“If you can stand it.”
By way of answer I went on unscrewing. I lifted the circular operculum
from its place and laid it carefully on the bale. A flake or so of snow
whirled and vanished as that thin and unfamiliar air took possession of
our sphere. I knelt, and then seated myself at the edge of the manhole,
peering over it. Beneath, within a yard of my face, lay the untrodden
snow of the moon.
There came a little pause. Our eyes met.
“It doesn’t distress your lungs too much?” said Cavor.
“No,” I said. “I can stand this.”
He stretched out his hand for his blanket, thrust his head through its
central hole, and wrapped it about him. He sat down on the edge of the
manhole, he let his feet drop until they were within six inches of the
lunar ground. He hesitated for a moment, then thrust himself forward,
dropped these intervening inches, and stood upon the untrodden soil of
the moon.
As he stepped forward he was refracted grotesquely by the edge of the
glass. He stood for a moment looking this way and that. Then he drew
himself together and leapt.
The glass distorted everything, but it seemed to me even then to be an
extremely big leap. He had at one bound become remote. He seemed twenty
or thirty feet off. He was standing high upon a rocky mass and
gesticulating back to me. Perhaps he was shouting—but the sound did not
reach me. But how the deuce had he done this? I felt like a man who has
just seen a new conjuring trick.
In a puzzled state of mind I too dropped through the manhole. I stood
up. Just in front of me the snowdrift had fallen away and made a sort
of ditch. I made a step and jumped.
I found myself flying through the air, saw the rock on which he stood
coming to meet me, clutched it and clung in a state of infinite
amazement.
I gasped a painful laugh. I was tremendously confused. Cavor bent down
and shouted in piping tones for me to be careful.
I had forgotten that on the moon, with only an eighth part of the
earth’s mass and a quarter of its diameter, my weight was barely a
sixth what it was on earth. But now that fact insisted on being
remembered.
“We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now,” he said.
With a guarded effort I raised myself to the top, and moving as
cautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blaze
of the sun. The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirty
feet away.
As far as the eye could see over the enormous disorder of rocks that
formed the crater floor, the same bristling scrub that surrounded us
was starting into life, diversified here and there by bulging masses of
a cactus form, and scarlet and purple lichens that grew so fast they
seemed to crawl over the rocks. The whole area of the crater seemed to
me then to be one similar wilderness up to the very foot of the
surrounding cliff.
This cliff was apparently bare of vegetation save at its base, and with
buttresses and terraces and platforms that did not very greatly attract
our attention at the time. It was many miles away from us in every
direction; we seemed to be almost at the centre of the crater, and we
saw it through a certain haziness that drove before the wind. For there
was even a wind now in the thin air, a swift yet weak wind that chilled
exceedingly but exerted little pressure. It was blowing round the
crater, as it seemed, to the hot illuminated side from the foggy
darkness under the sunward wall. It was difficult to look into this
eastward fog; we had to peer with half-closed eyes beneath the shade of
our hands, because of the fierce intensity of the motionless sun.
“It seems to be deserted,” said Cavor, “absolutely desolate.”
I looked about me again. I retained even then a clinging hope of some
quasi-human evidence, some pinnacle of building, some house or engine,
but everywhere one looked spread the tumbled rocks in peaks and crests,
and the darting scrub and those bulging cacti that swelled and swelled,
a flat negation as it seemed of all such hope.
“It looks as though these plants had it to themselves,” I said. “I see
no trace of any other creature.”
“No insects—no birds, no! Not a trace, not a scrap nor particle of
animal life. If there was—what would they do in the night? ... No;
there’s just these plants alone.”
I shaded my eyes with my hand. “It’s like the landscape of a dream.
These things are less like earthly land plants than the things one
imagines among the rocks at the bottom of the sea. Look at that yonder!
One might imagine it a lizard changed into a plant. And the glare!”
“This is only the fresh morning,” said Cavor.
He sighed and looked about him. “This is no world for men,” he said.
“And yet in a way—it appeals.”
He became silent for a time, then commenced his meditative humming.
I started at a gentle touch, and found a thin sheet of livid lichen
lapping over my shoe. I kicked at it and it fell to powder, and each
speck began to grow.
I heard Cavor exclaim sharply, and perceived that one of the fixed
bayonets of the scrub had pricked him. He hesitated, his eyes sought
among the rocks about us. A sudden blaze of pink had crept up a ragged
pillar of crag. It was a most extraordinary pink, a livid magenta.
“Look!” said I, turning, and behold Cavor had vanished.
For an instant I stood transfixed. Then I made a hasty step to look
over the verge of the rock. But in my surprise at his disappearance I
forgot once more that we were on the moon. The thrust of my foot that I
made in striding would have carried me a yard on earth; on the moon it
carried me six—a good five yards over the edge. For the moment the
thing had something of the effect of those nightmares when one falls
and falls. For while one falls sixteen feet in the first second of a
fall on earth, on the moon one falls two, and with only a sixth of
one’s weight. I fell, or rather I jumped down, about ten yards I
suppose. It seemed to take quite a long time, five or six seconds, I
should think. I floated through the air and fell like a feather,
knee-deep in a snow-drift in the bottom of a gully of blue-grey,
white-veined rock.