king away from the
scene of the hideous tragedy, "so the sooner we go, the better I shall
like it."

A few minutes later the _Astronef_ was again rising towards the stars
with her searchlights still flashing down into the Valley of Expiring
Life, which had seemed to them even worse than the Valley of Death. As
he followed the rays with a pair of powerful field glasses, Redgrave
fancied that he saw huge, dim shapes moving about the stunted shrubbery
and through the slimy pools of the stagnant rivers, and once or twice he
got a glimpse of what might well have been the ruins of towns and
cities, but the gloom soon became too deep and dense for the
searchlights to pierce and he was glad when the _Astronef_ soared up
into the brilliant sunlight once more. Even the ghastly wilderness of
the lunar landscape was welcome after the nameless horrors of that
hideous abyss.

After a couple of hours' rapid travelling, Redgrave pointed down to a
comparatively small, deep crater, and said:

"There, that is Malapert. It is almost exactly at the south pole of the
moon, and there," he went on, pointing ahead, "is the horizon of the
hemisphere which no earthborn eyes have ever seen."

"Except ours," said Zaidie somewhat inconsequently, "and I wonder what
_we_ shall see."

"Probably something very like what we have seen on this side," replied
Redgrave, and as the event proved, he was right.

Contrary to many ingenious speculations which have been indulged in by
both scientist and romancer, they found that the hemisphere, which for
countless ages had never been turned towards the earth, was almost an
exact replica of the visible one. Fully three-fourths of it was
brilliantly illuminated by the sun, and what they saw through their
glasses was practically the same as what they had beheld on the
earthward side; huge groups of enormous craters and ringed mountains,
long, irregular chains crowned with sharp, splintery peaks, and between
these vast, deeply depressed areas, ranging in colour from dazzling
white to grey-brown, marking the beds of the vanished lunar seas.

As they crossed one of these, Redgrave allowed the _Astronef_ to sink to
within a few thousand feet of the surface, and then he and Zaidie swept
it with their telescopes. Their chance search was rewarded by something
they had not seen in the sea-beds of the other hemisphere.

These depressions were far deeper than the others, evidently many
thousands of feet below the ave