Over this chaotic region the travellers were now sweeping, as if borne on the wings of a storm; the peaks defiled beneath them; the yawning chasms revealed their ruin-strewn floors; the fissured cracks untwisted themselves; the ramparts showed all their sides; the mysterious holes presented their impenetrable depths; the clustered mountain summits and rings rapidly decomposed themselves: but in a moment again all had become more inextricably entangled than ever. Everything appeared to be the finished handiwork of volcanic agency, in the utmost purity and highest perfection. None of the mollifying effects of air or water could here be noticed. No smooth-capped mountains, no gently winding river channels, no vast prairie-lands of deposited sediment, no traces of vegetation, no signs of agriculture, no vestiges of a great city. Nothing but vast beds of glistering lava, now rough like immense piles of scoriae and clinker, now smooth like crystal mirrors, and reflecting the Sun's rays with the same intolerable glare. Not the faintest speck of life. A world absolutely and completely dead, fixed, still, motionless—save when a gigantic land-slide, breaking off the vertical wall of a crater, plunged down into the soundless depths, with all the fury too of a crashing avalanche, with all the speed of a Niagara, but, in the total absence of atmosphere, noiseless as a feather, as a snow flake, as a grain of impalpable dust.

Basic set up:

In this sequel to Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, Verne's three travellers finally make it to the moon. Or almost. They fly around it in their homemade projectile.

Verne's characters in All Around the Moon don't actually walk on the moon, but they get pretty dang close to it. Thanks to their projectile, they get to circle the moon at pretty close proximity.

By focusing on the moon, Jules Verne's story reflects a long tradition in sci-fi of focusing on locations and settings in outer space. Sci-fi writers just love outer space, and as far back as 1870 they were already imagining what outer space would be like.

The landscape of the moon described above in some ways resembles ours. There are chasms and peaks and mountain summits. Of course we also have chasms and peaks and mountain summits on our own awesome planet.

But the passage also emphasizes just how different the moon's landscape is from ours. "None of the mollifying effects of air or water could here be noticed." And because there's no air or water, the moon's landscape behaves in pretty strange ways. Even when there's a huge landslide, "crashing" like an "avalanche" with the "speed of a Niagara," there's no sound: "in the total absence of atmosphere," the landslide is "noiseless as a feather, as a snow flake, as a grain of impalpable dust."

Whoa. That's way trippier than we would have expected from a guy writing in 1870.