CHAPTER 5

A Lunar Morning

We were in a vast circular plain, the floor of the giant crater. Its cliff-like walls surrounded us on every side. Although we could not yet see the sun, its light fell upon the western cliffs and showed their dull grey rocks lined here and there with snow.

All around us were grey mounds of a snowy substance. At the time I thought they were snow. But they were not—they were masses of frozen air.

Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, came the lunar day. The sunlight had crept down the cliffs, and advanced quickly towards us. At the touch of the dawn a grey vapour poured upward from the crater floor, until at last it was steaming like a wet handkerchief held before the fire.

"It's air," said Cavor. "It must be air—or it would not rise like this—at the mere touch of a sunbeam."

Swiftly, steadily, the day approached us. Mound after mound was caught by the blaze and turned to vapour. Cavor seized my arm. "Look!" he said. "The sunrise! The sun!" He turned me about and pointed to the eastward cliff. Its outline was marked by tongues of bright red flame that danced and twisted.

And then—the sun!

A thin edge appeared first, then it took a circular shape, and its dazzling light seemed to stab my eyes like a spear. I cried aloud and turned about blinded, groping for my blanket beneath the bundle.

And with that brilliant light came a hissing sound. The air outside our glass was boiling—like snow into which a white-hot rod is thrust. What had been solid air had at the touch of the sun become a paste, a watery mud, that hissed and bubbled into gas.

There came a violent whirl of the sphere. The frozen air on which it rested had begun to melt, and we began to roll down a slope, colliding and bumping against our bundle and against each other. On the earth we should have smashed one another a dozen times, but on the moon our weight was only one-sixth of what it is on earth, and we fell very gently. I felt sick and then I fainted.

When I came to myself Cavor was bending over me, his eyes as well as mine protected from the brilliance of the landscape by blue spectacles. I was dizzy, my forehead bled, and my hands were bruised. He gave me some medicine he had brought with him, after which I felt a little better. I began to stretch my limbs carefully. Soon I could talk.

"What has happened?" I asked. "Have we jumped to the tropics?"

"It was as I expected. This air has evaporated, if it is air. And the surface of the moon is showing. We are lying on a bank of rock. Here and there bare soil is exposed. A queer sort of soil."

He assisted me into a sitting position and I could see with my own eyes.

We were no longer in empty space. An atmosphere had arisen about us. The outline of things had grown sharp and varied, and except for a space of white substance here and there, the arctic appearance had gone altogether. Everywhere brown spaces of bare earth spread to the blaze of the sun. The sunlight came through the glass of our sphere and turned our climate to summer, but the sphere was lying upon snow.

And scattered here and there upon the slope of the crater-wall were dry, twisted sticks of the same brown colour as the rock upon which they lay. That was amazing. Sticks! On a lifeless world?

"Cavor!" I cried.

"Yes."

"It may be a dead world now—but once—"

Something arrested my attention. I had discovered among these sticks a number of little round objects. And it seemed to me that one of these had moved!

For an instant I could not believe my eyes. I gave a cry. I gripped Cavor's arm. I pointed. "Look!" I cried. "There! Yes! And there!"

His eyes followed my pointing finger. "Eh?" he said.

How can I describe the thing I saw? I have said that among the dry sticks there were little round objects. Now first one and then another had stirred, had rolled over and cracked, thrusting out something like a little root. 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!" So our vast journey had not been made in vain, and we had come to no desolate waste of minerals, but to a world that lived and moved!

One after another these amazing seeds burst open and passed into the second stage of growth. They thrust a little root downward into the earth and a queer little bud into the air. In a little while the whole slope was dotted with plants standing upright in the blaze of the sun.

They did not stand for long. The buds swelled and opened, spreading a circle of tiny brown leaves that grew rapidly even as we watched. In a few minutes all the slope that had seemed so recently a lifeless stretch of dry sticks was now dark with green and orange-coloured plants. It was a miracle, that growth. So, one must imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the newly-made earth.