—"But what has all this to do with the question under discussion?" interrupted Barbican, desirous to keep his friends from losing their tempers in idle disputation.
"True!" said Ardan. "The Chair, thankful for being called to order, would respectfully remind the house that the question before it is: Has the Moon been inhabited? Affirmative has been heard. Negative is called on to reply. Mr. Barbican has the parole."
But Mr. Barbican was unwilling just then to enter too deeply into such an exceedingly difficult subject. "The probabilities," he contented himself with saying, "would appear to be in favor of the Captain's speculations. But we must never forget that they are speculations—nothing more. Not the slightest evidence has yet been produced that the Moon is anything else than 'a dead and useless waste of extinct volcanoes.' No signs of cities, no signs of buildings, not even of ruins, none of anything that could be reasonably ascribed to the labors of intelligent creatures. No sign of change of any kind has been established. As for the agreement between the Moon's rotation and her revolution, which compels her to keep the same face constantly turned towards the Earth, we don't know that it has not existed from the beginning. As for what is called the effect of volcanic agency upon her surface, we don't know that her peculiar blistered appearance may not have been brought about altogether by the bubbling and spitting that blisters molten iron when cooling and contracting. Some close observers have even ventured to account for her craters by saying they were due to pelting showers of meteoric rain. Then again as to her atmosphere—why should she have lost her atmosphere? Why should it sink into craters? Atmosphere is gas, great in volume, small in matter; where would there be room for it? Solidified by the intense cold? Possibly in the night time. But would not the heat of the long day be great enough to thaw it back again? The same trouble attends the alleged disappearance of the water. Swallowed up in the cavernous cracks, it is said. But why are there cracks? Cooling is not always attended by cracking. Water cools without cracking; cannon balls cool without cracking. Too much stress has been laid on the great difference between the nucleus and the crust: it is really impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. In fact, no theory explains satisfactorily anything regarding the present state of the Moon's surface. In fact, from the day that Galileo compared her clustering craters to 'eyes on a peacock's tail' to the present time, we must acknowledge that we know nothing more than we can actually see, not one particle more of the Moon's history than our telescopes reveal to our corporal eyes!"
"In the lucid opinion of the honorable and learned gentleman who spoke last," said Ardan, "the Chair is compelled to concur. Therefore, as to the second question before the house for deliberation, Has the Moon been ever inhabited? the Chair gets out of its difficulty, as a Scotch jury does when it has not evidence enough either way, by returning a solemn verdict of Not Proven!"
"And with this conclusion," said Barbican, hastily rising, "of a subject on which, to tell the truth, we are unable as yet to throw any light worth speaking of, let us be satisfied for the present. Another question of greater moment to us just now is: where are we? It seems to me that we are increasing our distance from the Moon very decidedly and very rapidly."
It was easy to see that he was quite right in this observation. The Projectile, still following a northerly course and therefore approaching the lunar equator, was certainly getting farther and farther from the Moon. Even at 30° S., only ten degrees farther north than the latitude of Tycho, the travellers had considerable difficulty, comparatively, in observing the details of Pitatus, a walled mountain on the south shores of the Mare Nubium. In the "sea" itself, over which they now floated, they could see very little, but far to the left, on the 20th parallel, they could discern the vast crater of Bullialdus, 9,000 feet deep. On the right, they had just caught a glimpse of Purbach, a depressed valley almost square in shape with a round crater in the centre, when Ardan suddenly cried out:
"A Railroad!"
And, sure enough, right under them, a little northeast of Purbach, the travellers easily distinguished a long line straight and black, really not unlike a railroad cutting through a low hilly country.
This, Barbican explained, was of course no railway, but a steep cliff, at least 1,000 feet high, casting a very deep shadow, and probably the result of the caving in of the surface on the eastern edge.
Then they saw the immense crater of Arzachel and in its midst a cone mountain shining with dazzling splendor. A little north of this, they could detect the outlines of another crater, Alphonse, at least 70 miles in diameter. Close to it they could easily distinguish the immense crater or, as some observers call it, Ramparted Plain, Ptolemy, so well known to lunar astronomers, occupying, as it does, such a favorable position near the centre of the Moon, and having a diameter fully, in one direction at least, 120 miles long.