I vote we go and see what the invisible hemisphere is like." "I have had all I want of this side," said Zaidie, looking away from the scene of the hideous tragedy, "so the sooner we go, the better I shall like it." A few minutes later the _Astronef_ was again rising towards the stars with her searchlights still flashing down into the Valley of Expiring Life, which had seemed to them even worse than the Valley of Death.

As he followed the rays with a pair of powerful field glasses, Redgrave fancied that he saw huge, dim shapes moving about the stunted shrubbery and through the slimy pools of the stagnant rivers, and once or twice he got a glimpse of what might well have been the ruins of towns and cities, but the gloom soon became too deep and dense for the searchlights to pierce and he was glad when the _Astronef_ soared up into the brilliant sunlight once more.

Even the ghastly wilderness of the lunar landscape was welcome after the nameless horrors of that hideous abyss.
After a couple of hours' rapid travelling, Redgrave pointed down to a comparatively small, deep crater, and said: "There, that is Malapert.

It is almost exactly at the south pole of the moon, and there," he went on, pointing ahead, "is the horizon of the hemisphere which no earthborn eyes have ever seen." "Except ours," said Zaidie somewhat inconsequently, "and I wonder what _we_ shall see." "Probably something very like what we have seen on this side," replied Redgrave, and as the event proved, he was right.
Contrary to many ingenious speculations which have been indulged in by both scientist and romancer, they found that the hemisphere, which for countless ages had never been turned towards the earth, was almost an exact replica of the visible one.

Fully three-fourths of it was brilliantly illuminated by the sun, and what they saw through their glasses was practically the same as what they had beheld on the earthward side; huge groups of enormous craters and ringed mountains, long, irregular chains crowned with sharp, splintery peaks, and between these vast, deeply depressed areas, ranging in colour from dazzling white to grey-brown, marking the beds of the vanished lunar seas.
As they crossed one of these, Redgrave allowed the _Astronef_ to sink to within a few thousand feet of the surface, and then he and Zaidie swept it with their telescopes.