But the _Yosemite Valley_, as I saw it ten years ago, is an apter comparison.

There I stood on the brink of a tremendous chasm with perpendicular walls, a mile in width, a mile in depth and eight miles in length.

Judge if I was astounded! But how should we feel it, when travelling on the lunar surface, we should suddenly find ourselves on the brink of a yawning chasm two miles wide, fifty miles long, and so fathomless in sheer vertical depth as to leave its black profundities absolutely invisible in spite of the dazzling sunlight!" "I feel my flesh already crawling even in the anticipation!" cried Ardan.
"I shan't regret it much if we never get to the Moon," growled M'Nicholl; "I never hankered after it anyhow!" By this time the Projectile had reached the fortieth degree of lunar latitude, and could hardly be further than five hundred miles from the surface, a distance reduced to about 5 miles by the travellers' glasses.
Away to their left appeared _Helicon_, a ring mountain about 1600 feet high; and still further to the left the eye could catch a glimpse of the cliffs enclosing a semi-elliptical portion of _Mare Imbrium_, called the _Sinus Iridium_, or Bay of the Rainbows.
In order to allow astronomers to make complete observations on the lunar surface, the terrestrial atmosphere should possess a transparency seventy times greater than its present power of transmission.

But in the void through which the Projectile was now floating, no fluid whatever interposed between the eye of the observer and the object observed.
Besides, the travellers now found themselves at a distance that had never before been reached by the most powerful telescopes, including even Lord Rosse's and the great instrument on the Rocky Mountains.
Barbican was therefore in a condition singularly favorable to resolve the great question concerning the Moon's inhabitableness.

Nevertheless, the solution still escaped him.