rage surface, but the sun's rays were
blazing full into this one, and, dotted round its slopes at varying
elevations, they made out little patches which seemed to differ from the
general surface.

"I wonder if those are the remains of cities," said Zaidie. "Isn't it
possible that the old peoples of the moon might have built their cities
along the seas just as we do, and that their descendants may have
followed the waters as they retreated, I mean as they either dried up or
disappeared into the centre?"

"Very probable indeed, dearest of philosophers," he said, picking her up
with one arm and kissing the smiling lips which had just uttered this
most reasonable deduction. "Now we'll go down and see."

He diminished the vertically repulsive force a little, and the
_Astronef_ dropped slantingly towards the bed of what might once have
been the Pacific of the Moon.

When they were within about a couple of thousand feet of the surface it
became perfectly plain that Zaidie was correct in her hypothesis. The
vast sea floor was thickly strewn with the ruins of countless cities and
towns, which had been inhabited by an equally countless series of
generations of men and women, who had perhaps lived and loved in the
days when our own world was a glowing mass of molten rock, surrounded by
the envelope of vapours which has since condensed to form our oceans.

They dropped still lower and ran diagonally across the ocean-bed, and as
they did so Zaidie's proposition was more and more completely confirmed,
for they saw that the towns and cities which stood highest were the most
dilapidated, and that the buildings had evidently been torn and crumbled
away by the action of wind and water, snow and ice.

The nearer they approached to the central and deepest depression, the
better preserved and the simpler the buildings became, until down in the
lowest depths they found a collection of low-built square edifices,
scarcely better than huts, which had clustered round the little lake
into which, ages before, the ocean had dwindled. But where the lake had
been there was now only a shallow depression covered with grey sand and
brown rock.

Into this they descended and touched the lunar surface for the last
time. 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