Chapter 13

LUNAR LANDSCAPES

At half past two in the morning of December 6th, the travellers crossed
the 30th northern parallel, at a distance from the lunar surface of 625
miles, reduced to about 6 by their spy-glasses. Barbican could not yet
see the least probability of their landing at any point of the disc. The
velocity of the Projectile was decidedly slow, but for that reason
extremely puzzling. Barbican could not account for it. At such a
proximity to the Moon, the velocity, one would think, should be very
great indeed to be able to counteract the lunar attraction. Why did it
not fall? Barbican could not tell; his companions were equally in the
dark. Ardan said he gave it up. Besides they had no time to spend in
investigating it. The lunar panorama was unrolling all its splendors
beneath them, and they could not bear to lose one of its slightest
details.

The lunar disc being brought within a distance of about six miles by the
spy-glasses, it is a fair question to ask, what _could_ an aeronaut at
such an elevation from our Earth discover on its surface? At present
that question can hardly be answered, the most remarkable balloon
ascensions never having passed an altitude of five miles under
circumstances favorable for observers. Here, however, is an account,
carefully transcribed from notes taken on the spot, of what Barbican and
his companions _did_ see from their peculiar post of observation.

Varieties of color, in the first place, appeared here and there upon the
disc. Selenographers are not quite agreed as to the nature of these
colors. Not that such colors are without variety or too faint to be
easily distinguished. Schmidt of Athens even says that if our oceans on
earth were all evaporated, an observer in the Moon would hardly find the
seas and continents of our globe even so well outlined as those of the
Moon are to the eye of a terrestrial observer. According to him, the
shade of color distinguishing those vast plains known as "seas" is a
dark gray dashed with green and brown,--a color presented also by a few
of the great craters.

This opinion of Schmidt's, shared by Beer and Maedler, Barbican's
observations now convinced him to be far better founded than that of
certain astronomers who admit of no color at all being visible on the
Moon's surface but gray. In certain spots the greenish tint was quite
decided, particularly in _Mare Serenitatis_ and _Mare Humorum,_ the very
localities where Schmidt had most noticed it. Barbican also remarked
that several large craters, of the class that had no interior cones,
reflected a kind of bluish tinge, somewhat like that given forth by a
freshly polished steel plate. These tints, he now saw enough to convince
him, proceeded really from