CHAPTER VIII.
Of the great courage of three engineers—How they passed the Screen and saw the Host of Heaven—How they further discovered a Disk of Unknown Fire—Of the reception of the news throughout the world—Of the construction of a mountain Observatory; and of the rapid growth of Astronomical knowledge.
The levelling of the rock was necessarily a work which required a good deal of time; and, while it was proceeding, three of the engineers formed the daring project of scrambling up the cliff, into the cloud, and endeavouring to penetrate through it by themselves. All the three were in the stationary period of life, and, consequently, in the possession of full bodily strength and activity. The cliff was in most places rough enough to give good hold for both hands and feet. Still, to venture on a climb through a dense mist, on the face of a nearly precipitous and wholly unknown mountain, where a single slip would be certainly followed by immediate destruction, was regarded by their comrades as too hazardous to be thought of.
But the three were not to be dissuaded—I ought, perhaps, to mention that it is to one of these daring men I am indebted for the account of the whole expedition. Their preparations were soon complete, for their equipment was very simple; each of them took about one pound weight of some sort of food in a highly concentrated form, and a flask containing a pint of water. Water, it may be observed, was valuable at this elevation, for every drop had to be carried up from the glacier region. Each man also carried a coil of about five hundred yards of fine, but very strong twine. This was intended to be used as a clue to guide them back to the camp. Fixing an end of one of these coils to the wall of their store, they started on their perilous journey at two o’clock in the afternoon. Without very much difficulty they scrambled up to the edge of the cloud, and there disappeared from the sight of their friends, most of whom believed that they had gone mad.
As a proof of the great care and skill with which the works had been carried on, I may here remark that, up to this time, but one fatal accident had occurred. This was during the construction of the galleries on the face of the thirty-thousand-feet precipice. The top had been nearly reached, when a man, who was heaving a fragment of rock over the edge, lost his balance, and fell with the fragment. His horrified comrades watched his terrible fall, unbroken for about twenty thousand feet; there he touched a projecting spur of the rock, and evanesced instantly, mortal lesion having been made.
As soon as the three adventurers had entered the cloud they had the satisfaction of finding that, at all events, one possible obstacle, an obstacle which might have proved fatal to the success of the whole undertaking, had no existence. It had been feared that the atmosphere of the cloud-screen might turn out to be unfit for the support of animal life. But they found no difficulty in breathing. The extreme tenuity of the air, of course, rendered active exertion very laborious and exhausting, and thus, though the rock was not unfavourable for climbing, their upward progress was exceedingly slow. They often encountered difficulties which were quite insuperable, and which compelled them, retracing their steps, and recoiling their clue, to seek another line of ascent.
As they slowly attained a higher altitude, it became quite plain that the angle of inclination was steadily becoming less. Before long it reached fifty degrees, and this change of slope, though it eased their climb, caused great apprehension to the climbers, for it seemed to indicate an approach to the top, and certainly no signs of any abatement in the density of the mist had yet become visible. To reach the summit while still wrapped in the cloud would be the deathblow to all their hopes.
This angle of fifty degrees continued unaltered for a considerable distance. At about six o’clock, after four hours’ hard work, they came to the end of their second coil of string. Night was evidently coming on; they sat down on a small ledge of rock, and after taking some refreshment, they fastened their last coil to the string already paid out, resolved to proceed till it also came to an end.
A few hundred feet further on the slope suddenly grew much steeper, and this, requiring additional exertion in the very thin air, soon produced such exhaustion in two of the party, that they were obliged to stop again and rest.
By this time it had become quite dark, and the third engineer, who was still in as vigorous a condition as when he started from the camp, imagined that he perceived overhead through the mist what seemed to be small twinkling lights. Immediately he resumed the ascent, and still holding the clue, climbed a few yards higher up the mountain. And then he stopped and held on to the steep rock with both his hands, while he looked at the great Host of Heaven shining in the black depths of space. The cloud terminated above as abruptly as it began below. He had reached the edge, and the vision came upon him suddenly.
When he recovered his speech he called softly to his companions to follow up the clue, for the cloud was passed. They struggled up with difficulty, and then all three stood together in silent wonder at the spectacle before them. They had not the slightest conception of its meaning; what the lights were; whether connected or not with their own abode; what were their distances; were they living beings—for a falling star, which suddenly flashed across the sky, suggested this question. Seen through that exceeding thin air, the splendour of the stars and planets was greater than what we, who have only seen them through a much denser medium, are able to conceive. Conspicuous above them all in beauty and brightness was the earth itself, which, being then in opposition, was at its least distance from the observers. When in that position, the earth presents to the Hesperians a much more brilliant object than their planet does to us. For, though not receiving as great a supply of light from the sun as Hesperos does, this deficiency is far more than balanced by the fact that, when in opposition, the whole of the illuminated face of the earth is visible at Hesperos, while only an exceedingly thin crescent of Hesperos is visible at the earth.
Notwithstanding the intense coldness of the air, they stood for a long time contemplating the wondrous illumination. At last they became conscious of a change in the scene. The small lights began to grow dim, while the light diffused around them increased. The upper surface of the sea of cloud which lay stretched out on all sides, a few feet below them, gradually manifested itself as a smooth greyish-coloured plain. Behind them, towards the east, the mountain still sloped steeply up; but, at no great height above their heads, the top was distinctly visible. They resolved to continue the ascent, having first fastened the end of their clue, which was now unnecessary, to a conspicuous projection of rock about a hundred feet above the upper cloud surface.
