The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of the scenery had
altogether disappeared. The glare of the sun had taken upon itself a
faint tinge of amber; the shadows upon the cliff of the crater wall
were deeply purple. To the eastward a dark bank of fog still crouched
and sheltered from the sunrise, but to the westward the sky was blue
and clear. I began to realise the length of my insensibility.
We were no longer in a void. An atmosphere had arisen about us. The
outline of things had gained in character, had grown acute and varied;
save for a shadowed space of white substance here and there, white
substance that was no longer air but snow, the arctic appearance had
gone altogether. Everywhere broad rusty brown spaces of bare and
tumbled earth spread to the blaze of the sun. Here and there at the
edge of the snowdrifts were transient little pools and eddies of
water, the only things stirring in that expanse of barrenness. The
sunlight inundated the upper two blinds of our sphere and turned our
climate to high summer, but our feet were still in shadow, and the
sphere was lying upon a drift of snow.
And scattered here and there upon the slope, and emphasised by little
white threads of unthawed snow upon their shady sides, were shapes
like sticks, dry twisted sticks of the same rusty hue as the rock
upon which they lay. That caught one’s thoughts sharply. Sticks! On a
lifeless world? Then as my eye grew more accustomed to the texture of
their substance, I perceived that almost all this surface had a fibrous
texture, like the carpet of brown needles one finds beneath the shade
of pine trees.
“Cavor!” I said.
“Yes.”
“It may be a dead world now--but once----”
Something arrested my attention. I had discovered among these needles a
number of little round objects. And it seemed to me that one of these
had moved.
“Cavor,” I whispered.
“What?”
But I did not answer at once. I stared incredulous. For an instant I
could not believe my eyes. I gave an inarticulate cry. I gripped his
arm. I pointed. “Look!” I cried, finding my tongue. “There! Yes! And
there!”
His eyes followed my pointing finger. “Eh?” he said.
How can I describe the thing I saw? It is so petty a thing to state,
and yet it seemed so wonderful, so pregnant with emotion. I have said
that amidst the stick-like litter were these rounded bodies, these
little oval bodies that might have passed as very small pebbles.
And now first one and then another had stirred, had rolled over and
cracked, and down the crack of each of them showed a minute line of
yellowish green, thrusting outward to meet the hot encouragement of the
newly-risen sun. For a moment that was all, and then there stirred and
burst a third!
“It is a seed,” said Cavor. And then I heard him whisper very softly,
“_Life!_”
“Life!” And immediately it poured upon us that our vast journey had
not been made in vain, that we had come to no arid waste of minerals,
but to a world that lived and moved! We watched intensely. I remember
I kept rubbing the glass before me with my sleeve, jealous of the
faintest suspicion of mist.
[Illustration: “We watched intensely”]
The picture was clear and vivid only in the middle of the field.
All about that centre the dead fibres and seeds were magnified and
distorted by the curvature of the glass. But we could see enough! One
after another all down the sunlit slope these miraculous little brown
bodies burst and gaped apart, like seed-pods, like the husks of fruits;
opened eager mouths that drank in the heat and light pouring in a
cascade from the newly-risen sun.
Every moment more of these seed coats ruptured, and even as they did
so the swelling pioneers overflowed their rent-distended seed-cases,
and passed into the second stage of growth. With a steady assurance, a
swift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward to
the earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. In a little
while the whole slope was dotted with minute plantlets standing at
attention in the blaze of the sun.
They did not stand for long. The bundle-like buds swelled and strained
and opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips,
spreading a whorl of tiny, spiky, brownish leaves, that lengthened
rapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement was
slower than any animal’s, swifter than any plant’s I have ever seen
before. How can I suggest it to you--the way that growth went on? The
leaf tips grew so that they moved onward even while we looked at them.
The brown seed-case shrivelled and was absorbed with an equal rapidity.
Have you ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand
and watched the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon
plants grew like that.
In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of these
plants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a second
whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a
lifeless stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-green
herbage of bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their
growing.
I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the
eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed
and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this
fringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a
cactus, and swelling visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills with
air.
Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distended
form was rising over the scrub. But here the light fell upon its
sleek sides, and I could see that its colour was a vivid orange hue.
It rose as one watched it; if one looked away from it for a minute
and then back, its outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congested
branches until in a little time it rose a coralline shape of many feet
in height. Compared with such a growth the terrestrial puff-ball,
which will sometimes swell a foot in diameter in a single night,
would be a hopeless laggard. But then the puff-ball grows against a
gravitational pull six times that of the moon. Beyond, out of gullies
and flats that had been hidden from us, but not from the quickening
sun, over reefs and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spiky
and fleshy vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously to
take advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit and
seed again and die. It was like a miracle, that growth. So, one must
imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the
desolation of the new-made earth.
Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, the
stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of
vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes. Conceive
it all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth
seem watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, wherever
there was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow. And to have the
picture of our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we
saw it all through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are
distorted by a lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very
bright there, and towards the edges magnified and unreal.