“Terrestrial volcanoes,” said Barbicane, “are but mole-hills
compared with those of the moon. Measuring the old craters
formed by the first eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna, we find them
little more than three miles in breadth. In France the circle
of Cantal measures six miles across; at Ceyland the circle of
the island is forty miles, which is considered the largest on
the globe. What are these diameters against that of Clavius,
which we overlook at this moment?”
“What is its breadth?” asked Nicholl.
“It is 150 miles,” replied Barbicane. “This circle is certainly
the most important on the moon, but many others measure 150,
100, or 75 miles.”
“Ah! my friends,” exclaimed Michel, “can you picture to
yourselves what this now peaceful orb of night must have been
when its craters, filled with thunderings, vomited at the same
time smoke and tongues of flame. What a wonderful spectacle
then, and now what decay! This moon is nothing more than a thin
carcase of fireworks, whose squibs, rockets, serpents, and suns,
after a superb brilliancy, have left but sadly broken cases.
Who can say the cause, the reason, the motive force of
these cataclysms?”
Barbicane was not listening to Michel Ardan; he was
contemplating these ramparts of Clavius, formed by large
mountains spread over several miles. At the bottom of the
immense cavity burrowed hundreds of small extinguished craters,
riddling the soil like a colander, and overlooked by a peak
15,000 feet high.
Around the plain appeared desolate. Nothing so arid as these
reliefs, nothing so sad as these ruins of mountains, and (if we
may so express ourselves) these fragments of peaks and mountains
which strewed the soil. The satellite seemed to have burst at
this spot.
The projectile was still advancing, and this movement did
not subside. Circles, craters, and uprooted mountains succeeded
each other incessantly. No more plains; no more seas. A never
ending Switzerland and Norway. And lastly, in the canter of
this region of crevasses, the most splendid mountain on the
lunar disc, the dazzling Tycho, in which posterity will ever
preserve the name of the illustrious Danish astronomer.
In observing the full moon in a cloudless sky no one has failed
to remark this brilliant point of the southern hemisphere.
Michel Ardan used every metaphor that his imagination could
supply to designate it by. To him this Tycho was a focus of
light, a center of irradiation, a crater vomiting rays. It was
the tire of a brilliant wheel, an _asteria_ enclosing the disc
with its silver tentacles, an enormous eye filled with flames,
a glory carved for Pluto’s head, a star launched by the
Creator’s hand, and crushed against the face of the moon!
Tycho forms such a concentration of light that the inhabitants
of the earth can see it without glasses, though at a distance
of 240,000 miles! Imagine, then, its intensity to the eye of
observers placed at a distance of only fifty miles! Seen through
this pure ether, its brilliancy was so intolerable that Barbicane
and his friends were obliged to blacken their glasses with the gas
smoke before they could bear the splendor. Then silent, scarcely
uttering an interjection of admiration, they gazed, they contemplated.
All their feelings, all their impressions, were concentrated in that
look, as under any violent emotion all life is concentrated at the heart.
Tycho belongs to the system of radiating mountains, like
Aristarchus and Copernicus; but it is of all the most complete
and decided, showing unquestionably the frightful volcanic
action to which the formation of the moon is due. Tycho is
situated in 43@ south latitude, and 12@ east longitude. Its center
is occupied by a crater fifty miles broad. It assumes a slightly
elliptical form, and is surrounded by an enclosure of annular
ramparts, which on the east and west overlook the outer plain from
a height of 15,000 feet. It is a group of Mont Blancs, placed
round one common center and crowned by radiating beams.
What this incomparable mountain really is, with all the
projections converging toward it, and the interior excrescences
of its crater, photography itself could never represent.
Indeed, it is during the full moon that Tycho is seen in all