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Chapter XVII. Tycho
At six in the evening the projectile passed the south pole at
less than forty miles off, a distance equal to that already reached
at the north pole. The elliptical curve was being rigidly carried
out.
At this moment the travelers once more entered the blessed rays
of the sun. They saw once more those stars which move slowly from
east to west. The radiant orb was saluted by a triple hurrah. With
its light it also sent heat, which soon pierced the metal walls.
The glass resumed its accustomed appearance. The layers of ice
melted as if by enchantment; and immediately, for economy’s
sake, the gas was put out, the air apparatus alone consuming its
usual quantity.
“Ah!” said Nicholl, “these rays of heat are
good. With what impatience must the Selenites wait the reappearance
of the orb of day.”
“Yes,” replied Michel Ardan, “imbibing as it
were the brilliant ether, light and heat, all life is contained in
them.”
At this moment the bottom of the projectile deviated somewhat
from the lunar surface, in order to follow the slightly lengthened
elliptical orbit. From this point, had the earth been at the full,
Barbicane and his companions could have seen it, but immersed in
the sun’s irradiation she was quite invisible. Another
spectacle attracted their attention, that of the southern part of
the moon, brought by the glasses to within 450 yards. They did not
again leave the scuttles, and noted every detail of this
fantastical continent.
Mounts Doerful and Leibnitz formed two separate groups very near
the south pole. The first group extended from the pole to the
eighty-fourth parallel, on the eastern part of the orb; the second
occupied the eastern border, extending from the 65°
of latitude to the pole.
On their capriciously formed ridge appeared dazzling sheets, as
mentioned by Pere Secchi. With more certainty than the illustrious
Roman astronomer, Barbicane was enabled to recognize their
nature.
“They are snow,” he exclaimed.
“Snow?” repeated Nicholl.
“Yes, Nicholl, snow; the surface of which is deeply
frozen. See how they reflect the luminous rays. Cooled lava would
never give out such intense reflection. There must then be water,
there must be air on the moon. As little as you please, but the
fact can no longer be contested.” No, it could not be. And if
ever Barbicane should see the earth again, his notes will bear
witness to this great fact in his selenographic observations.
These mountains of Doerful and Leibnitz rose in the midst of
plains of a medium extent, which were bounded by an indefinite
succession of circles and annular ramparts. These two chains are
the only ones met with in this region of circles. Comparatively but
slightly marked, they throw up here and there some sharp points,
the highest summit of which attains an altitude of 24,600 feet.
But the projectile was high above all this landscape, and the
projections disappeared in the intense brilliancy of the disc. And
to the eyes of the travelers there reappeared that original aspect
of the lunar landscapes, raw in tone, without gradation of colors,
and without degrees of shadow, roughly black and white, from the
want of diffusion of light.
But the sight of this desolate world did not fail to captivate
them by its very strangeness. They were moving over this region as
if they had been borne on the breath of some storm, watching
heights defile under their feet, piercing the cavities with their
eyes, going down into the rifts, climbing the ramparts, sounding
these mysterious holes, and leveling all cracks. But no trace of
vegetation, no appearance of cities; nothing but stratification,
beds of lava, overflowings polished like immense mirrors,
reflecting the sun’s rays with overpowering brilliancy.
Nothing belonging to a living world— everything to a dead
world, where avalanches, rolling from the summits of the mountains,
would disperse noiselessly at the bottom of the abyss, retaining
the motion, but wanting the sound. In any case it was the image of
death, without its being possible even to say that life had ever
existed there.
Michel Ardan, however, thought he recognized a heap of ruins, to
which he drew Barbicane’s attention. It was about the 80th
parallel, in 30° longitude. This heap of stones, rather regularly
placed, represented a vast fortress, overlooking a long rift, which
in former days had served as a bed to the rivers of prehistorical
times. Not far from that, rose to a height of 17,400 feet the
annular mountain of Short, equal to the Asiatic Caucasus. Michel
Ardan, with his accustomed ardor, maintained “the
evidences” of his fortress. Beneath it he discerned the
dismantled ramparts of a town; here the still intact arch of a
portico, there two or three columns lying under their base; farther
on, a succession of arches which must have supported the conduit of
an aqueduct; in another part the sunken pillars of a gigantic
bridge, run into the thickest parts of the rift. He distinguished
all this, but with so much imagination in his glance, and through
glasses so fantastical, that we must mistrust his observation. But
who could affirm, who would dare to say, that the amiable fellow
did not really see that which his two companions would not see?
Moments were too precious to be sacrificed in idle discussion.
The selenite city, whether imaginary or not, had already
disappeared afar off. The distance of the projectile from the lunar
disc was on the increase, and the details of the soil were being
lost in a confused jumble. The reliefs, the circles, the craters,
and the plains alone remained, and still showed their boundary
lines distinctly. At this moment, to the left, lay extended one of
the finest circles of lunar orography, one of the curiosities of
this continent. It was Newton, which Barbicane recognized without
trouble, by referring to the Mappa Selenographica.
Newton is situated in exactly 77° south latitude, and 16° east
longitude. It forms an annular crater, the ramparts of which,
rising to a height of 21,300 feet, seemed to be impassable.
Barbicane made his companions observe that the height of this
mountain above the surrounding plain was far from equaling the
depth of its crater. This enormous hole was beyond all measurement,
and formed a gloomy abyss, the bottom of which the sun’s rays
could never reach. There, according to Humboldt, reigns utter
darkness, which the light of the sun and the earth cannot break.
