It was the earth-lit portion of the long familiar and yet mysterious orb which was to be their resting place for the next few hours.
"The sun hasn't risen over there yet," said Redgrave, as she was peering down into the void.

"It's earth-light still.

Now look at the other side." She crossed the deck, and saw the strangest scene she had yet beheld.
Apparently only a few miles below her was a huge crescent-shaped plain arching away for hundreds of miles on either side.

The outer edge had a ragged look, and little excrescences, which soon took the shape of flat-topped mountains, projected from it and stood out bright and sharp against the black void beneath, out of which the stars shone up, as it seemed, a few feet beyond the edge of the disc.
The plain itself was a scene of awful and utter desolation.

Huge mountain-walls, towering to immense heights and enclosing great circular and oval plains, one side of them blazing with intolerable light, and the other side black with impenetrable obscurity; enormous valleys reaching down from brilliant day into rayless night--perhaps down into the very bowels of the dead world itself; vast grey-white plains lying round the mountains, crossed by little ridges and by long black lines, which could only be immense fissures with perpendicular sides--but all hard, grey-white and black, all intolerable brightness or inky gloom; not a sign of life anywhere; no shady forests, no green fields, no broad, glittering oceans; only a ghastly wilderness of dead mountains and dead plains.
"What an awful place," Zaidie whispered.