At length, pointing to a gigantic circle of white light
fringing an abyss of utter darkness, he said:
"There is Newton, the greatest mystery of the moon. Those inner walls
are twenty-four thousand feet high; that means that the bottom, which
has never been seen by human eyes, is about five thousand feet below the
surface of the moon. What do you say, dear--shall we go down and see if
the searchlight will show us anything? You know there may be something
like breathable air down there, and perhaps living creatures who can
breathe it."
"Certainly!" replied Zaidie decisively; "haven't we come to see things
that nobody else has ever seen?"
Redgrave went down to the engine-room, and presently the _Astronef_
changed her course, and in a few minutes was hanging with her polished
hull bathed in sunlight, like a star suspended over the unfathomable
gulf of darkness below.
As they sank below the level of the sun-rays, Murgatroyd turned on both
the searchlights. They dropped down ever slowly and more slowly until
gradually the two long, thin streams of light began to spread themselves
out; the lower they went the more the beams spread out, and by the time
the _Astronef_ came gently to a rest they were swinging round her in
broad fans of diffused light over a dark, marshy surface, with scattered
patches of grey moss and reeds, with dull gleams of stagnant water
showing between them.
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