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66 Venus than on the earth. The nearest thing I can liken it to on earth is the view of the Alps from some of the Swiss mountains. I have seen something a little like it when I rested once on the summit of Jungfrau, and looked upon the chains of Alpine peaks,–on Eiger, the Wetterhorn, and far-off Mont Blanc. Peak upon peak, chain upon chain, opened to my view. But the absence of the ring-shape of the mountains marks the difference between the mountain-lands of the earth and those of the moon. In this the lunar mountains are more like ours than those of earth, though Vesuvius and the mountains of the Sandwich Isles are a little like the huge craters of the moon.

I made designedly for Tycho,–the metropolitan crater, as your astronomers call it. The huge circle of ramparts (but little lower than the loftiest mountains of Europe), in terrific precipices of a mile or more in sheer descents, opened before me. The enclosed region of the ring was larger than many an English county, but it was a vast desert; not an even plain, but rugged, with piles of rocks, relics of ancient volcanic eruptions. The central cones stood out somewhat as the Malverns stand in the midst of the plain of