shire. Fancy the circle complete–the Cotswolds and Welsh mountains some ten or twenty times more lofty–up to the level of the taller Alps; the Malverns raised to Ben Cruachan; the plains of Worcester and Hereford and Gloucester a lifeless desert covered with rocks, and you may gain a feeble conception of what Tycho is.
All was dead around me. Not a city, not a house, not a tree, not even a blade of grass was to be seen. All horror, desolation, death! And yet, withal, Nature, even in that dead world, has a certain strange beauty.
I made for the central group of mountains (which I have likened to the Malverns). Here on their southern slope I descended. The shock was violent, though I tried to soften the fall. I dismounted from my car and trod another world, the third world I had visited. It was a solemn and sublime feeling,–that of treading a fresh world in space.
I clambered up the chief peak of the central mountain of Tycho. Around me stretched the desert-plain for some twenty miles on every side, and then, beyond and above all, the mighty ring of mountains, without a break, only varied, here and there, by the long shadows of their rocks.
