I saw Cavor’s face, as white as I felt my own to be. We regarded one
another in silence. The transparent blackness of the glass behind him
made him seem as though he floated in a void.
“Well, we’re committed,” I said at last.
“Yes,” he said, “we’re committed.”
“Don’t move,” he exclaimed, at some suggestion of a gesture. “Let your
muscles keep quite lax—as if you were in bed. We are in a little
universe of our own. Look at those things!”
He pointed to the loose cases and bundles that had been lying on the
blankets in the bottom of the sphere. I was astonished to see that they
were floating now nearly a foot from the spherical wall. Then I saw
from his shadow that Cavor was no longer leaning against the glass. I
thrust out my hand behind me, and found that I too was suspended in
space, clear of the glass.
I did not cry out nor gesticulate, but fear came upon me. It was like
being held and lifted by something—you know not what. The mere touch of
my hand against the glass moved me rapidly. I understood what had
happened, but that did not prevent my being afraid. We were cut off
from all exterior gravitation, only the attraction of objects within
our sphere had effect. Consequently everything that was not fixed to
the glass was falling—slowly because of the slightness of our
masses—towards the centre of gravity of our little world, which seemed
to be somewhere about the middle of the sphere, but rather nearer to
myself than Cavor, on account of my greater weight.
“We must turn round,” said Cavor, “and float back to back, with the
things between us.”
It was the strangest sensation conceivable, floating thus loosely in
space, at first indeed horribly strange, and when the horror passed,
not disagreeable at all, exceeding restful; indeed, the nearest thing
in earthly experience to it that I know is lying on a very thick, soft
feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I
had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at
starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were
disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like
the beginning of a dream.
V.
The Journey to the Moon
Presently Cavor extinguished the light. He said we had not overmuch
energy stored, and that what we had we must economise for reading. For
a time, whether it was long or short I do not know, there was nothing
but blank darkness.
A question floated up out of the void. “How are we pointing?” I said.
“What is our direction?”
“We are flying away from the earth at a tangent, and as the moon is
near her third quarter we are going somewhere towards her. I will open
a blind—”
Came a click, and then a window in the outer case yawned open. The sky
outside was as black as the darkness within the sphere, but the shape
of the open window was marked by an infinite number of stars.
Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine
its appearance when the vague, half luminous veil of our air has been
withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors
that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise
the meaning of the hosts of heaven!
Stranger things we were presently to see, but that airless, star-dusted
sky! Of all things, I think that will be one of the last I shall
forget.
The little window vanished with a click, another beside it snapped open
and instantly closed, and then a third, and for a moment I had to close
my eyes because of the blinding splendour of the waning moon.
For a space I had to stare at Cavor and the white-lit things about me
to season my eyes to light again, before I could turn them towards that
pallid glare.
Four windows were open in order that the gravitation of the moon might
act upon all the substances in our sphere. I found I was no longer
floating freely in space, but that my feet were resting on the glass in
the direction of the moon. The blankets and cases of provisions were
also creeping slowly down the glass, and presently came to rest so as
to block out a portion of the view. It seemed to me, of course, that I
looked “down” when I looked at the moon. On earth “down” means
earthward, the way things fall, and “up” the reverse direction. Now the
pull of gravitation was towards the moon, and for all I knew to the
contrary our earth was overhead. And, of course, when all the Cavorite
blinds were closed, “down” was towards the centre of our sphere, and
“up” towards its outer wall.
It was curiously unlike earthly experience, too, to have the light
coming _up_ to one. On earth light falls from above, or comes slanting
down sideways, but here it came from beneath our feet, and to see our
shadows we had to look up.
At first it gave me a sort of vertigo to stand only on thick glass and
look down upon the moon through hundreds of thousands of miles of
vacant space; but this sickness passed very speedily. And then—the
splendour of the sight!
The reader may imagine it best if he will lie on the ground some warm
summer’s night and look between his upraised feet at the moon, but for
some reason, probably because the absence of air made it so much more
luminous, the moon seemed already considerably larger than it does from
earth. The minutest details of its surface were acutely clear. And
since we did not see it through air, its outline was bright and sharp,
there was no glow or halo about it, and the star-dust that covered the
sky came right to its very margin, and marked the outline of its
unilluminated part. And as I stood and stared at the moon between my
feet, that perception of the impossible that had been with me off and
on ever since our start, returned again with tenfold conviction.
“Cavor,” I said, “this takes me queerly. Those companies we were going
to run, and all that about minerals?”
“Well?”
