

Barbican was the first to dissolve the reverie by jumping up. His sharp eye had noticed that the base of the Projectile, instead of keeping rigidly perpendicular to the lunar surface, turned away a little, so as to render the elliptical orbit somewhat elongated. This he made his companions immediately observe, and also called their attention to the fact that from this point they could easily have seen the Earth had it been Full, but that now, drowned in the Sun's beams, it was quite invisible. A more attractive spectacle, however, soon engaged their undivided attention--that of the Moon's southern regions, now brought within about the third of a mile by their telescopes. Immediately resuming their posts by the windows, they carefully noted every feature presented by the fantastic panorama that stretched itself out in endless lengths beneath their wondering eyes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THEY SEEMED HALF ASLEEP.]

Mount _Leibnitz_ and Mount _Doerfel_ form two separate groups developed in the regions of the extreme south. The first extends westwardly from the pole to the 84th parallel; the second, on the southeastern border, starting from the pole, reaches the neighborhood of the 65th. In the entangled valleys of their cl.u.s.tered peaks, appeared the dazzling sheets of white, noted by Father Secchi, but their peculiar nature Barbican could now examine with a greater prospect of certainty than the ill.u.s.trious 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. See how vividly they reflect the Sun's rays. Consolidated beds of lava could never shine with such dazzling uniformity. Therefore there must be both water and air on the Moon's surface. Not much--perhaps very little if you insist on it--but the fact that there is some can now no longer be questioned."

This a.s.sertion of Barbican's, made so positively by a man who never decided unless when thoroughly convinced, was a great triumph for Ardan, who, as the gracious reader doubtless remembers, had had a famous dispute with M'Nicholl on that very subject at Tampa.[D] His eyes brightened and a smile of pleasure played around his lips, but, with a great effort at self-restraint, he kept perfectly silent and would not permit himself even to look in the direction of the Captain. As for M'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 an indefinite succession of walled hollows and ring ramparts. They are the only chains met in this region of ridge-brimmed craters and circles; distinguished by no particular feature, they project a few pointed peaks here and there, some of which exceed four miles and a half in height.

This alt.i.tude, however, foreshortened as it was by the vertical position of the Projectile, could not be noticed just then, even if correct observation had been permitted by the dazzling surface.

Once more again before the travellers' eyes the Moon's disc revealed itself in all the old familiar features so characteristic of lunar landscapes--no blending of tones, no softening of colors, no graduation of shadows, every line glaring in white or black by reason of the total absence of refracted light. And yet the wonderfully peculiar character of this desolate world imparted to it a weird attraction as strangely fascinating as ever.

Over this chaotic region the travellers were now sweeping, as if borne on the wings of a storm; the peaks defiled beneath them; the yawning chasms revealed their ruin-strewn floors; the fissured cracks untwisted themselves; the ramparts showed all their sides; the mysterious holes presented their impenetrable depths; the cl.u.s.tered mountain summits and rings rapidly decomposed themselves: but in a moment again all had become more inextricably entangled than ever. Everything appeared to be the finished handiwork of volcanic agency, in the utmost purity and highest perfection. None of the mollifying effects of air or water could here be noticed. No smooth-capped mountains, no gently winding river channels, no vast prairie-lands of deposited sediment, no traces of vegetation, no signs of agriculture, no vestiges of a great city.

Nothing but vast beds of glistering lava, now rough like immense piles of scoriae and clinker, now smooth like crystal mirrors, and reflecting the Sun's rays with the same intolerable glare. Not the faintest speck of life. A world absolutely and completely dead, fixed, still, motionless--save when a gigantic land-slide, breaking off the vertical wall of a crater, plunged down into the soundless depths, with all the fury 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 snow flake, 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 the Moon's border, though perhaps due to different forces from those acting in the centre, still presented a character generally uniform. The same bulwark-surrounded hollows, the same abrupt projections of surface. Yet a different arrangement, as Barbican pointed out to his companions, might be naturally expected. In the central portion of the disc, the Moon's crust, before solidification, must have been subjected to two attractions--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 the contrary, the terrestrial attraction, having acted in a direction perpendicular to that of the lunar, should have exerted greater power, and therefore given a different shape to the general contour. But no remarkable difference had so far been perceived by terrestrial observers; and none could now be detected by our travellers. Therefore the Moon must have found in herself alone the principle of her shape and of her superficial development--that is, she owed nothing to external influences. "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 the Moon'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 ceased long 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 extinct Sun, so is the Moon an extinct Earth. My own opinion at present is that the Moon is now the image of death, but I can't say if she has ever been the abode of life."

"The abode of life!" cried Ardan, who had great repugnance in accepting the 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 an abandoned city as ever I saw, I should like to know what they are!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: ONCE MORE THE PIPES OF AN AQUEDUCT.]

He pointed to some very remarkable rocky formations in the neighborhood of _Short_, a ring mountain rising to an alt.i.tude considerably higher than that of Mont Blanc. Even Barbican and M'Nicholl could detect some regularity and semblance of order in the arrangement of these rocks, but this, of course, they looked on as a mere freak of nature, like the Lurlei Rock, the Giant's Causeway, or the Old Man of the Franconia Mountains. Ardan, however, would not accept such an easy mode of getting rid of a difficulty.

"See the ruins on that bluff," he exclaimed; "those steep sides must have been washed by a great river in the prehistoric times. That was the fortress. Farther down lay the city. There are the dismantled ramparts; why, there's the very coping of a portico still intact! Don't you see three broken pillars lying beside their pedestals? There! a little to the left of those arches that evidently once bore the pipes of an aqueduct! You don't see them? Well, look a little to the right, and there is something that you can see! As I'm a living man I have no difficulty in discerning the gigantic butments of a great bridge that formerly 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, without denying that he had good grounds for his a.s.sertion on this subject or questioning the general accuracy of his observations, content themselves with saying that the reason why they had failed to discover the wonderful city, was that Ardan's telescope was of a strange and peculiar construction. Being somewhat short-sighted, he had had it manufactured expressly for his own use, but it was of such singular power that his companions could not use it without hurting their eyes.

But, whether the ruins were real or not, the moments were evidently too precious to be lost in idle discussion. The great city of the Selenites soon disappeared on the remote horizon, and, what was of far greater importance, the distance of the Projectile from the Moon's disc began to increase so sensibly that the smaller details of the surface were soon lost in a confused ma.s.s, and it was only the lofty heights, the wide craters, the great ring mountains, and the vast plains that still continued to give sharp, distinctive outlines.

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