rmed by the first eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna, they are found to be
scarcely 6,000 metres wide. In France the circle of the Cantal measures
five miles; at Ceylon the circle of the island is forty miles, and is
considered the largest on the globe. What are these diameters compared
to that of Clavius, which we are over in this moment?"

"What is its width?" asked Nicholl.

"About seventy miles," answered Barbicane. "This amphitheatre is
certainly the largest on the moon, but many are fifty miles wide!"

"Ah, my friends," exclaimed Michel Ardan, "can you imagine what this
peaceful orb of night was once like? when these craters vomited torrents
of lava and stones, with clouds of smoke and sheets of flame? What a
prodigious spectacle formerly, and now what a falling off! This moon is
now only the meagre case of fireworks, of which the rockets, serpents,
suns, and wheels, after going off magnificently, only leave torn pieces
of cardboard. Who can tell the cause, reason, or justification of such
cataclysms?"

Barbicane did not listen to Michel Ardan. He was contemplating those
ramparts of Clavius, formed of wide mountains several leagues thick. At
the bottom of its immense cavity lay hundreds of small extinct craters,
making the soil like a sieve, and overlooked by a peak more than 15,000
feet high.

The plain around had a desolate aspect. Nothing so arid as these
reliefs, nothing so sad as these ruins of mountains, if so they may be
called, as those heaps of peaks and mountains encumbering the ground!
The satellite seemed to have been blown up in this place.

The projectile still went on, and the chaos was still the same. Circles,
craters, and mountains succeeded each other incessantly. No more plains
or seas--an interminable Switzerland or Norway. Lastly, in the centre of
the creviced region at its culminating point, the most splendid mountain
of the lunar disc, the dazzling Tycho, to which posterity still gives
the name of the illustrious Danish astronomer.

Whilst observing the full moon in a cloudless sky, there is no one who
has not remarked this brilliant point on the southern hemisphere. Michel
Ardan, to qualify it, employed all the metaphors his imagination could
furnish him with. To him Tycho was an ardent focus of light, a centre of
irradiation, a crater vomiting flames! It was the axle of a fiery wheel,
a sea-star encircling the disc with its silver tentacles, an immense eye
darting fire, a nimbo made for