Fully three-fourths of it was
brilliantly illuminated by the sun, and what they saw through their
glasses was practically the same as what they had beheld on the
earthward side; huge groups of enormous craters and ringed mountains,
long, irregular chains crowned with sharp, splintery peaks, and between
these vast, deeply depressed areas, ranging in colour from dazzling
white to grey-brown, marking the beds of the vanished lunar seas.
As they crossed one of these, Redgrave allowed the _Astronef_ to sink to
within a few thousand feet of the surface, and then he and Zaidie swept
it with their telescopes. Their chance search was rewarded by something
they had not seen in the sea-beds of the other hemisphere.
These depressions were far deeper than the others, evidently many
thousands of feet below the average surface, but the sun's rays were
blazing full into this one, and, dotted round its slopes at varying
elevations, they made out little patches which seemed to differ from the
general surface.
"I wonder if those are the remains of cities," said Zaidie. "Isn't it
possible that the old peoples of the moon might have built their cities
along the seas just as we do, and that their descendants may have
followed the waters as they retreated, I mean as they either dried up or
disappeared into the centre?"
"Very probable indeed, dearest of philosophers," he said, picking her up
with one arm and kissing the smiling lips which had just uttered this
most reasonable deduction.
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