The wonderful complexity of
its bright streaks diverging on all sides from its centre presented a
scene alike splendid and unique. These streaks, the travellers thought,
could be traced further north than in any other direction: they fancied
they could detect them even in the _Mare Imbrium_, but this of course
might be owing to the point from which they made their observations. At
one o'clock in the morning, the Projectile, flying through space, was
exactly over this magnificent mountain.
In spite of the brilliant sunlight that was blazing around them, the
travellers could easily recognize the peculiar features of _Copernicus_.
It belongs to those ring mountains of the first class called Circuses.
Like _Kepler_ and _Aristarchus_, who rule over _Oceanus Procellarum_,
_Copernicus_, when viewed through our telescopes, sometimes glistens so
brightly through the ashy light of the Moon that it has been frequently
taken for a volcano in full activity. Whatever it may have been once,
however, it is certainly nothing more now than, like all the other
mountains on the visible side of the Moon, an extinct volcano, only with
a crater of such exceeding grandeur and sublimity as to throw utterly
into the shade everything like it on our Earth.
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