Manned space flight -- Fiction; Moon -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction
Some remarks on the orographical disposition of the moon must conclude
the description of its continents, chains of mountains, isolated
mountains, amphitheatres, and watercourses. The moon is like an immense
Switzerland--a continual Norway, where Plutonic influence has done
everything. This surface, so profoundly rugged, is the result of the
successive contractions of the crust while the orb was being formed. The
lunar disc is propitious for the study of great geological phenomena.
According to the remarks of some astronomers, its surface, although more
ancient than the surface of the earth, has remained newer. There there
is no water to deteriorate the primitive relief, the continuous action
of which produces a sort of general levelling. No air, the decomposing
influence of which modifies orographical profiles. There Pluto's work,
unaltered by Neptune's, is in all its native purity. It is the earth as
she was before tides and currents covered her with layers of soil.
After having wandered over these vast continents the eye is attracted by
still vaster seas. Not only does their formation, situation, and aspect
recall the terrestrial oceans, but, as upon earth, these seas occupy the
largest part of the globe. And yet these are not liquid tracts, but
plains, the nature of which the travellers hoped soon to determine.
Astronomers, it must be owned, have decorated these pretended seas with
at least odd names which science has respected at present. Michel Ardan
was right when he compared this map to a "map of tenderness," drawn up
by Scudery or Cyrano de Bergerac.
"Only," added he, "it is no longer the map of sentiment like that of the
18th century; it is the map of life, clearly divided into two parts, the
one feminine, the other masculine. To the women, the right hemisphere;
to the men, the left!"
When he spoke thus Michel made his prosaic companions shrug their
shoulders. Barbicane and Nicholl looked at the lunar map from another
point of view to that of their imaginative friend. However, their
imaginative friend had some reason on his side. Judge if he had not.
In the left hemisphere stretches the "Sea of Clouds," where human reason
is so often drowned. Not far off appears the "Sea of Rains," fed by all
the worries of existence. Near lies the "Sea of Tempests," where man
struggles incessantly against his too-often victorious passions. Then,
exhausted by deceptions, treasons, infidelities, and all the procession
of terrestrial miseries, what does he find at the end of his career? The
vast "Sea of Humours," scarcely softened by some drops from the waters
of the "Gulf of Dew!" Clouds, rain, tempests, humours, does the life of
man contain aught but these? and is it not summed up in these four
words?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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