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The Mysterious Document.
65

selected one large meteor, and chaining my car to it, swept with it onwards towards your satellite, which loomed as a distant globe, part light, part dark, in the black ether.

As I drew near it, in the vast realms of space, I loosened my car from the meteor, and then, restoring the power of gravitation, dashed on into the lunar sphere of gravitation towards the southern mountain-region that surrounds the lunar South Pole. It was a wondrously grand, and yet an awful, spectacle,–those vast and desolate rings of lunar mountains. Chain beyond chain, circle beyond circle, ring beyond ring, of extinct volcanoes opened up to my vision,–all glistening in the bright sunlight. To man, the heat would have been fatal. Boiling water was nothing to it. The thermometer rose to what you call 400 degrees. But our natures can bear much greater heat than that. In our own world, so near the sun, we often get it. Higher and more potent than man in vitality, freed from his lower necessities, we can flourish and enjoy a vigorous life where he would die. So the intense heat did not inconvenience me. I only dwelt admiringly on the superb spectacle–a spectacle such as I never saw before; though it was more like, in some points, the scenes on