Page:The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 (IA TheGreatMoonHoaxOf18351859).pdf/36

Rh mens we saw: & circumstance which we attempted to account for from the great (theoretical) extremes in the lunar climate. On a curious kind of tree-melon we nevertheless saw fruit in great abundance, and in every stage of inception and maturity. The general color of these woods was a dark green, though not without occasional admixtures of every tint of our forest seasons. The hectic flush of autumn was often seen kindled upon the cheek of earliest spring; and the gay drapery of summer in some places surrounded trees leafless as the victims of winter. It seemed as if all the seasons here united hands in a circle of perpetual harmony. Of animals we saw only an elegant striped quadruped about three feet high, like a miniature zebra; which was always in small herds on the green sward of the hills; and two or three kinds of long-tailed birds, which we judged to be golden and blue pheasants. On the shores, however, we saw countless multitudes of univalve shell-fish, and among them some huge flat ones, which all three of my associates declared to be cornu ammonæ; and I confess I was here compelled to abandon my sceptical substitution of pebbles. The cliffs all along these shores were deeply undermined by tides; they were very cavernous, and yellow crystal stalactites larger than a man's thigh were shooting forth on all sides. Indeed every rood of this island appeared to be crystallized; masses of fallen crystals were found on every beach we explored, and beamed from every fractured headland. It was more like a creation of an oriental fancy than a distant variety of nature brought by the powers of science to ocular demonstration. The striking dissimilitude of this island to every other we had found on these waters, and its near proximity to the main land, led us to bappose that it must at some time have been a part of it; more especially as its crescent bay embraced the first of a chain of smaller ones which ran directly thither. The first one was a pure quartz rock, about three miles in circumference, towering in naked majesty from the blue deep, without either shore or shelter. But it glowed in the sun almost like a sapphire, as did all the lesser ones of whom it seemed the king. Our theory was speedily confirmed; for all the shore of the main land was battlemented and spired with these unobtainable