The remainder of the climb, which was hardly a thousand feet more, was easily accomplished by the three engineers, now rested and reinvigorated by success. And, on reaching the summit, which proved to be a small and nearly level platform of rock, they were rewarded with another spectacle totally different in kind, but fully as astonishing as that which met their eyes when they emerged from the cloud.
By this time every trace of the heavenly lights had vanished, and they beheld on all sides of them a perfectly uniform and level plain. At one point, towards the east of this plain, an object was visible which at once absorbed the entire attention of the three. A very small segment of a fiery circle bordered on the horizon, shedding a track of bright light over the cloudy sea, which lay about a thousand feet below them. As they gazed and gazed on the fiery segment, it soon became plain that the segment belonged to a burning circular disk which was rising out of the cloud. The segment quickly grew into a semicircle; a few minutes more, and the whole disk became visible, left the cloud, and mounted slowly in the sky. At the same time the vast plain took a snow-white colour of dazzling radiance, and the heat emitted from the disk became so intense that the three mountaineers retreated quickly into the shadow of the peak by descending a few steps on the western side. One thing had become quite clear to them, namely, the cause of the daily illumination of the cloud-screen. It was evidently the great disk of unknown fire, which was still mounting in the air and travelling towards the west.
Obviously no delay was to be made in descending to the camp and communicating to their comrades the tidings of the complete success of the expedition. They were obliged to use great caution on the downward journey. All mountaineers are aware that the descent of a very steep slope, where a single slip would be fatal, is a much more ticklish process than its ascent, insomuch that some have ventured to affirm that few great ascents would be made if the descent came first. By two o’clock in the afternoon they had accomplished the descent of the open part of the mountain; they easily found the string fastened to the projecting rock, and, re-entering the cloud, and guided by the clue, they very slowly, but without accident, found their way back to the camp, which they reached about six o’clock in the evening.
The reader will easily understand the joy which the safe return of the three engineers occasioned in the camp, and the intense interest with which their story of the marvels visible beyond the cloud was listened to. Their report was hastily committed to writing, sent down by the tramways, and circulated through the world with all speed. Operations were instantly resumed at the gallery, which had still to be driven through the cloud stratum. It was resolved to continue it right up to the top of the mountain, for the report of the engineers rendered it quite plain that an extensive observatory must be established there, and that a corps of the ablest mathematicians and best trained physical observers must take up their permanent abode in it, in order to investigate the nature and meaning of the myriad smaller lights and the great fiery disk.
Meanwhile, daring the progress of the works, many of the artificers who were in the prime of life, repeated the ascent which had been so successfully accomplished by the three pioneers; with the guidance of the clue, this was now a comparatively easy undertaking. Before the lapse of three years the first Hesperian observatory had been actually built, and a body of twenty-five of the ablest scientific men entered upon the study of practical and theoretical astronomy in that elevated abode. As a protection against the violence of the unscreened solar rays, a cavern was excavated in which the observers could pass the daytime at their calculations, and, issuing forth at nightfall, they laboriously watched the stars.
The speed with which these men found out the clue to the explanation of the complicated phenomena before them, would be quite incredible to anyone who did not bear in mind the remarkable conditions under which they worked. This was no case of a gang of stolid country bumpkins contemplating for the first time the starry heavens. Every one of the observers was an expert geometer, was perfectly familiar with all kinds of algebraical calculation, and had been trained for centuries in every type of physical observation and experiment. Before the discovery of the heavenly world telescopes had been invented; but, being adapted for use on the surface of the planet only, they were all of small size. The vast field for observation now disclosed, created a demand for a much more powerful class of instruments, and the stimulus thus given to opticians soon showed its effect in most important improvements in the manufacture of glass. Before many years were over, high class astronomical instruments were attainable, including those by which angles can be measured to an extraordinary degree of minuteness.
Thus the great rapidity with which this able band of observers succeeded in reducing the chaos of the fields of heaven to an orderly cosmos may be explained. I need not attempt to recount the successive steps in their marvellous progress. A very few days after they began their systematic labour, one of them suggested the real rotation of the planet on her axis as the cause of the apparent diurnal movement of the celestial sphere. This conjecture was speedily verified by pendulum experiments at the pole. Then followed the discoveries of the distinction between stars and planets and satellites; the distances and magnitudes of the planets; the position of their own world among them, and the dependence of the whole solar system on the sun. In short, by the close of the ninth millenary period, the Hesperian astronomy was a long way in advance of anything even now known on earth.
In the ancient history of Hesperos this discovery of the external world forms by far the most important epoch, and, for several centuries, the study of astronomy seems to have absorbed a great part of the energies of the inhabitants. Two other places were found on the mountain chains of the north, where, by going through the same kind of works as those detailed above—some of them involving even greater difficulties in their execution—peaks which rose above the cloud were reached, and observatories built upon them. It thus became possible to compare observations taken at different parts of the surface, and astronomical discoveries proceeded with still greater rapidity.