Then reappeared to the eyes of the travellers that original aspect of the lunar landscapes, raw in tone, without gradation of colours, only white and black, for diffused light was wanting.  Still the sight of this desolate world was very curious on account of its very strangeness.  They were moving above this chaotic region as if carried along by the breath of a tempest, seeing the summits fly under their feet, looking down the cavities, climbing the ramparts, sounding the mysterious holes.  But there was no trace of vegetation, no appearance of cities, nothing but stratifications, lava streams, polished like immense mirrors, which reflect the solar rays with unbearable brilliancy.  There was no appearance of a living world, everything of a dead one, where the avalanches rolling from the summit of the mountains rushed noiselessly.  They had plenty of movement, but noise was wanting still.

Barbicane established the fact, by reiterated observation, that the reliefs on the borders of the disc, although they had been acted upon by different forces to those of the central region, presented a uniform conformation.  There was the same circular aggregation, the same accidents of ground.  Still it might be supposed that their arrangements were not completely analogous.  In the centre the still malleable crust of the moon suffered the double attraction of the moon and the earth acting in inverse ways according to a radius prolonged from one to the other.  On the borders of the disc, on the contrary, the lunar attraction has been, thus to say, perpendicular with the terrestrial attraction.  It seems, therefore, that the reliefs on the soil produced under these conditions ought to have taken a different form.  Yet they had not, therefore the moon had found in herself alone the principle of her formation and constitution.  She owed nothing to foreign influences, which justified the remarkable proposition of Arago’s, “No action exterior to the moon has contributed to the production of her relief.”

However that may be in its actual condition, this world was the image of death without it being possible to say that life had ever animated it.

Michel Ardan, however, thought he recognised a heap of ruins, to which he drew Barbicane’s attention.  It was situated in about the 80th parallel and 30 deg. longitude.  This heap of stones, pretty regularly made, was in the shape of a vast fortress, overlooking one of those long furrows which served as river-beds in ante-historical times.  Not far off rose to a height of 5,646 metres the circular mountain called Short, equal to the Asiatic Caucasus.  Michel Ardan, with his habitual ardour, maintained “the evidences” of his fortress.  Below he perceived the dismantled ramparts of a town; here the arch of a portico, still intact; there two or three columns lying on their side; farther on a succession of archpieces, which must have supported the conduct of an aqueduct; in another part the sunken pillars of a gigantic bridge run into the thickest part of the furrow.  He distinguished all that, but with so much imagination in his eyes, through a telescope so fanciful, that his observation cannot be relied upon.  And yet who would affirm, who would dare to say, that the amiable fellow had not really seen what his two companions would not see?