The plain itself was a scene of awful and utter desolation. Huge
mountain-walls, towering to immense heights and enclosing great circular
and oval plains, one side of them blazing with intolerable light, and
the other side black with impenetrable obscurity; enormous valleys
reaching down from brilliant day into rayless night--perhaps down into
the very bowels of the dead world itself; vast grey-white plains lying
round the mountains, crossed by little ridges and by long black lines,
which could only be immense fissures with perpendicular sides--but all
hard, grey-white and black, all intolerable brightness or inky gloom;
not a sign of life anywhere; no shady forests, no green fields, no
broad, glittering oceans; only a ghastly wilderness of dead mountains
and dead plains.
"What an awful place," Zaidie whispered. "Surely we can't land there.
How far are we from it?"
"About fifteen hundred miles," replied Redgrave, who was sweeping the
scene below him with one of the two powerful telescopes which stood on
the deck. "No, it doesn't look very cheerful, does it? But it's a
marvellous sight for all that, and one that a good many people on earth
would give one of their eyes to see from here. I'm letting her drop
pretty fast, and we shall probably land in a couple of hours or so.
Meanwhile you may as well get out your moon atlas, and study your
lunography.
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