Mythologists could well have made it the mouth of hell.
“Newton,” said Barbicane, “is the most perfect
type of these annular mountains, of which the earth possesses no
sample. They prove that the moon’s formation, by means of
cooling, is due to violent causes; for while, under the pressure of
internal fires the reliefs rise to considerable height, the depths
withdraw far below the lunar level.”
“I do not dispute the fact,” replied Michel
Ardan.
Some minutes after passing Newton, the projectile directly
overlooked the annular mountains of Moret. It skirted at some
distance the summits of Blancanus, and at about half-past seven in
the evening reached the circle of Clavius1.
This circle, one of the most remarkable of the disc, is situated
in 58° south latitude, and 15° east longitude. Its
height is estimated at 22,950 feet. The travelers, at a distance of
twenty-four miles (reduced to four by their glasses) could admire
this vast crater in its entirety.
“Terrestrial volcanoes,” said Barbicane, “are
but mole-hills compared with those of the moon. Measuring the old
craters formed by the first eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna, we find
them little more than three miles in breadth. In France the circle
of Cantal measures six miles across; at Ceyland the circle of the
island is forty miles, which is considered the largest 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 most important on the moon, but many others
measure 150, 100, or 75 miles.”
“Ah! my friends,” exclaimed Michel, “can you
picture to yourselves what this now peaceful orb of night must have
been when its craters, filled with thunderings, vomited at the same
time smoke and tongues of flame. What a wonderful spectacle then,
and now what decay! This moon is nothing more than a thin carcase
of fireworks, whose squibs, rockets, serpents, and 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 these ramparts of Clavius, formed by large mountains
spread over several miles. At the bottom of the immense cavity
burrowed hundreds of small extinguished craters, riddling the soil
like a colander, and overlooked by 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 express ourselves) 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. And lastly, in the canter of this region of
crevasses, the most splendid mountain on the lunar disc, the
dazzling Tycho2, in which posterity will ever preserve the name of
the illustrious Danish astronomer.
In observing the full moon in a cloudless sky no one has failed
to remark this brilliant point of the southern hemisphere. Michel
Ardan used every metaphor that his imagination could supply to
designate it by. To him this Tycho was a focus of light, a center
of irradiation, a crater vomiting rays. It was the tire of a
brilliant wheel, an asteria enclosing the disc with its silver
tentacles, an enormous eye filled with flames, a glory 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 the earth 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 distance of only fifty miles! Seen through this pure
ether, its brilliancy was so intolerable that Barbicane and his
friends were obliged to blacken their glasses with the gas smoke
before they could bear the splendor. Then silent, scarcely uttering
an interjection of admiration, they gazed, they contemplated. All
their feelings, all their impressions, were concentrated in that
look, as under any violent emotion all life is concentrated at the
heart.
Tycho belongs to the system of radiating mountains, like
Aristarchus and Copernicus; but it is of all the most complete and
decided, showing unquestionably the frightful volcanic action to
which the formation of the moon is due. Tycho is situated in 43°
south latitude, and 12° east longitude. Its center
is occupied by a crater fifty miles broad. It assumes a slightly
elliptical form, and is surrounded by an enclosure of annular
ramparts, which on the east and west overlook the outer plain from
a height of 15,000 feet. It is a group of Mont Blancs, placed round
one common center and crowned by radiating beams.
What this incomparable mountain really is, with all the
projections converging toward it, and the interior excrescences of
its crater, photography itself could never represent. Indeed, it is
during the full moon that Tycho is seen in all its splendor. Then
all shadows disappear, the foreshortening of perspective
disappears, and all proofs become white— a disagreeable fact:
for this strange region would have been marvelous if reproduced
with photographic exactness. It is but a group of hollows, craters,
circles, a network of crests; then, as far as the eye could see, a
whole volcanic network cast upon this encrusted soil. One can then
understand that the bubbles of this central eruption have kept
their first form. Crystallized by cooling, they have stereotyped
that aspect which the moon formerly presented when under the
Plutonian forces.
The distance which separated the travelers from the annular
summits of Tycho was not so great but that they could catch the
principal details. Even on the causeway forming the fortifications
of Tycho, the mountains hanging on to the interior and exterior
sloping flanks rose in stories like gigantic terraces. They
appeared to be higher by 300 or 400 feet to the west than to the
east. No system of terrestrial encampment could equal these natural
fortifications. A town built at the bottom of this circular cavity
would have been utterly inaccessible.
Inaccessible and wonderfully extended over this soil covered
with picturesque projections! Indeed, nature had not left the
bottom of this crater flat and empty. It possessed its own peculiar
orography, a mountainous system, making it a world in itself. The
travelers could distinguish 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 1,500 feet. A vast
circle, in which ancient Rome could have been held in its entirety
ten times over.
“Ah!” exclaimed Michel Ardan, enthusiastic at the
sight; “what a grand town might be constructed within that
ring of mountains! A quiet city, a peaceful refuge, beyond all
human misery. How calm and isolated those misanthropes, those
haters of humanity might live there, and all who have a distaste
for social life!”
“All! It would be too small for them,” replied
Barbicane simply.
1 Site of the American base in 2001: A Space Odyssey
2 In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the monolith on the moon had been buried at the center of a magnetic anomaly (TMA-1) inside this crater. Perhaps these two settings are a small nod to Verne on the part of Arthur C. Clarke.
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