Craterus

“ The chariots also were captured, horses and all, being heavy and slow in the retreat, and useless in the action itself on account of the clayey ground. When the horsemen who had escaped from this rout brought news to Porus that Alexander himself had crossed the river with the strongest part of his army, and that his son had been slain in the battle, he nevertheless could not make up his mind what course to take, because the men who had been left behind under Craterus were seen to be attempting to cross the river from the great camp which was directly opposite his position. ”

“ However, at last he preferred to march against Alexander himself with all his army, and to come into a decisive conflict with the strongest division of the Macedonians, commanded by the king in person. But nevertheless he left a few of the elephants together with a small army there at the camp to frighten the cavalry under Craterus from the bank of the river. He then took all his cavalry to the number of 4,000 men, all his chariots to the number of 300, with 200 of his elephants and 30,000 choice infantry, and marched against Alexander. ”

“ Slave and workers – obeying a superior command.
Overhead, more than two hundred miles of solid rock-strata lay like a thick shell – an exuviate – as tho this alien bit of spake were animate, and the moon-matter a shell over its pulsating being. The crater-shaft itself, like a huge gaping aesophagus, was drawing into the Hemisphere a current of rarefied air, and like corpuscles the disc-shadows flickered upon their endless journeys. Yet herein lay the stronghold, the natural habitat, of the Wrongness of Space. ”

“ I’d be helpless as a new-born babe if we bumped up against the Wrongness of Space right here and now—“
“If you don’t quit talking,” chided Dos-Tev, cutting into the rambling soliloquy, “you’ll have yourself worked into a nervous state. Remember the crater is fifty-six miles in diameter up here, and it took us six hours to walk to the center. Also this diameter prevails for over two miles to the false-floor of debris. After we get to the inner shaft we’ll have some worrying to do.”
There was a moment’s silence and then a more courageous, “Yes, Sire,” from Bullo. ”

“ To the other was the downward sweep of the crater's flank, dun, dead, wrinkled, seamed and seared by the stabbing rays which bathed it in pitiless light. And beyond the foot of the crater was a vast irregular plain, lower in the center as though eons past it might have been the bed of some vanished sea. About the plain were the crests of barren mountains, crags, pinnacles, misshapen and weird beyond thought.
Yes, the moon is dead—now. But—there was life upon it once. Croft willed himself down from the lip of the crater to the plain. He moved about it. ”

“ Far above us was the heaven-towering horizon, and far beneath us, where the top of the mountain should have been, was a deeper deep, the great crater, the House of the Sun. Twenty-three miles around stretched the dizzy wells of the crater. We stood on the edge of the nearly vertical western wall, and the floor of the crater lay nearly half a mile beneath. This floor, broken by lava-flows and cinder-cones, was as red and fresh and uneroded as if it were but yesterday that the fires went out. ”

“ There are other interesting glimpses to [Pg 242] be had of an older world in the moon than that whose scarred face is now beautified for us by distance. Not far from Theophilus and the other great crater-mountains just described, at the upper, or southern, end of the level expanse called the "Sea of Nectar," is a broad, semicircular bay whose shores are formed by the walls of a partially destroyed crater named Fracastorius. ”

“ Somewhere over Copernicus, the two invisible bodies of Dos-Tev and Bullo had been loosed in mid-void as the force-plane disseminated beneath their feet, and now were falling toward the heart of the crater, under the power of their own apparati.
Darkness, eddying and impenetrable. Above; a circular star-field like black velvet dusted lightly with powdered crystal, growing constantly smaller. Around and below, a darkness so dense as to seem almost animate. ”

“ Under a high sun they generally appear as white spots, more or less ill- defined, as on the floors of Archimedes, Fracastorius, Plato, and many other formations, which include a great number, all of which are probably crater cones, although only a few have been seen as such. It is a significant fact that in these situations they are always found to be closely associated with the light streaks which traverse the interior of the formations, standing either on their surface or close to their edges. ”

“ Here was another and smaller crater inside the great ringed wall of Hercules. The light of the sun struck slantingly across to throw one side of the gigantic cup into shadow, while the opposite rim blared brightly in the lunar dawn. And within the smaller crater, too, one side was dead black with shadow.
Dead!—No moving thing—no sign of life or indication that life might ever have been! A dead world, this!—its utter desolation struck Chet's half-uttered exclamation to a hoarse whisper of dismay. In all the universe what less likely place might one discover wherein to look for man? ”

“ Hence the Crater is indeed essentially vivific, since souls also are certain lives, but it is the first-effective cause of souls, according to the peculiarity of hyparxis, and is the uniform and all-perfect monad, not of every life, but of that which is psychical. For from this Crater the soul of the universe subsists, and likewise the second and third genera of partible souls, and of those souls that are allotted a progression between these. ”

“ Unfortunately for us, the banks of clouds below were too thick for us to do more than obtain a view of the surrounding mountain-tops and country, and see the crater. The sea we could only behold at a great distance. We spent forty minutes at the top, examining the crater, and looking all around us; during the latter part of which operation, I am sorry to say, I fell fast asleep from sheer fatigue, and was aroused by Richard hallooing to me that my clothes were on fire, which, alas! was too true. I pocketed specimens of obsidian, sulphur, and pumice. ”

“ Craters of the kind exist, indeed, in hundreds on the moon's surface. But many astronomers have given years of their life to the study of such objects; and the centre of the moon's disc, for reasons which astronomers will understand, has been studied with exceptional care. It seems so unlikely that a deep crater three miles in diameter could escape recognition, that some astronomers have not hesitated to regard the newly-detected crater as certainly a new formation. ”