“I don’t see ‘em here.”
“No,” said Cavor; “but you’ll get over all that.”
“I suppose I’m made to turn right side up again. Still, _this_— For a
moment I could half believe there never was a world.”
“That copy of _Lloyd’s News_ might help you.”
I stared at the paper for a moment, then held it above the level of my
face, and found I could read it quite easily. I struck a column of mean
little advertisements. “A gentleman of private means is willing to lend
money,” I read. I knew that gentleman. Then somebody eccentric wanted
to sell a Cutaway bicycle, “quite new and cost £15,” for five pounds;
and a lady in distress wished to dispose of some fish knives and forks,
“a wedding present,” at a great sacrifice. No doubt some simple soul
was sagely examining these knives and forks, and another triumphantly
riding off on that bicycle, and a third trustfully consulting that
benevolent gentleman of means even as I read. I laughed, and let the
paper drift from my hand.
“Are we visible from the earth?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I knew some one who was rather interested in astronomy. It occurred to
me that it would be rather odd if—my friend—chanced to be looking
through some telescope.”
“It would need the most powerful telescope on earth even now to see us
as the minutest speck.”
For a time I stared in silence at the moon.
“It’s a world,” I said; “one feels that infinitely more than one ever
did on earth. People perhaps—”
“People!” he exclaimed. “_No!_ Banish all that! Think yourself a sort
of ultra-arctic voyager exploring the desolate places of space. Look at
it!”
He waved his hand at the shining whiteness below. “It’s dead—dead! Vast
extinct volcanoes, lava wildernesses, tumbled wastes of snow, or frozen
carbonic acid, or frozen air, and everywhere landslip seams and cracks
and gulfs. Nothing happens. Men have watched this planet systematically
with telescopes for over two hundred years. How much change do you
think they have seen?”
“None.”
“They have traced two indisputable landslips, a doubtful crack, and one
slight periodic change of colour, and that’s all.”
“I didn’t know they’d traced even that.”
“Oh, yes. But as for people—!”
“By the way,” I asked, “how small a thing will the biggest telescopes
show upon the moon?”
“One could see a fair-sized church. One could certainly see any towns
or buildings, or anything like the handiwork of men. There might
perhaps be insects, something in the way of ants, for example, so that
they could hide in deep burrows from the lunar light, or some new sort
of creatures having no earthly parallel. That is the most probable
thing, if we are to find life there at all. Think of the difference in
conditions! Life must fit itself to a day as long as fourteen earthly
days, a cloudless sun-blaze of fourteen days, and then a night of equal
length, growing ever colder and colder under these cold, sharp stars.
In that night there must be cold, the ultimate cold, absolute zero,
273° C. below the earthly freezing point. Whatever life there is must
hibernate through _that_, and rise again each day.”
He mused. “One can imagine something worm-like,” he said, “taking its
air solid as an earth-worm swallows earth, or thick-skinned monsters—”
“By the bye,” I said, “why didn’t we bring a gun?”
He did not answer that question. “No,” he concluded, “we just have to
go. We shall see when we get there.”
I remembered something. “Of course, there’s my minerals, anyhow,” I
said; “whatever the conditions may be.”
Presently he told me he wished to alter our course a little by letting
the earth tug at us for a moment. He was going to open one earthward
blind for thirty seconds. He warned me that it would make my head swim,
and advised me to extend my hands against the glass to break my fall. I
did as he directed, and thrust my feet against the bales of food cases
and air cylinders to prevent their falling upon me. Then with a click
the window flew open. I fell clumsily upon hands and face, and saw for
a moment between my black extended fingers our mother earth—a planet in
a downward sky.
We were still very near—Cavor told me the distance was perhaps eight
hundred miles and the huge terrestrial disc filled all heaven. But
already it was plain to see that the world was a globe. The land below
us was in twilight and vague, but westward the vast grey stretches of
the Atlantic shone like molten silver under the receding day. I think I
recognised the cloud-dimmed coast-lines of France and Spain and the
south of England, and then, with a click, the shutter closed again, and
I found myself in a state of extraordinary confusion sliding slowly
over the smooth glass.
When at last things settled themselves in my mind again, it seemed
quite beyond question that the moon was “down” and under my feet, and
that the earth was somewhere away on the level of the horizon—the earth
that had been “down” to me and my kindred since the beginning of
things.
