“Yes, time enough, perhaps, provided that sufficient water and air and other vital requisites remained after the exhaustion of the volcanic energies.”
“Oh, let us say that they did remain. I am eager to believe that the moon has not always been so desolate as she appears at present.”
“Very well, you are at liberty to believe that if you like. No astronomer is likely positively to contradict you, although he may smile a little incredulously. Besides, as I have already told you, there are certain rather inconclusive indications of some kind of life, and of some kind of activity, still on the moon.”
“Please show them to me, then, or tell me about them. Perhaps I shall find them less inconclusive than you do.”
“Everything in its turn,” I replied. “We shall come to the indications that I have spoken of after we resume the inspection of the photographs.”
“Then I am ready to resume at once.”
Accordingly we returned to the table and the photographs under the pleasant shade of the elm. Taking up the photograph numbered 7, I remarked that it exhibited the moon as it appears a little after First Quarter; that is to say, a trifle more than half the face turned toward the earth is in the sunlight. I called attention once more to the six “seas,” which we had already remarked, and to the continued conspicuousness of Theophilus and its companions, a little above the middle of the visible hemisphere.
“You observe now,” I continued, “how the rotundity of the lunar globe begins to manifest itself as the sunlight sweeps farther eastward. The crescent shape is gone and the line between day and night begins to be bowed outward, convexly. The Mare Crisium is particularly well defined, and also the diamond-shaped region called the Palus Somnii. With the sun so nearly vertical above it, the remarkable peak of Proclus, between the Palus Somnii and the Mare Crisium, has become very brilliant. In a telescope you would see it glowing almost like a star. You observe also that several long, straight, bright rays proceed from it in several directions.”
“All the more reason, it seems to me,” said my friend, “why your unimaginative astronomer, Riccioli, should have named it for some brilliant gem instead of attaching to so dazzling an object the prosaic designation of ‘Proclus.’”
“After all,” I replied, “what’s in a name?” Now that you are familiar with the appearance of Proclus, its name will henceforth call up to your mind an image as brilliant as if it had been named ‘Mount Diamond’ or ‘Mount Amethyst.’”