The moments were too precious to be sacrificed to an idle discussion.  The Selenite city, whether real or pretended, had disappeared in the distance.  The projectile began to get farther away from the lunar disc, and the details of the ground began to be lost in a confused jumble.  The reliefs, amphitheatres, craters, and plains alone remained, and still showed their boundary-lines distinctly.

At that moment there stretched to the left one of the finest amphitheatres in lunar orography.  It was Newton, which Barbicane easily recognised by referring to the Mappa Selenographica.

Newton is situated in exactly 77 deg. south lat. and 16 deg. east long.  It forms a circular crater, the ramparts of which, 7,264 metres high, seemed to be inaccessible.

Barbicane made his companions notice that the height of that mountain above the surrounding plain was far from being equal to the depth of its crater.  This enormous hole was beyond all measurement, and made a gloomy abyss, the bottom of which the sun’s rays could never reach.  There, according to Humboldt, utter darkness reigns, which the light of the sun and the earth could not break.  The mythologists would have made it with justice hell’s mouth.

“Newton,” said Barbicane, “is the most perfect type of the circular mountains, of which the earth possesses no specimen.  They prove that the formation of the moon by cooling was due to violent causes, for whilst under the influence of interior fire the reliefs were thrown up to considerable heights, the bottom dropped in, and became lower than the lunar level.”

“I do not say no,” answered Michel Ardan.

A few minutes after having passed Newton the projectile stood directly over the circular mountain of Moret.  It also passed rather high above the summits of Blancanus, and about 7.30 p.m. it reached the amphitheatre of Clavius.

This circle, one of the most remarkable on the disc, is situated in south lat. 58 deg. and east long. 15 deg..  Its height is estimated at 7,091 metres.  The travellers at a distance of 200 miles, reduced to two by the telescopes, could admire the arrangement of this vast crater.

“The terrestrial volcanoes,” said Barbicane, “are only molehills compared to the volcanoes of the moon.  Measuring the ancient craters formed by the first eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna, they are found to be scarcely 6,000 metres wide.  In France the circle of the Cantal measures five miles; at Ceylon the circle of the island is forty miles, and is considered the largest on the globe.  What are these diameters compared to that of Clavius, which we are over in this moment?”

“What is its width?” asked Nicholl.

“About seventy miles,” answered Barbicane.  “This amphitheatre is certainly the largest on the moon, but many are fifty miles wide!”

“Ah, my friends,” exclaimed Michel Ardan, “can you imagine what this peaceful orb of night was once like? when these craters vomited torrents of lava and stones, with clouds of smoke and sheets of flame?  What a prodigious spectacle formerly, and now what a falling off!  This moon is now only the meagre case of fireworks, of which the rockets, serpents, suns, and wheels, after going off magnificently, only leave torn pieces of cardboard.  Who can tell the cause, reason, or justification of such cataclysms?”