n'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 rep