[PART IV]
ON THE MOON
I
"We have arrove! All out for the moon!" repeated Burke, the would-be humorist. "Get ready for the quarantine officer!"
They all looked at one another incredulously. Save for the jar and the thunder of the blow when the Ring struck the moon's surface, there was nothing to suggest or indicate that they were not still moving through space, except the minor facts that the port-holes were curtained by a sitting cloud of white dust and that the deadlight was totally obscured. There was no motion now, but there had been no motion before. Their journey had been very much like that entertaining side-show at Coney Island, where the passengers on an imitation ship gain a vivid impression of mal de mer by sitting perfectly still while the shore, sea, and sky revolve topsyturvy about them. Yet, to quote the never-failing Burke, there they were!
But were they there? Wasn't it all a mad sort of dream? Too much liquid air or something? Had they really ever moved an inch? Weren't they still just roosting on the staging in the aerodrome at Washington, and stirring up a big dust with their old propeller? Rhoda was actually convinced, for the moment, that they had never started at all, and her illusion might have persisted had not Bennie called her attention to the fact that the dust cloud had suddenly subsided, dropping like a stone, owing to the complete absence of any supporting atmosphere, and leaving the sky clear and dark as on a winter's night.
Through the now transparent window, the surface of the moon, blazing under the blinding rays of the sun, became instantly visible, like a desert at high noon. But what a desert! The Ring was lying in the center of a small, circular plain, rimmed by a coruscated rocky wall—a "craterlet" such as Rhoda and Bennie had studied through the great telescope at Georgetown. For some distance about the Ring's circumference, the soft, porous rock composing the surface had been deeply eroded by the blast from the tractor and grooves and furrows of large size radiated from the point where they had come to rest. Far from being level, the plain around the crater bristled with pinnacles and peaks of every size and shape, suggesting stalagmites on the floor of a cave—strange and grotesque creations of the erosion of prehistoric winds.
Here and there, curious mounds and hillocks, presenting weird profiles, gave the place the appearance of being a gathering-spot or "council-rock" for selenite creatures turned by some unearthly spell to stone; while everywhere lay, in tumultuous confusion, huge slabs and blocks with ridges, walls, and hummocks, suggesting to Rhoda's fanciful imagination vast lunar building-operations suddenly interrupted by a cataclysm of nature. At a distance of something over three hundred yards, an isolated pinnacle rose to a great height, one side dazzling in the sun's untempered light, the other shrouded in absolute darkness. Everywhere the plain was strewn with loose and scattered rocks and covered with a soft, white detritus.
It was a ghostly spectacle—this lunar crust—like a crowded cemetery in white moonlight, thrusting ghastly fingers toward the sky, populous yet silent. Rhoda shivered. Had men lived there, she wondered? Had strange beasts ever roamed and wallowed among the selenite undergrowth where now these stark forms raised themselves? Had the sweet air of life ever eddied among these deathly rocks? Had birds once sung there, and insects buzzed and crawled? Would they, perhaps, find the imprint of some giant foot impressed upon the motionless dust? Her meditations were unceremoniously interrupted by Burke.