The sun was very near. It shone upon the top of the cloud-bank and the clouds glowed with a marvelous whiteness. It shone upon the mountain-peaks where they penetrated the clouds, and the peaks were warmed, and there was no snow anywhere despite the height. There were winds here where the sun shone. The sky was very blue. At the edge of the plateau where the cloud-bank lay below, the mountainsides seemed to descend into a sea of milk. Great undulations in the mist had the seeming of waves, which moved with great deliberation toward the shores. They seemed sometimes to break against the mountain-wall where it was cliff-like, and sometimes they seemed to flow up gentler inclinations like water flowing up a beach.
All this was in the slowest of slow motion, because the cloud-waves were sometimes miles from crest to crest.
The look of things was different on the plateau, too. This part of the unnamed world, no less than the lowlands, had been seeded with life on two separate occasions. Once with bacteria and moulds and lichens to break up the rocks and make soil of them, and once with seeds and insects-eggs and such living things as might sustain themselves immediately upon hatching. But here on the heights the conditions were drastically unlike the lowland tropic moisture. Different things had thriven, and in quite different fashion.
Here moulds and yeasts and rusts were stunted by the sunlight. Grasses and weeds and trees survived, instead. This was an ideal environment for plants that needed sunlight to form chlorophyll, and chlorophyll to make use of the soil that had been formed. So here was vegetation that was nearly Earth-like. And there was a remarkable side-effect on the fauna which had been introduced at the same time and in the same manner as down below. In coolness which amounted to a temperate climate there could be no such frenzy of life as formed the nightmare-jungles in the lowlands. Plants grew at a slower tempo than fungi, and less luxuriantly. There was no adequate food-supply for large-sized plant-eaters. Insects which were to survive in sunshine could not grow to be monsters. Moreover, the nights were chill. Many insects grow torpid in the cool of a temperate-zone night, but warm up to activity soon after sunrise. But a large creature, made torpid by cold, will not revive so quickly. If large enough, it will not become fully active until close to dusk. On the plateau, the lowland monsters would starve in any case. But more—they would have only a fraction of a day of full activity.
There was a necessary limit then, to the size of the insects that lived above the clouds. The life on the plateau would not have seemed horrifying at all to humans living on other planets. Save for the absence of birds to sing and lack of a variety of small mammals, the untouched sunlit plateau with its warm days and briskly chill nights would have impressed most men as an ideal habitation.
But Burl and his companions were hardly prepared to see it that way at first glimpse. Certainly if told about it beforehand, they would have viewed it with despair.
But they did not know beforehand. They toiled upward, their leader moved by such ridiculous motives as have sometimes caused men to achieve greatness throughout all history. Back on Earth, two great continents were discovered by a man trying to get spices to conceal the gamey flavor of half-spoiled meat. The power that drives mile-long space-craft, and that lights and runs the cities of the galaxy, was first developed because it could be used in bombs to kill other men. There were precedents for Burl leading his fellows into sunshine merely because he was angered that they ceased to admire him.
The trudging, climbing folk were high above the valley, now. The thin mist that was never absent anywhere had hidden their former home, little by little. They climbed a steeply slanting mountain-flank. The stone was mostly covered by ragged, bluish-green rock-tripe in partly overlapping sheets. Such stuff is always close behind the bacteria which first attack a rock-face. On a slope, it clings while soil is washed downward as fast as it forms. The people never ate it. It produced frightening cramps. In time they would learn that if thoroughly dried it can he soaked to pliability again and cooked to a reasonable palatability. But so far they knew neither dryness nor fire.
Nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them. A slanting, stony mountainside which stretched up frighteningly to the very sky. Grayness overhead. Grayness, also, to one side—the side away from the mountain. And equal grayness below. The valley in which they lived could no longer be seen at all. Trudging and scrambling up the interminable incline, the people of Burl's personal following gradually realized the strangeness of their surroundings. As one result, they grew sick and dizzy. To them it seemed that the solid earth had tilted, and might presently tilt further. There was no horizon, but they had never seen a horizon. So they felt that what had been down was now partly behind, and they feared lest a turning universe let them fall ultimately toward the grayness they considered sky.
In this frightening strangeness, their only consolation was the company of their fellows. To stop would be to be abandoned in this place where all values were turned topsy-turvy. To go back—but none of them could imagine descending again to be devoured as one-third of their number already had been. If Burl had stopped, his followers would have squatted down and shivered together miserably, and waited for death. They had no thought of adventure nor any hope of safety. The only goodnesses they could imagine were food and the nearness of other humans. They clung together, obsessed by the dread of being left alone.