A couple of hours' excursion among the houses proved that they had been the last refuge of the last descendants of a dying race, a race which had socially degenerated just as the succession of cities had done architecturally, age by age, as the long-drawn struggle for mere existence had become keener and keener until the two last essentials, air and water, had failed--and then the end had come.
The streets, like the square of the great Temple of Tycho, were strewn with myriads and myriads of bones, and there were myriads more scattered round what had once been the shores of the dwindling lake.

Here, as elsewhere, there was not a sign or a record of any kind--carving or sculpture.

If there were any such on the surface of the moon they had not discovered them.

The buildings which they had seen evidently belonged to the decadent period during which the dwindling remnants of the Selenites asked only to eat and drink and breathe.
Inside the great Pyramid of the City of Tycho they might, perhaps, have found something--some stone or tablet which bore the mark of the artist's hand; elsewhere, perhaps, they might have found cities reared by older races, which might have rivalled the creations of Egypt and Babylon, but they had neither time nor inclination to look for these.
All that they had seen of the Dead World had only sickened and saddened them.

The untravelled regions of Space peopled by living worlds more akin to their own were before them.