So slight were the exertions required of us, so easy did the practical
annihilation of our weight make all we had to do, that the necessity
for taking refreshment did not occur to us for nearly six hours (by
Cavor’s chronometer) after our start. I was amazed at that lapse of
time. Even then I was satisfied with very little. Cavor examined the
apparatus for absorbing carbonic acid and water, and pronounced it to
be in satisfactory order, our consumption of oxygen having been
extraordinarily slight. And our talk being exhausted for the time, and
there being nothing further for us to do, we gave way to a curious
drowsiness that had come upon us, and spreading our blankets on the
bottom of the sphere in such a manner as to shut out most of the
moonlight, wished each other good-night, and almost immediately fell
asleep.
And so, sleeping, and sometimes talking and reading a little, and at
times eating, although without any keenness of appetite,[1] but for the
most part in a sort of quiescence that was neither waking nor slumber,
we fell through a space of time that had neither night nor day in it,
silently, softly, and swiftly down towards the moon.
[1] It is a curious thing, that while we were in the sphere we felt
not the slightest desire for food, nor did we feel the want of it when
we abstained. At first we forced our appetites, but afterwards we
fasted completely. Altogether we did not consume one-hundredth part of
the compressed provisions we had brought with us. The amount of
carbonic acid we breathed was also unnaturally low, but why this was,
I am quite unable to explain.
VI.
The Landing on the Moon
I remember how one day Cavor suddenly opened six of our shutters and
blinded me so that I cried aloud at him. The whole area was moon, a
stupendous scimitar of white dawn with its edge hacked out by notches
of darkness, the crescent shore of an ebbing tide of darkness, out of
which peaks and pinnacles came glittering into the blaze of the sun. I
take it the reader has seen pictures or photographs of the moon and
that I need not describe the broader features of that landscape, those
spacious ring-like ranges vaster than any terrestrial mountains, their
summits shining in the day, their shadows harsh and deep, the grey
disordered plains, the ridges, hills, and craterlets, all passing at
last from a blazing illumination into a common mystery of black.
Athwart this world we were flying scarcely a hundred miles above its
crests and pinnacles. And now we could see, what no eye on earth will
ever see, that under the blaze of the day the harsh outlines of the
rocks and ravines of the plains and crater floor grew grey and
indistinct under a thickening haze, that the white of their lit
surfaces broke into lumps and patches, and broke again and shrank and
vanished, and that here and there strange tints of brown and olive grew
and spread.
But little time we had for watching then. For now we had come to the
real danger of our journey. We had to drop ever closer to the moon as
we spun about it, to slacken our pace and watch our chance, until at
last we could dare to drop upon its surface.
For Cavor that was a time of intense exertion; for me it was an anxious
inactivity. I seemed perpetually to be getting out of his way. He leapt
about the sphere from point to point with an agility that would have
been impossible on earth. He was perpetually opening and closing the
Cavorite windows, making calculations, consulting his chronometer by
means of the glow lamp during those last eventful hours. For a long
time we had all our windows closed and hung silently in darkness
hurling through space.
Then he was feeling for the shutter studs, and suddenly four windows
were open. I staggered and covered my eyes, drenched and scorched and
blinded by the unaccustomed splendour of the sun beneath my feet. Then
again the shutters snapped, leaving my brain spinning in a darkness
that pressed against the eyes. And after that I floated in another
vast, black silence.
Then Cavor switched on the electric light, and told me he proposed to
bind all our luggage together with the blankets about it, against the
concussion of our descent. We did this with our windows closed, because
in that way our goods arranged themselves naturally at the centre of
the sphere. That too was a strange business; we two men floating loose
in that spherical space, and packing and pulling ropes. Imagine it if
you can! No up nor down, and every effort resulting in unexpected
movements. Now I would be pressed against the glass with the full force
of Cavor’s thrust, now I would be kicking helplessly in a void. Now the
star of the electric light would be overhead, now under foot. Now
Cavor’s feet would float up before my eyes, and now we would be
crossways to each other. But at last our goods were safely bound
together in a big soft bale, all except two blankets with head holes
that we were to wrap about ourselves.
Then for a flash Cavor opened a window moonward, and we saw that we
were dropping towards a huge central crater with a number of minor
craters grouped in a sort of cross about it. And then again Cavor flung
our little sphere open to the scorching, blinding sun. I think he was
using the sun’s attraction as a brake. “Cover yourself with a blanket,”
he cried, thrusting himself from me, and for a moment I did not
understand.
