Presently, however, they saw the face of the Man in the Moon coming around from the other side.
“We must have made a complete circuit of the Moon,” Janey decided. “See, Johnny, the rudder is pulled over to one side! That’s the reason!”
Johnny pulled the rudder string until the Flying Machine was aimed right at the Moon, and they approached it at great speed.
“Slow up, Johnny!” Janey cried, when they could make out all the mountain tops and valleys very distinctly. “It feels too much as if we were falling when we go so fast.”
So Johnny twisted the “Start” spool backwards until they were flying very slowly and seemed to be floating down toward the Moon’s surface as lightly as a feather.
The Flying Machine still was headed directly toward the Moon, and this gave the children the impression that they were falling. But Johnny, by pulling the rudder about occasionally, steered the Flying Machine so that they landed among large mushrooms and queer ferns, instead of on the mountain tops or in the deep valleys they had seen on the other side of the Moon.
For, although the children did not know this, they had passed around the side of the Moon that always faces the Earth and had alighted in the Magical Land of Noom.
