busy taking photographs of the pyramid with
its ghastly surroundings, and a few general views of this strange City
of the Dead.

CHAPTER VIII

When they got back they found Murgatroyd pacing up and down the floor of
the deck-chamber, looking about him with serious eyes, but betraying no
other visible sign of anxiety. The _Astronef_ was at once his home and
his idol, and, as Redgrave had said, even his own direct orders would
hardly have induced him to leave her even in a world in which there was
not a living human being to dispute possession of her.

When they had resumed their ordinary clothing the _Astronef_ rose from
the surface of the plain, crossed the encircling wall at the height of a
few hundred feet, and made her way at a speed of about fifty miles an
hour towards the regions of the South Pole.

Behind them to the north-west they could see from their elevation of
nearly thirty thousand feet the vast expanse of the Sea of Clouds.
Dotted here and there were the shining points and ridges of light
marking the peaks and crater-walls which the rays of the rising sun had
already touched. Before them and to the right and left rose a vast maze
of ragged, splintery peaks and huge ramparts of mountain-walls enclosing
plains so far below their summits that the light of neither sun nor
earth ever reached them.

By directing the force exerted by what might now be called the
propelling part of the engines against the mountain masses which they
crossed to right and left and behind, Redgrave was able to take a zigzag
course that carried them over many of the walled plains which were
wholly or partially lit up by the sun, and in nearly all of the deepest
their telescopes revealed something like what they had found within the
crater of Tycho. At length, pointing to a gigantic circle of white light
fringing an abyss of utter darkness, he said:

"There is Newton, the greatest mystery of the moon. Those inner walls
are twenty-four thousand feet high; that means that the bottom, which
has never been seen by human eyes, is about five thousand feet below the
surface of the moon. What do you say, dear--shall we go down and see if
the searchlight will show us anything? You know there may be something
like breathable air down there, and perhaps living creatures who can
breathe it."

"Certainly!" replied Zaidie decisively; "haven't we come to see things
that nobody else has ever seen?"

Redgrave went down to the engine-r