A world absolutely and completely dead, fixed, still, motionless--save when a gigantic land-slide, breaking off the vertical wall of a crater, plunged down into the soundless depths, with all the fury too of a crashing avalanche, with all the speed of a Niagara, but, in the total absence of atmosphere, noiseless as a feather, as a snow flake, as a grain of impalpable dust.
Careful observations, taken by Barbican and repeated by his companions, soon satisfied them that the ridgy outline of the mountains on the Moon's border, though perhaps due to different forces from those acting in the centre, still presented a character generally uniform.

The same bulwark-surrounded hollows, the same abrupt projections of surface.

Yet a different arrangement, as Barbican pointed out to his companions, might be naturally expected.

In the central portion of the disc, the Moon's crust, before solidification, must have been subjected to two attractions--that of the Moon herself and that of the Earth--acting, however, in contrary directions and therefore, in a certain sense, serving to neutralize each other.

Towards the border of her disc, on the contrary, the terrestrial attraction, having acted in a direction perpendicular to that of the lunar, should have exerted greater power, and therefore given a different shape to the general contour.