Then I hauled the blanket from beneath my feet and got it about me and
over my head and eyes. Abruptly he closed the shutters again, snapped
one open again and closed it, then suddenly began snapping them all
open, each safely into its steel roller. There came a jar, and then we
were rolling over and over, bumping against the glass and against the
big bale of our luggage, and clutching at each other, and outside some
white substance splashed as if we were rolling down a slope of snow....
Over, clutch, bump, clutch, bump, over....
Came a thud, and I was half buried under the bale of our possessions,
and for a space everything was still. Then I could hear Cavor puffing
and grunting, and the snapping of a shutter in its sash. I made an
effort, thrust back our blanket-wrapped luggage, and emerged from
beneath it. Our open windows were just visible as a deeper black set
with stars.
We were still alive, and we were lying in the darkness of the shadow of
the wall of the great crater into which we had fallen.
We sat getting our breath again, and feeling the bruises on our limbs.
I don’t think either of us had had a very clear expectation of such
rough handling as we had received. I struggled painfully to my feet.
“And now,” said I, “to look at the landscape of the moon! But—! It’s
tremendously dark, Cavor!”
The glass was dewy, and as I spoke I wiped at it with my blanket.
“We’re half an hour or so beyond the day,” he said. “We must wait.”
It was impossible to distinguish anything. We might have been in a
sphere of steel for all that we could see. My rubbing with the blanket
simply smeared the glass, and as fast as I wiped it, it became opaque
again with freshly condensed moisture mixed with an increasing quantity
of blanket hairs. Of course I ought not to have used the blanket. In my
efforts to clear the glass I slipped upon the damp surface, and hurt my
shin against one of the oxygen cylinders that protruded from our bale.
The thing was exasperating—it was absurd. Here we were just arrived
upon the moon, amidst we knew not what wonders, and all we could see
was the grey and streaming wall of the bubble in which we had come.
“Confound it!” I said, “but at this rate we might have stopped at
home;” and I squatted on the bale and shivered, and drew my blanket
closer about me.
Abruptly the moisture turned to spangles and fronds of frost. “Can you
reach the electric heater,” said Cavor. “Yes—that black knob. Or we
shall freeze.”
I did not wait to be told twice. “And now,” said I, “what are we to
do?”
“Wait,” he said.
“Wait?”
“Of course. We shall have to wait until our air gets warm again, and
then this glass will clear. We can’t do anything till then. It’s night
here yet; we must wait for the day to overtake us. Meanwhile, don’t you
feel hungry?”
For a space I did not answer him, but sat fretting. I turned
reluctantly from the smeared puzzle of the glass and stared at his
face. “Yes,” I said, “I am hungry. I feel somehow enormously
disappointed. I had expected—I don’t know what I had expected, but not
this.”
I summoned my philosophy, and rearranging my blanket about me sat down
on the bale again and began my first meal on the moon. I don’t think I
finished it—I forget. Presently, first in patches, then running rapidly
together into wider spaces, came the clearing of the glass, came the
drawing of the misty veil that hid the moon world from our eyes.
We peered out upon the landscape of the moon.
VII.
Sunrise on the Moon
As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. We
were in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor of
the giant crater. Its cliff-like walls closed us in on every side. From
the westward the light of the unseen sun fell upon them, reaching to
the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment of drab
and greyish rock, lined here and there with banks and crevices of snow.
This was perhaps a dozen miles away, but at first no intervening
atmosphere diminished in the slightest the minutely detailed brilliancy
with which these things glared at us. They stood out clear and dazzling
against a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthly
eyes rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousness
of the sky.
The eastward cliff was at first merely a starless selvedge to the
starry dome. No rosy flush, no creeping pallor, announced the
commencing day. Only the Corona, the Zodiacal light, a huge
cone-shaped, luminous haze, pointing up towards the splendour of the
morning star, warned us of the imminent nearness of the sun.
Whatever light was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs. It
showed a huge undulating plain, cold and grey, a grey that deepened
eastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow.
Innumerable rounded grey summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy
substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity,
gave us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall. These
hummocks looked like snow. At the time I thought they were snow. But
they were not—they were mounds and masses of frozen air.
So it was at first; and then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came the
lunar day.
The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at
its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots
towards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the
touch of the dawn a reek of grey vapour poured upward from the crater
floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of grey, thicker and
broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming
like a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs
were no more than refracted glare beyond.
“It is air,” said Cavor. “It must be air—or it would not rise like
this—at the mere touch of a sun-beam. And at this pace....”
He peered upwards. “Look!” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“In the sky. Already. On the blackness—a little touch of blue. See! The
stars seem larger. And the little ones and all those dim nebulosities
we saw in empty space—they are hidden!”
