harness to their plow to cut such furrows!”
“They are not furrows,” said Barbicane; “they are _rifts_.”
“Rifts? stuff!” replied Michel mildly; “but what do you mean by
`rifts’ in the scientific world?”
Barbicane immediately enlightened his companion as to what he
knew about lunar rifts. He knew that they were a kind of furrow
found on every part of the disc which was not mountainous; that
these furrows, generally isolated, measured from 400 to 500
leagues in length; that their breadth varied from 1,000 to 1,500
yards, and that their borders were strictly parallel; but he
knew nothing more either of their formation or their nature.
Barbicane, through his glasses, observed these rifts with
great attention. He noticed that their borders were formed of
steep declivities; they were long parallel ramparts, and with some
small amount of imagination he might have admitted the existence
of long lines of fortifications, raised by Selenite engineers.
Of these different rifts some were perfectly straight, as if cut
by a line; others were slightly curved, though still keeping
their borders parallel; some crossed each other, some cut through
craters; here they wound through ordinary cavities, such as
Posidonius or Petavius; there they wound through the seas, such
as the “Sea of Serenity.”
These natural accidents naturally excited the imaginations of
these terrestrial astronomers. The first observations had not
discovered these rifts. Neither Hevelius, Cassin, La Hire, nor
Herschel seemed to have known them. It was Schroeter who in
1789 first drew attention to them. Others followed who studied
them, as Pastorff, Gruithuysen, Boeer, and Moedler. At this
time their number amounts to seventy; but, if they have been
counted, their nature has not yet been determined; they are
certainly _not_ fortifications, any more than they are the
ancient beds of dried-up rivers; for, on one side, the waters,
so slight on the moon’s surface, could never have worn such
drains for themselves; and, on the other, they often cross
craters of great elevation.
We must, however, allow that Michel Ardan had “an idea,” and
that, without knowing it, he coincided in that respect with
Julius Schmidt.
“Why,” said he, “should not these unaccountable appearances be
simply phenomena of vegetation?”
“What do you mean?” asked Barbicane quickly.
“Do not excite yourself, my worthy president,” replied Michel;
“might it not be possible that the dark lines forming that
bastion were rows of trees regularly placed?”
“You stick to your vegetation, then?” said Barbicane.
“I like,” retorted Michel Ardan, “to explain what you savants
cannot explain; at least my hypotheses has the advantage of
indicating why these rifts disappear, or seem to disappear, at
certain seasons.”
“And for what reason?”
“For the reason that the trees become invisible when they lose
their leaves, and visible again when they regain them.”
“Your explanation is ingenious, my dear companion,” replied
Barbicane, “but inadmissible.”
“Why?”
“Because, so to speak, there are no seasons on the moon’s surface,
and that, consequently, the phenomena of vegetation of which you
speak cannot occur.”
Indeed, the slight obliquity of the lunar axis keeps the sun at
an almost equal height in every latitude. Above the equatorial
regions the radiant orb almost invariably occupies the zenith,
and does not pass the limits of the horizon in the polar
regions; thus, according to each region, there reigns a
perpetual winter, spring, summer, or autumn, as in the planet
Jupiter, whose axis is but little inclined upon its orbit.
What origin do they attribute to these rifts? That is a
question difficult to solve. They are certainly anterior to the
formation of craters and circles, for several have introduced
themselves by breaking through their circular ramparts. Thus it
may be that, contemporary with the later geological epochs, they
are due to the expansion of natural forces.
But the projectile had now attained the fortieth degree of lunar
latitude, at a distance not exceeding 40 miles. Through the
glasses objects appeared to be only four miles distant.
At this point, under their feet, rose Mount Helicon, 1,520 feet
high, and round about the left rose moderate elevations,
enclosing a small portion of the “Sea of Rains,” under the name
of the Gulf of Iris. The terrestrial atmosphere would have to