solar rays with unbearable brilliancy. There was no
appearance of a living world, everything of a dead one, where the
avalanches rolling from the summit of the mountains rushed noiselessly.
They had plenty of movement, but noise was wanting still.

Barbicane established the fact, by reiterated observation, that the
reliefs on the borders of the disc, although they had been acted upon
by different forces to those of the central region, presented a uniform
conformation. There was the same circular aggregation, the same
accidents of ground. Still it might be supposed that their arrangements
were not completely analogous. In the centre the still malleable crust
of the moon suffered the double attraction of the moon and the earth
acting in inverse ways according to a radius prolonged from one to the
other. On the borders of the disc, on the contrary, the lunar attraction
has been, thus to say, perpendicular with the terrestrial attraction. It
seems, therefore, that the reliefs on the soil produced under these
conditions ought to have taken a different form. Yet they had not,
therefore the moon had found in herself alone the principle of her
formation and constitution. She owed nothing to foreign influences,
which justified the remarkable proposition of Arago's, "No action
exterior to the moon has contributed to the production of her relief."

However that may be in its actual condition, this world was the image of
death without it being possible to say that life had ever animated it.

Michel Ardan, however, thought he recognised a heap of ruins, to which
he drew Barbicane's attention. It was situated in about the 80th
parallel and 30 deg. longitude. This heap of stones, pretty regularly made,
was in the shape of a vast fortress, overlooking one of those long
furrows which served as river-beds in ante-historical times. Not far off
rose to a height of 5,646 metres the circular mountain called Short,
equal to the Asiatic Caucasus. Michel Ardan, with his habitual ardour,
maintained "the evidences" of his fortress. Below he perceived the
dismantled ramparts of a town; here the arch of a portico, still intact;
there two or three columns lying on their side; farther on a succession
of archpieces, which must have supported the conduct of an aqueduct; in
another part the sunken pillars of a gigantic bridge run into the
thickest part of the furrow. He distinguished all that, but with so much
imagination in his eyes, through a telesco