Swiftly, steadily, the day approached us. Grey summit after grey summit
was overtaken by the blaze, and turned to a smoking white intensity. At
last there was nothing to the west of us but a bank of surging fog, the
tumultuous advance and ascent of cloudy haze. The distant cliff had
receded farther and farther, had loomed and changed through the whirl,
and foundered and vanished at last in its confusion.
Nearer came that steaming advance, nearer and nearer, coming as fast as
the shadow of a cloud before the south-west wind. About us rose a thin
anticipatory haze.
Cavor gripped my arm. “What?” I said.
“Look! The sunrise! The sun!”
He turned me about and pointed to the brow of the eastward cliff,
looming above the haze about us, scarce lighter than the darkness of
the sky. But now its line was marked by strange reddish shapes, tongues
of vermilion flame that writhed and danced. I fancied it must be
spirals of vapour that had caught the light and made this crest of
fiery tongues against the sky, but indeed it was the solar prominences
I saw, a crown of fire about the sun that is forever hidden from
earthly eyes by our atmospheric veil.
And then—the sun!
Steadily, inevitably came a brilliant line, came a thin edge of
intolerable effulgence that took a circular shape, became a bow, became
a blazing sceptre, and hurled a shaft of heat at us as though it was a
spear.
It seemed verily to stab my eyes! I cried aloud and turned about
blinded, groping for my blanket beneath the bale.
And with that incandescence came a sound, the first sound that had
reached us from without since we left the earth, a hissing and
rustling, the stormy trailing of the aerial garment of the advancing
day. And with the coming of the sound and the light the sphere lurched,
and blinded and dazzled we staggered helplessly against each other. It
lurched again, and the hissing grew louder. I had shut my eyes
perforce, I was making clumsy efforts to cover my head with my blanket,
and this second lurch sent me helplessly off my feet. I fell against
the bale, and opening my eyes had a momentary glimpse of the air just
outside our glass. It was running—it was boiling—like snow into which a
white-hot rod is thrust. What had been solid air had suddenly at the
touch of the sun become a paste, a mud, a slushy liquefaction, that
hissed and bubbled into gas.
There came a still more violent whirl of the sphere and we had clutched
one another. In another moment we were spun about again. Round we went
and over, and then I was on all fours. The lunar dawn had hold of us.
It meant to show us little men what the moon could do with us.
I caught a second glimpse of things without, puffs of vapour, half
liquid slush, excavated, sliding, falling, sliding. We dropped into
darkness. I went down with Cavor’s knees in my chest. Then he seemed to
fly away from me, and for a moment I lay with all the breath out of my
body staring upward. A toppling crag of the melting stuff had splashed
over us, buried us, and now it thinned and boiled off us. I saw the
bubbles dancing on the glass above. I heard Cavor exclaiming feebly.
Then some huge landslip in the thawing air had caught us, and
spluttering expostulation, we began to roll down a slope, rolling
faster and faster, leaping crevasses and rebounding from banks, faster
and faster, westward into the white-hot boiling tumult of the lunar
day.
Clutching at one another we spun about, pitched this way and that, our
bale of packages leaping at us, pounding at us. We collided, we
gripped, we were torn asunder—our heads met, and the whole universe
burst into fiery darts and stars! On the earth we should have smashed
one another a dozen times, but on the moon, luckily for us, our weight
was only one-sixth of what it is terrestrially, and we fell very
mercifully. I recall a sensation of utter sickness, a feeling as if my
brain were upside down within my skull, and then—
Something was at work upon my face, some thin feelers worried my ears.
Then I discovered the brilliance of the landscape around was mitigated
by blue spectacles. Cavor bent over me, and I saw his face upside down,
his eyes also protected by tinted goggles. His breath came irregularly,
and his lip was bleeding from a bruise. “Better?” he said, wiping the
blood with the back of his hand.
Everything seemed swaying for a space, but that was simply my
giddiness. I perceived that he had closed some of the shutters in the
outer sphere to save me—from the direct blaze of the sun. I was aware
that everything about us was very brilliant.
“Lord!” I gasped. “But this—”
I craned my neck to see. I perceived there was a blinding glare
outside, an utter change from the gloomy darkness of our first
impressions. “Have I been insensible long?” I asked.
“I don’t know—the chronometer is broken. Some little time.... My dear
chap! I have been afraid...”
