His ears were with his eyes, and these were obstinately bent on the gigantic ramparts of _Clavius_, formed of concentric mountain ridges, which were actually leagues in depth.

On the floor of the vast cavity, could be seen hundreds of smaller craters, mottling it like a skimming dish, and pierced here and there by sharp peaks, one of which could hardly be less than 15,000 feet high.
All around, the plain was desolate in the extreme.

You could not conceive how anything could be barrener than these serrated outlines, or gloomier than these shattered mountains--until you looked at the plain that encircled them.

Ardan hardly exaggerated when he called it the scene of a battle fought thousands of years ago but still white with the hideous bones of overthrown peaks, slaughtered mountains and mutilated precipices! "Hills amid the air encountered hills, Hurled to and fro in jaculation dire," murmured M'Nicholl, who could quote you Milton quite as readily as the Bible.
"This must have been the spot," muttered Barbican to himself, "where the brittle shell of the cooling sphere, being thicker than usual, offered greater resistance to an eruption of the red-hot nucleus.

Hence these piled up buttresses, and these orderless heaps of consolidated lava and ejected scoriae." The Projectile advanced, but the scene of desolation seemed to remain unchanged.