The First Men in the Moon Read online

  VII SUNRISE ON THE MOON

  As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. Wewere in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor ofthe giant crater. Its cliff-like walls closed us in on every side.From the westward the light of the unseen sun fell upon them, reachingto the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment ofdrab and greyish rock, lined here and there with banks and crevices ofsnow. This was perhaps a dozen miles away, but at first no interveningatmosphere diminished in the slightest the minutely detailed brilliancywith which these things glared at us. They stood out clear and dazzlingagainst a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthlyeyes rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousnessof the sky.

  The eastward cliff was at first merely a starless selvedge tothe starry dome. No rosy flush, no creeping pallor, announcedthe commencing day. Only the Corona, the Zodiacal light, a hugecone-shaped, luminous haze, pointing up towards the splendour of themorning star, warned us of the imminent nearness of the sun.

  Whatever light was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs. Itshowed a huge undulating plain, cold and grey, a grey that deepenedeastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow.Innumerable rounded grey summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowysubstance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity,gave us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall. Thesehummocks looked like snow. At the time I thought they were snow. Butthey were not--they were mounds and masses of frozen air!

  So it was at first, and then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came thelunar day.

  The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted massesat its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued bootstowards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at thetouch of the dawn a reek of grey vapour poured upward from the craterfloor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of grey, thicker andbroader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaminglike a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffswere no more than a refracted glare beyond.

  “It is air,” said Cavor. “It must be air--or it would not rise likethis--at the mere touch of a sunbeam. 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 dimnebulosities we saw in empty space--they are hidden!”

  Swiftly, steadily the day approached us. Grey summit after grey summitwas 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 hadreceded further and further, 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 asthe shadow of a cloud before the south-west wind. About us rose a thinanticipatory 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 darknessof the sky. But now its line was marked by strange reddish shapes,tongues of vermilion flame that writhed and danced. I fancied it mustbe spirals of vapour that had caught the light and made this crest offiery tongues against the sky, but indeed it was the solar prominencesI saw, a crown of fire about the sun that is forever hidden fromearthly eyes by our atmospheric veil.

  And then--the sun!

  Steadily, inevitably came a brilliant line, came a thin edge ofintolerable effulgence that took a circular shape, became a bow, becamea blazing sceptre, and hurled a shaft of heat at us as though it was aspear.

  It seemed verily to stab my eyes! I cried aloud and turned aboutblinded, groping for my blanket beneath the bale.

  And with that incandescence came a sound, the first sound that hadreached us from without since we left the earth, a hissing andrustling, the stormy trailing of the aerial garment of the advancingday. 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 eyesperforce, I was making clumsy efforts to cover my head with my blanket,and this second lurch sent me helplessly off my feet. I fell againstthe bale, and opening my eyes had a momentary glimpse of the air justoutside our glass. It was running--it was boiling--like snow into whicha white-hot rod is thrust. What had been solid air had suddenly at thetouch of the sun become a paste, a mud, a slushy liquefaction, thathissed and bubbled into gas.

  There came a still more violent whirl of the sphere, and we hadclutched one another. In another moment we were spun about again. Roundwe went and over, and then I was on all fours. The lunar dawn had holdof 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 droppedinto darkness. I went down with Cavor’s knees in my chest. Then heseemed to fly away from me, and for a moment I lay with all the breathout of my body staring upward. A toppling crag of the melting stuff hadsplashed over us, buried us, and now it thinned and boiled off us. Isaw the bubbles dancing on the glass above. I heard Cavor exclaimingfeebly.

  Then some huge landslip in the thawing air had caught us, andspluttering expostulation, we began to roll down a slope, rollingfaster and faster, leaping crevasses and rebounding from banks, fasterand 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, wegripped, we were torn asunder--our heads met, and the whole universeburst into fiery darts and stars! On the earth we should have smashedone another a dozen times, but on the moon, luckily for us, our weightwas only one-sixth of what it is terrestrially, and we fell verymercifully. I recall a sensation of utter sickness, a feeling as if mybrain 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 mitigatedby 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 theblood with the back of his hand.

  Everything seemed swaying for a space, but that was simply mygiddiness. I perceived that he had closed some of the shutters in theouter sphere to save me from the direct blaze of the sun. I was awarethat everything about us was very brilliant.

  “Lord!” I gasped. “But this----!”

  I craned my neck to see. I perceived there was a blinding glareoutside, an utter change from the gloomy darkness of our firstimpressions. “Have I been insensible long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know--the chronometer is broken. Some little time.... My dearchap! I have been afraid....”

  I lay for a space taking this in. I saw his face still bore evidencesof emotion. For a while I said nothing. I passed an inquisitive handover my contusions, and surveyed his face for similar damages. Theback of my right hand had suffered most, and was skinless and raw. Myforehead was bruised and had bled. He handed me a little measure withsome of the restorative--I forget the name of it--he had brought withus. After a time I felt a little better. I began to stretch my limbscarefully. 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 theglass and then stared at me. “Good Lord!” he said. “_No!_”

  “What has happened?” I asked after a pause. “Have we jumped to thetropics?”r />
  “It was as I expected. This air has evaporated--if it is air. At anyrate, it has evaporated and the surface of the moon is showing. We arelying on a bank of earthy rock. Here and there bare soil is exposed. Aqueer sort of soil!”

  It occurred to him that it was unnecessary to explain. He assisted meinto a sitting position, and I could see with my own eyes.