I lay for a space taking this in. I saw his face still bore evidences
of emotion. For a while I said nothing. I passed an inquisitive hand
over my contusions, and surveyed his face for similar damages. The back
of my right hand had suffered most, and was skinless and raw. My
forehead was bruised and had bled. He handed me a little measure with
some of the restorative—I forget the name of it—he had brought with us.
After a time I felt a little better. I began to stretch my limbs
carefully. Soon I could talk.
“It wouldn’t have done,” I said, as though there had been no interval.
“No! it _wouldn’t_.”
He thought, his hands hanging over his knees. He peered through the
glass and then stared at me. “Good Lord!” he said. “_No!_”
“What has happened?” I asked after a pause. “Have we jumped to the
tropics?”
“It was as I expected. This air has evaporated—if it is air. At any
rate, it has evaporated, and the surface of the moon is showing. We are
lying on a bank of earthy rock. Here and there bare soil is exposed. A
queer sort of soil!”
It occurred to him that it was unnecessary to explain. He assisted me
into a sitting position, and I could see with my own eyes.
VIII.
A Lunar Morning
The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of 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.
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.
IX.
Prospecting Begins
We ceased to gaze. We turned to each other, the same thought, the same
question in our eyes. For these plants to grow, there must be some air,
however attenuated, air that we also should be able to breathe.
“The manhole?” I said.
“Yes!” said Cavor, “if it is air we see!”
“In a little while,” I said, “these plants will be as high as we are.
Suppose—suppose after all— Is it certain? How do you know that stuff
_is_ air? It may be nitrogen—it may be carbonic acid even!”
“That’s easy,” he said, and set about proving it. He produced a big
piece of crumpled paper from the bale, lit it, and thrust it hastily
through the man-hole valve. I bent forward and peered down through the
thick glass for its appearance outside, that little flame on whose
evidence depended so much!
I saw the paper drop out and lie lightly upon the snow. The pink flame
of its burning vanished. For an instant it seemed to be extinguished.
And then I saw a little blue tongue upon the edge of it that trembled,
and crept, and spread!
Quietly the whole sheet, save where it lay in immediate contact with
the snow, charred and shrivelled and sent up a quivering thread of
smoke. There was no doubt left to me; the atmosphere of the moon was
either pure oxygen or air, and capable therefore—unless its tenuity was
excessive—of supporting our alien life. We might emerge—and live!
I sat down with my legs on either side of the manhole and prepared to
unscrew it, but Cavor stopped me. “There is first a little precaution,”
he said. He pointed out that although it was certainly an oxygenated
atmosphere outside, it might still be so rarefied as to cause us grave
injury. He reminded me of mountain sickness, and of the bleeding that
often afflicts aeronauts who have ascended too swiftly, and he spent
some time in the preparation of a sickly-tasting drink which he
insisted on my sharing. It made me feel a little numb, but otherwise
had no effect on me. Then he permitted me to begin unscrewing.
Presently the glass stopper of the manhole was so far undone that the
denser air within our sphere began to escape along the thread of the
screw, singing as a kettle sings before it boils. Thereupon he made me
desist. It speedily became evident that the pressure outside was very
much less than it was within. How much less it was we had no means of
telling.
I sat grasping the stopper with both hands, ready to close it again if,
in spite of our intense hope, the lunar atmosphere should after all
prove too rarefied for us, and Cavor sat with a cylinder of compressed
oxygen at hand to restore our pressure. We looked at one another in
silence, and then at the fantastic vegetation that swayed and grew
visibly and noiselessly without. And ever that shrill piping continued.
My blood-vessels began to throb in my ears, and the sound of Cavor’s
movements diminished. I noted how still everything had become, because
of the thinning of the air.
As our air sizzled out from the screw the moisture of it condensed in
little puffs.
Presently I experienced a peculiar shortness of breath that lasted
indeed during the whole of the time of our exposure to the moon’s
exterior atmosphere, and a rather unpleasant sensation about the ears
and finger-nails and the back of the throat grew upon my attention, and
presently passed off again.
But then came vertigo and nausea that abruptly changed the quality of
my courage. I gave the lid of the manhole half a turn and made a hasty
explanation to Cavor; but now he was the more sanguine. He answered me
in a voice that seemed extraordinarily small and remote, because of the
thinness of the air that carried the sound. He recommended a nip of
brandy, and set me the example, and presently I felt better. I turned
the manhole stopper back again. The throbbing in my ears grew louder,
and then I remarked that the piping note of the outrush had ceased. For
a time I could not be sure that it had ceased.
“Well?” said Cavor, in the ghost of a voice.
“Well?” said I.
“Shall we go on?”