“Yes, sir.”
“Very well, then—we’ll see. Now place your eye to the eye-piece, and we’ll have a look at the moon.”
Joshua, at once eager and filled with awe, placed his eye to the eye-piece. He caught his breath in boyish ecstasy as the great tinfoil half-moon, chewed to lacelike filaments on its east and southeast sides, was revealed to him as he never before had seen it. Immovable, absolutely silent, he gazed in rapture, and all the mysticism of the universe wrapped itself about him. He saw the wondrous craters, the mountains, the sea bottoms, the plains, and his fancy peopled them with strange adventurers bent on stranger quests—dream people who lived dream lives and sought dream marvels in a land whose fabric was dreams.
“You perhaps are not aware, Joshua,” Clegg was saying softly in his stilted, academic way, “that you are seeing the moon upside down, in the natural way that we see all objects. Do you know that whatever you see in this world you see upside down? But your eyes have adjusted themselves, and they really appear to you as rightside up. This is known to the science of optics by reason of men born blind suddenly regaining their sight, when their unadjusted eyes see objects upside down. Don’t ask me to explain it, for it is out of my field. But remember that, as you now see the moon, north is south, and east is west.
“Now, the dark areas that you see, Joshua, are flat plains and sea bottoms. The bright areas are mountainous regions. There are nine mountain chains on that portion of the moon which is visible to us earth-dwellers. (And the most that we ever see of the moon’s surface is about forty-seven per cent.) These nine mountain chains contain some three thousand peaks, many of them between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand feet in height. Though you are not able to see it now, there is a mountain-peak on the southern edge of the moon which is thirty-six thousand feet high. Mount Everest, as you probably remember from your study of geography, is twenty-nine thousand feet in height, and is this planet’s closest approach to the gigantic moon-mountain of which I speak. Do you follow me, Joshua?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now observe that large crater in the south polar region, Joshua. Where will you look for it?”
“’Way up on top, to the right—I mean, to the east?”
“Yes, that’s right—you are quick to comprehend. But remember, now, that in reality that region is far to the south and west. Have you found the crater—by far the largest to be seen?”
“Yes, sir—I think so.”