d the edge of the disc.

The plain itself was a scene of awful and utter desolation. Huge
mountain-walls, towering to immense heights and enclosing great circular
and oval plains, one side of them blazing with intolerable light, and
the other side black with impenetrable obscurity; enormous valleys
reaching down from brilliant day into rayless night--perhaps down into
the very bowels of the dead world itself; vast grey-white plains lying
round the mountains, crossed by little ridges and by long black lines,
which could only be immense fissures with perpendicular sides--but all
hard, grey-white and black, all intolerable brightness or inky gloom;
not a sign of life anywhere; no shady forests, no green fields, no
broad, glittering oceans; only a ghastly wilderness of dead mountains
and dead plains.

"What an awful place," Zaidie whispered. "Surely we can't land there.
How far are we from it?"

"About fifteen hundred miles," replied Redgrave, who was sweeping the
scene below him with one of the two powerful telescopes which stood on
the deck. "No, it doesn't look very cheerful, does it? But it's a
marvellous sight for all that, and one that a good many people on earth
would give one of their eyes to see from here. I'm letting her drop
pretty fast, and we shall probably land in a couple of hours or so.
Meanwhile you may as well get out your moon atlas, and study your
lunography. I'm going to turn the power a bit astern so that we shall go
down obliquely, and see more of the lighted disc. We started at new moon
so that you should have a look at the full earth, and also so that we
could get round to the invisible side while it is lighted up."

They both went below, he to deflect the repulsive force so that one set
of engines should give them a somewhat oblique direction, while the
other, acting directly on the surface of the moon, simply retarded their
fall; and she to get out her maps.

When they got back the _Astronef_ had changed her apparent position,
and, instead of falling directly on to the moon, was descending towards
it in a slanting direction. The result of this was that the sunlit
crescent rapidly grew in breadth. Peak after peak and range after range
rose up swiftly out of the black gulf beyond. The sun climbed quickly up
through the star-strewn, mid-day heavens, and the full earth sank more
swiftly still behind them.

Another hour of silent, entranced wonder and admiration followed, and
then Redgrave said: