Crowded about the deadlight, the passengers watched intently the enormous yellow globe beneath them steadily increasing in diameter. In twenty minutes, it filled half their field of vision; ten more, and its rim was lost to them. They were settling down upon the moon! Directly below lay the huge circular crater of Copernicus, frosty in the sun's light, brilliant streaks radiating from its cone. Inside the circumference of the extinct volcano, and parallel to it, was a smaller crater, at the bottom of which glowed several dazzling points, which Rhoda knew must be other cones. To the south stretched away vast grayish-yellow, lava-strewn plains. Elsewhere, over the visible surface of the moon, were distributed continents of highly irregular formation, with strangely indented coastlines, rivaling in their conformation those of Norway and Sweden. Concentric circles of great mountains marked both the northern and southern hemispheres, most of them craters of extinct volcanoes, and each glowing with its own individual color or radiation. Here rose a sparkling white point of light, Mount Eratosthenes; there, Mount Gay-Lussac; beyond, Mount Philolaus, and, to the south, Doerfel, Leibnitz, and that most splendid of lunar glories, Tycho, plainly visible in its dazzling beauty to the naked eyes of the inhabitants of the earth. The predominating color both of these craters and of the dead seas, or plains, surrounding them seemed to be gray mixed with green or brown, but, here and there, certain of them shone with a bluish tint, while others glowed with a well-defined red or green. The great crater of Copernicus steadily increased in size until Bennie estimated that they were less than two thousand miles above it. The lunar surface was still coming up toward them at an appalling velocity, and Bennie began to have misgivings about their ability to stop in time. "If we can't stop her, we're done for," he said. "We ought to have reversed sooner. I thought we were going to run _by_ the moon, but we were evidently pointed directly toward it." "You forgot the moon's orbital motion, I think," put in Rhoda. "It got in our way, that's all." "It's too late to do anything now," said Bennie. "We're too near to swerve off and run by." He looked at his watch. "If the tractor is delivering its full power and runs for five minutes more, we ought to be all right, but it's going to be a narrow squeak." He hurried to the engine-room. "Atterbury, give her more power!" he shouted. The engineer threw a frightened glance at him. "I'm at the last notch now. Look at the tractor! The inductor-tubes are white-hot!"