The First Men in the Moon Read online

  VIII A LUNAR MORNING

  The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of the scenery hadaltogether disappeared. The glare of the sun had taken upon itself afaint tinge of amber; the shadows upon the cliff of the crater wallwere deeply purple. To the eastward a dark bank of fog still crouchedand sheltered from the sunrise, but to the westward the sky was blueand clear. I began to realise the length of my insensibility.

  We were no longer in a void. An atmosphere had arisen about us. Theoutline of things had gained in character, had grown acute and varied;save for a shadowed space of white substance here and there, whitesubstance that was no longer air but snow, the arctic appearance hadgone altogether. Everywhere broad rusty brown spaces of bare andtumbled earth spread to the blaze of the sun. Here and there at theedge of the snowdrifts were transient little pools and eddies ofwater, the only things stirring in that expanse of barrenness. Thesunlight inundated the upper two blinds of our sphere and turned ourclimate to high summer, but our feet were still in shadow, and thesphere was lying upon a drift of snow.

  And scattered here and there upon the slope, and emphasised by littlewhite threads of unthawed snow upon their shady sides, were shapeslike sticks, dry twisted sticks of the same rusty hue as the rockupon which they lay. That caught one’s thoughts sharply. Sticks! On alifeless world? Then as my eye grew more accustomed to the texture oftheir substance, I perceived that almost all this surface had a fibroustexture, like the carpet of brown needles one finds beneath the shadeof 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 anumber of little round objects. And it seemed to me that one of thesehad moved.

  “Cavor,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  But I did not answer at once. I stared incredulous. For an instant Icould not believe my eyes. I gave an inarticulate cry. I gripped hisarm. I pointed. “Look!” I cried, finding my tongue. “There! Yes! Andthere!”

  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 saidthat amidst the stick-like litter were these rounded bodies, theselittle oval bodies that might have passed as very small pebbles.And now first one and then another had stirred, had rolled over andcracked, and down the crack of each of them showed a minute line ofyellowish green, thrusting outward to meet the hot encouragement of thenewly-risen sun. For a moment that was all, and then there stirred andburst 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 hadnot 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 rememberI kept rubbing the glass before me with my sleeve, jealous of thefaintest suspicion of mist.

  “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 anddistorted by the curvature of the glass. But we could see enough! Oneafter another all down the sunlit slope these miraculous little brownbodies burst and gaped apart, like seed-pods, like the husks of fruits;opened eager mouths that drank in the heat and light pouring in acascade from the newly-risen sun.

  Every moment more of these seed coats ruptured, and even as they didso the swelling pioneers overflowed their rent-distended seed-cases,and passed into the second stage of growth. With a steady assurance, aswift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward tothe earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. In a littlewhile the whole slope was dotted with minute plantlets standing atattention in the blaze of the sun.

  They did not stand for long. The bundle-like buds swelled and strainedand opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips,spreading a whorl of tiny, spiky, brownish leaves, that lengthenedrapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement wasslower than any animal’s, swifter than any plant’s I have ever seenbefore. How can I suggest it to you--the way that growth went on? Theleaf 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 handand watched the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moonplants grew like that.

  In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of theseplants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a secondwhorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently alifeless stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-greenherbage of bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of theirgrowing.

  I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to theeastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayedand bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond thisfringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like acactus, and swelling visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills withair.

  Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distendedform was rising over the scrub. But here the light fell upon itssleek 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 minuteand then back, its outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congestedbranches until in a little time it rose a coralline shape of many feetin 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 agravitational pull six times that of the moon. Beyond, out of gulliesand flats that had been hidden from us, but not from the quickeningsun, over reefs and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spikyand fleshy vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously totake advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit andseed again and die. It was like a miracle, that growth. So, one mustimagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered thedesolation of the new-made earth.

  Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, thestirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising ofvegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes. Conceiveit all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earthseem watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, whereverthere was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow. And to have thepicture of our impression complete, you must bear in mind that wesaw it all through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things aredistorted by a lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and verybright there, and towards the edges magnified and unreal.