000 feet high.

All around, the plain was desolate in the extreme. You could not
conceive how anything could be barrener than these serrated outlines, or
gloomier than these shattered mountains--until you looked at the plain
that encircled them. Ardan hardly exaggerated when he called it the
scene of a battle fought thousands of years ago but still white with the
hideous bones of overthrown peaks, slaughtered mountains and mutilated
precipices!

"Hills amid the air encountered hills,
Hurled to and fro in jaculation dire,"

murmured M'Nicholl, who could quote you Milton quite as readily as the
Bible.

"This must have been the spot," muttered Barbican to himself, "where the
brittle shell of the cooling sphere, being thicker than usual, offered
greater resistance to an eruption of the red-hot nucleus. Hence these
piled up buttresses, and these orderless heaps of consolidated lava and
ejected scoriae."

The Projectile advanced, but the scene of desolation seemed to remain
unchanged. Craters, ring mountains, pitted plateaus dotted with
shapeless wrecks, succeeded each other without interruption. For level
plain, for dark "sea," for smooth plateau, the eye here sought in vain.
It was a Swiss Greenland, an Icelandic Norway, a Sahara of shattered
crust studded with countless hills of glassy lava.

At last, in the very centre of this blistered region, right too at its
very culmination, the travellers came on the brightest and most
remarkable mountain of the Moon. In the dazzling _Tycho_ they found it
an easy matter to recognize the famous lunar point, which the world will
for ever designate by the name of the distinguished astronomer of
Denmark.

This brilliant luminosity of the southern hemisphere, no one that ever
gazes at the Full Moon in a cloudless sky, can help noticing. Ardan, who
had always particularly admired it, now hailed it as an old friend, and
almost exhausted breath, imagination and vocabulary in the epithets with
which he greeted this cynosure of the lunar mountains.

"Hail!" he cried, "thou blazing focus of glittering streaks, thou
coruscating nucleus of irradiation, thou starting point of rays
divergent, thou egress of meteoric flashes! Hub of the silver wheel that
ever rolls in silent majesty over the starry plains of Night! Paragon of
jewels enchased in a carcanet of dazzling brilliants! Eye of the
universe, beaming with heavenly resplendescence!

"Who shall say what thou art? Diana's nim