by Jules Verne
Illustration: CAN YOU PICTURE TO YOURSELVES?
"Terrestrial volcanoes," said Barbicane, "are but molehills comparedwith those of the moon. Measuring the old craters formed by the firsteruptions of Vesuvius and Etna, we find them little more than three milesin breadth. In France the circle of Cantal measures six miles across; atCeyland the circle of the island is forty miles, which is considered thelargest on the globe. What are these diameters against that of Clavius,which we overlook at this moment?"
"What is its breadth?" asked Nicholl.
"It is 150 miles," replied Barbicane. "This circle is certainly the mostimportant on the moon, but many others measure 150, 100, or 75 miles."
"Ah! my friends," exclaimed Michel, "can you picture to yourselves whatthis now peaceful orb of night must have been when its craters, filledwith thunderings, vomited at the same time smoke and tongues of flame.What a wonderful spectacle then, and now what decay! This moon is nothingmore than a thin carcase of fireworks, whose squibs, rockets, serpentsand suns, after a superb brilliancy, have left but sadly broken cases.Who can say the cause, the reason, the motive force of these cataclysms?"
Barbicane was not listening to Michel Ardan; he was contemplating thoseramparts of Clavius, formed by large mountains spread over severalmiles. At the bottom of the immense cavity burrowed hundreds of smallextinguished craters, riddling the soil like a colander, and overlookedby a peak 15,000 feet high.
Around the plain appeared desolate. Nothing so arid as these reliefs,nothing so sad as these ruins of mountains, and (if we may so expressourselves) these fragments of peaks and mountains which strewed the soil.The satellite seemed to have burst at this spot.
The projectile was still advancing, and this movement did not subside.Circles, craters, and uprooted mountains succeeded each other incessantly.No more plains; no more seas. A never-ending Switzerland and Norway. Andlastly, in the centre of this region of crevasses, the most splendidmountain on the lunar disc, the dazzling Tycho, in which posterity willever preserve the name of the illustrious Danish astronomer.
In observing the full moon in a cloudless sky no one has failed to remarkthis brilliant point of the southern hemisphere. Michel Ardan used everymetaphor that his imagination could supply to designate it by. To him thisTycho was a focus of light, a centre of irradiation, a crater vomitingrays. It was the tire of a brilliant wheel, an _asteria_ enclosing thedisc with its silver tentacles, an enormous eye filled with flames, aglory carved for Pluto's head, a star launched by the Creator's hand,and crushed against the face of the moon!
Tycho forms such a concentration of light that the inhabitants of theearth can see it without glasses, though at a distance of 240,000 miles!Imagine, then, its intensity to the eye of observers placed at a distanceof only fifty miles! Seen through this pure ether, its brilliancy was sointolerable that Barbicane and his friends were obliged to blacken theirglasses with the gas smoke before they could bear the splendour. Thensilent, scarcely uttering an interjection of admiration, they gazed, theycontemplated. All their feelings, all their impressions, were concentratedin that look, as under any violent emotion all life is concentrated atthe heart.
Tycho belongs to the system of radiating mountains, like Aristarchusand Copernicus; but it is of all the most complete and decided, showingunquestionably the frightful volcanic action to which the formation ofthe moon is due. Tycho is situated in 43 deg. south lat., and 12 deg. eastlong. Its centre is occupied by a crater fifty miles broad. It assumesa slightly elliptical form, and is surrounded by an enclosure of annularramparts, which on the east and west overlook the outer plain from aheight of 15,000 feet. It is a group of Mont Blancs, placed round onecommon centre and crowned by radiating beams.
What this incomparable mountain really is, with all the projectionsconverging towards it, and the interior excrescences of its crater,photography itself could never represent. Indeed, it is during the fullmoon that Tycho is seen in all its splendour. Then all shadows disappear,the foreshortening of perspective disappears, and all proofs becomewhite--a disagreeable fact; for this strange region would have beenmarvellous if reproduced with photographic exactness. It is but a groupof hollows, craters, circles, a network of crests; then, as far as theeye could see, a whole volcanic network cast upon this encrusted soil.One can then understand that the bubbles of this central eruption havekept their first form. Crystallized by cooling, they have stereotypedthat aspect which the moon formerly presented when under the Plutonianforces.
The distance which separated the travellers from the annular summits ofTycho was not so great but that they could catch the principal details.Even on the causeway forming the fortifications of Tycho, the mountainshanging on to the interior and exterior sloping flanks rose in storieslike gigantic terraces. They appeared to be higher by 300 or 400 feetto the west than to the east. No system of terrestrial encampment couldequal these natural fortifications. A town built at the bottom of thiscircular cavity would have been utterly inaccessible.
Inaccessible and wonderfully extended over this soil covered withpicturesque projections! Indeed, nature had not left the bottom ofthis crater flat and empty. It possessed its own peculiar orography, amountainous system, making it a world in itself. The travellers coulddistinguish clearly cones, central hills, remarkable positions of the soil,naturally placed to receive the chefs-d'oeuvre of Selenite architecture.There was marked out the place for a temple, here the ground of a forum,on this spot the plan of a palace, in another the plateau for a citadel;the whole overlooked by a central mountain of 1500 feet. A vast circle,in which ancient Rome could have been held in its entirety ten timesover.
"Ah!" exclaimed Michel Ardan, enthusiastic at the sight; "what a grandtown might be constructed within that ring of mountains! A quiet city,a peaceful refuge, beyond all human misery. How calm and isolated thosemisanthropes, those haters of humanity might live there, and all who havea distaste for social life!"
"All! It would be too small for them," replied Barbicane simply.