I remember, too, that as I studied the sun there, and watched the volcanic outbursts on its surface, I felt that I possibly embraced in a threefold picture as many stages in the history of planetary existence, through all of which this eruptive action was an agent,--above in the primal energies of the sun; all around me in the great volcano, black and torn with the fires that still burn below, and whose smoke rose over me in the plume that floated high up from the central cone; and finally in this last stage in the moon, which hung there pale in the daylight sky, and across whose face the vapors of the great terrestrial volcano drifted, but on whose own surface the last fire was extinct. We shall not get an adequate idea of it all, unless we add to our bird’s-eye views one showing a chain of lunar mountains as they would appear to us if we saw them, as we do our own Alps or Apennines, from about their feet; and such a view Fig. 74 affords us. In the barren plain on the foreground are great rifts such as we have been looking at from above, and smaller craters, with their extinct cones; while beyond rise the mountains, ghastly white in the cold sunshine, their precipices crowned by no mountain fir or cedar, and softened by no intervening air to veil their nakedness. If the reader has ever climbed one of the highest Alpine peaks, like those about Monte Rosa or the Matterhorn, and there waited for the dawn, he cannot but remember the sense of desolation and strangeness due to the utter absence of everything belonging to man or his works or his customary abode, above all which he is lifted into an upper world, so novel and, as it were, so unhuman in its features, that he is not likely to have forgotten his first impression of it; and this impression gives the nearest but still a feeble idea of what we see with the telescope in looking down on such a colorless scene, where too no water bubbles, no tree can sigh in the breeze, no bird can sing,--the home of silence. [Illustration: FIG. 73.--WITHERED HAND.] But here, above it, hangs a world in the sky, which we should need to call in color to depict, for it is green and yellow with the forests and the harvest-fields that overspread its continents, with emerald islands studding its gray oceans, over all of which sweep the clouds that bring the life-giving rain. It is our own world, which lights up the dreary lunar night, as the moon does ours. [Illustration: FIG. 74.--IDEAL LUNAR LANDSCAPE AND EARTH-SHINE.]