fields as I am a living man!"

"What do you mean by your cultivated fields?" asked M'Nicholl sourly,
wiping his glasses and shrugging his shoulders.

"Certainly cultivated fields!" replied Ardan. "Don't you see the
furrows? They're certainly plain enough. They are white too from
glistening in the sun, but they are quite different from the radiating
streaks of _Copernicus_. Why, their sides are perfectly parallel!"

"Where are those furrows?" asked M'Nicholl, putting his glasses to his
eye and adjusting the focus.

"You can see them in all directions," answered Ardan; "but two are
particularly visible: one running north from _Archimedes_, the other
south towards the _Apennines_."

M'Nicholl's face, as he gazed, gradually assumed a grin which soon
developed into a snicker, if not a positive laugh, as he observed to
Ardan:

"Your Selenites must be Brobdignagians, their oxen Leviathans, and their
ploughs bigger than Marston's famous cannon, if these are furrows!"

"How's that, Barbican?" asked Ardan doubtfully, but unwilling to submit
to M'Nicholl.

"They're not furrows, dear friend," said Barbican, "and can't be,
either, simply on account of their immense size. They are what the
German astronomers called _Rillen_; the French, _rainures_, and the
English, _grooves_, _canals_, _clefts_, _cracks_, _chasms_, or
_fissures_."

"You have a good stock of names for them anyhow," observed Ardan, "if
that does any good."

"The number of names given them," answered Barbican, "shows how little
is really known about them. They have been observed in all the level
portion of the Moon's surface. Small as they appear to us, a little
calculation must convince you that they are in some places hundreds of
miles in length, a mile in width and probably in many points several
miles in depth. Their width and depth, however, vary, though their
sides, so far as observed, are always rigorously parallel. Let us take a
good look at them."

Putting the glass to his eye, Barbican examined the clefts for some time
with close attention. He saw that their banks were sharp edged and
extremely steep. In many places they were of such geometrical regularity
that he readily excused Gruithuysen's idea of deeming them to be
gigantic earthworks thrown up by the Selenite engineers. Some of them
were as straight as if laid out with a line, others were curved a little
here and there, though still maintaining the strict parallelism of their
sides. These