"This must have been the spot," muttered Barbican to himself, "where the
brittle shell of the cooling sphere, being thicker than usual, offered
greater resistance to an eruption of the red-hot nucleus. Hence these
piled up buttresses, and these orderless heaps of consolidated lava and
ejected scoriae."
The Projectile advanced, but the scene of desolation seemed to remain
unchanged. Craters, ring mountains, pitted plateaus dotted with
shapeless wrecks, succeeded each other without interruption. For level
plain, for dark "sea," for smooth plateau, the eye here sought in vain.
It was a Swiss Greenland, an Icelandic Norway, a Sahara of shattered
crust studded with countless hills of glassy lava.
At last, in the very centre of this blistered region, right too at its
very culmination, the travellers came on the brightest and most
remarkable mountain of the Moon. In the dazzling _Tycho_ they found it
an easy matter to recognize the famous lunar point, which the world will
for ever designate by the name of the distinguished astronomer of
Denmark.
This brilliant luminosity of the southern hemisphere, no one that ever
gazes at the Full Moon in a cloudless sky, can help noticing.
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