After wandering over these vast continents, the eye is attracted by the still greater seas. Not only their formation, but their situation and aspect remind one of the terrestrial oceans; but again, as on earth, these seas occupy the greater portion of the globe. But in point of fact, these are not liquid spaces, but plains, the nature of which the travelers hoped soon to determine. Astronomers, we must allow, have graced these pretended seas with at least odd names, which science has respected up to the present time. Michel Ardan was right when he compared this map to a “Tendre card,” got up by a Scudary or a Cyrano de Bergerac. “Only,” said he, “it is no longer the sentimental card of the seventeenth century, it is the card of life, very neatly divided into two parts, one feminine, the other masculine; the right hemisphere for woman, the left for man.” In speaking thus, Michel made his prosaic companions shrug their shoulders. Barbicane and Nicholl looked upon the lunar map from a very different point of view to that of their fantastic friend. Nevertheless, their fantastic friend was a little in the right. Judge for yourselves. In the left hemisphere stretches the “Sea of Clouds,” where human reason is so often shipwrecked. Not far off lies the “Sea of Rains,” fed by all the fever of existence. Near this is the “Sea of Storms,” where man is ever fighting against his passions, which too often gain the victory. Then, worn out by deceit, treasons, infidelity, and the whole body of terrestrial misery, what does he find at the end of his career? that vast “Sea of Humors,” barely softened by some drops of the waters from the “Gulf of Dew!” Clouds, rain, storms, and humors—does the life of man contain aught but these? and is it not summed up in these four words? The right hemisphere, “dedicated to the ladies,” encloses smaller seas, whose significant names contain every incident of a feminine existence. There is the “Sea of Serenity,” over which the young girl bends; “The Lake of Dreams,” reflecting a joyous future; “The Sea of Nectar,” with its waves of tenderness and breezes of love; “The Sea of Fruitfulness;” “The Sea of Crises;” then the “Sea of Vapors,” whose dimensions are perhaps a little too confined; and lastly, that vast “Sea of Tranquillity,” in which every false passion, every useless dream, every unsatisfied desire is at length absorbed, and whose waves emerge peacefully into the “Lake of Death!” What a strange succession of names! What a singular division of the moon’s two hemispheres, joined to one another like man and woman, and forming that sphere of life carried into space! And was not the fantastic Michel right in thus interpreting the fancies of the ancient astronomers? But while his imagination thus roved over “the seas,” his grave companions were considering things more geographically. They were learning this new world by heart. They were measuring angles and diameters. CHAPTER XII. OROGRAPHIC DETAILS