“ Every day this Wrongness of Space is getting stronger. Whether it’s devil or man, I know not. Whether it’s vulnerable or not, I cannot fathom. Yet somewhere in the heart of this crater-pocked seimi-riven satellite there crouches an ancient stagnated evil which must be eradicated sooner or later, which is threatening at the peace of the universe and is uniting with that devil in man’s guise, Ay-Artz.”
“What?” stammered Bull, staring. “You mean—“
“That fools win where scientists fear to tread,” quoted Dos-Tev.
Bullo came forward, his eyes gleaming eagerly. ”

“ The great plain between the hills and the sea grows very impressive; so silent it is, so mournfully desolate, so haunted with memories of vanished glory. I looked at the Crathis—the Crati of Cosenza—here beginning to spread into a sea-marsh; the waters which used to flow over golden sands, which made white the oxen, and sunny-haired the children, that bathed in them, are now lost amid a wilderness poisoned by their own vapours.
The railway station, like all in this region, was set about with eucalyptus. ”

“ The Thi-Ranley radiator swayed under the overburdening load, leaking the built-up charge into the room, but Mea-Quin had no thought for it.
Out there in the blackness, where the thin sliver of illumination which was the rising of the earth-light hung in the black firmament over the yawning maw of the crater, dark as the pits of Tartarus, his thoughts concentrated. Dimly limned against the feeble earth-light were the serrated contours of the satellite, beyond and around the crater. Faint splinters of saw-toothed ridges hung ghostily from the gloom against the earth’s reflection. ”

“ The sun poured its beaming rays to the very bottom of the crater.
Each hillock, every rock, every stone, every asperity of the soil had its share of the luminous effulgence, and its shadow fell heavily on the soil. Among others, to his insane delight, the shadow of Scartaris was marked and clear, and moved slowly with the radiant star of day.
My uncle moved with it in a state of mental ecstasy. At twelve o'clock exactly, when the sun had attained its highest altitude for the day, the shadow fell upon the edge of the central pit! ”

“ The deep and inaccessible bottom of the crater loses itself in misty obscurity, and glimmers indistinctly through the vapours which are there slowly and incessantly ascending from its mysterious depths. All is desolate and silent, save when a solitary falcon, hovering over the vast chasm, awakes with her discordant screech the echoes of the precipice. Through a telescope may be seen, in various parts of the huge crater walls, swarms of small swallows, which have there built their nests, flying backwards and forwards. ”

“ When the Sun is rising the shadow of the walls falls upon the interior of the craters, and many of these dark conspicuous objects are to be seen near the Moon’s terminator. With a high Sun some of the craters are extremely bright. In proof of the large number of these objects, it may be noted here that in Mädler’s lunar map (1837) 7735 craters are figured, while in Schmidt’s (1878) there are no less than 32,856!
Crater-Cones. Conical hills or mountains, visible as small luminous spots about the period of full Moon. They are from 1/2 to 3 miles in diameter, and show deep central depressions. ”

“ The machine left the crater floor and flew rapidly up on a steep spiral course. In a few minutes the rugged mountain panorama was spread out like a relief map below us. Presently the stars were visible, and still we climbed, comfortable enough in the heated, air-tight compartment. The propellers had been stopped, but the gravity-neutralizing gas continued to lift the vessel straight up.
Then I noticed a faint purple veil coming over the stars above. Suddenly it seemed that we were plunging through a bank of thin purple mist. Abruptly we shot above a landscape weirder than the wildest dream! ”

“ On our earth the range-formation is supreme; on the moon the crater-formation is the rule, and is so-called from analogy to our volcanoes. A typical lunar crater may be described as a circular wall, enclosing a central plain, or "floor," which is often much depressed below the level of the surface outside. These so-called "craters," or "ring-mountains," as they are also termed, are often of gigantic proportions. For instance, the central plain of one of them, known as Ptolemæus, [17] is about 115 miles across, while that of Plato is about 60. The walls of craters often rise to great heights ”

“ About a mile southward of Banks’ Cove, there is a fine elliptic crater, about five hundred feet in depth, and three-quarters of a mile in diameter. Its bottom is occupied by a lake of brine, out of which some little crateriform hills of tuff rise. The lower beds are formed of compact tuff, appearing like a subaqueous deposit; whilst the upper beds, round the entire circumference, consist of a harsh, friable tuff, of little specific gravity, but often containing fragments of rock in layers. ”

“ Very stealthily he rises to his knees and peers over. As he does so, a chance star-shell bursts squarely over him, and comes sizzling officiously down almost on to his back. His head drops like a stone into the bush, but not before the ghostly magnesium flare has shown him what he came out to see—a deep shell-crater. The crater is full of Germans. They look like grey beetles in a trap, and are busy with pick and shovel, apparently "improving" the crater and connecting it with their own fire-trenches. They have no sentry out. ”

“ The difference is not that craters are formed less often, but that the great geological activity of Earth—erosion, volcanism, mountain building, continental drift, etc.—erases craters as fast as they are formed. On the average, a 10-kilometer-wide crater is formed on Earth about once every million years, but all those older than a few million years have been eroded away, filled in, or crushed beyond recognition by crustal motion. ”

“ I was chosen to accompany the car that was going to Aristarchus, because, as every one who had viewed the moon from the earth was aware, there was something very mysterious about that mountain. I knew that it was a crater nearly thirty miles in diameter and very deep, although its floor was plainly visible. ”

“ The question being put, Hans replied:
"Scartaris."
My uncle shot a triumphant glance at me.
"Now for the crater!" he cried.
The crater of Snæfell resembled an inverted cone, the opening of which might be half a league in diameter. Its depth appeared to be about two thousand feet. Imagine the aspect of such a reservoir, brim full and running over with liquid fire amid the rolling thunder. The bottom of the funnel was about 250 feet in circuit, so that the gentle slope allowed its lower brim to be reached without much difficulty. ”