Barbicane did not listen to Michel Ardan.  He was contemplating those ramparts of Clavius, formed of wide mountains several leagues thick.  At the bottom of its immense cavity lay hundreds of small extinct craters, making the soil like a sieve, and overlooked by a peak more than 15,000 feet high.

The plain around had a desolate aspect.  Nothing so arid as these reliefs, nothing so sad as these ruins of mountains, if so they may be called, as those heaps of peaks and mountains encumbering the ground!  The satellite seemed to have been blown up in this place.

The projectile still went on, and the chaos was still the same.  Circles, craters, and mountains succeeded each other incessantly.  No more plains or seas—­an interminable Switzerland or Norway.  Lastly, in the centre of the creviced region at its culminating point, the most splendid mountain of the lunar disc, the dazzling Tycho, to which posterity still gives the name of the illustrious Danish astronomer.

Whilst observing the full moon in a cloudless sky, there is no one who has not remarked this brilliant point on the southern hemisphere.  Michel Ardan, to qualify it, employed all the metaphors his imagination could furnish him with.  To him Tycho was an ardent focus of light, a centre of irradiation, a crater vomiting flames!  It was the axle of a fiery wheel, a sea-star encircling the disc with its silver tentacles, an immense eye darting fire, a nimbo made for Pluto’s head!  It was a star hurled by the hand of the Creator, and fallen upon the lunar surface!

Tycho forms such a luminous concentration that the inhabitants of the earth can see it without a telescope, although they are at a distance of 100,000 leagues.  It will, therefore, be readily imagined what its intensity must have been in the eyes of observers placed at fifty leagues only.

Across this pure ether its brilliancy was so unbearable that Barbicane and his friends were obliged to blacken the object-glasses of their telescopes with gas-smoke in order to support it.  Then, mute, hardly emitting a few admirative interjections, they looked and contemplated.  All their sentiments, all their impressions were concentrated in their eyes, as life, under violent emotion, is concentrated in the heart.

Tycho belongs to the system of radiating mountains, like Aristarchus and Copernicus.  But it testified the most completely of all to the terrible volcanic action to which the formation of the moon is due.

Tycho is situated in south lat. 43 deg. and east long. 12 deg..  Its centre is occupied by a crater more than forty miles wide.  It affects a slightly elliptical form, and is inclosed by circular ramparts, which on the east and west overlook the exterior plain from a height of 5,000 metres.  It is an aggregation of Mont Blancs, placed round a common centre, and crowned with shining rays.