"We ought to get a bonus for this," Torrence said. "If you don't tell 'em so, I will."
The descent upon Vulcan took another twenty-four hours. Then at last we had passed through a cloud-bank and, at some twenty thousand feet, the new world stretched dark and bleak beneath us. It certainly looked—to Jan's intense disappointment—wholly uninhabited. It was a tumbled, rocky landscape, barren and forbidding. Beneath us there were black ravines and canyons, little jagged peaks and hill-top spires, some of them sharp as needle-points. Off at one of the distant horizons the tiered land, rising up, stretched into the foothills of serrated ranks of mountain peaks which loomed over the jagged dark horizon line.
A great metal desert here. In the fitful starlight, and the mellow light of little crescent Mercury which hung over the mountains like a falling, new moon, the metallic quality of the rock was obvious—sleek, bronzed metal ore, in places polished by erosion so that it shone mirror-like. In other places it was mottled with a greenish cast.
"Well," Jan murmured, "not very hospitable-looking, is it? Don't you suppose there's any moisture, or any vegetation?"
There was no sign of any living creatures beneath us as we drifted diagonally downward. But presently, at lower altitude, I could see gleaming pools of water in the rock-hollows. The remains of a rainstorm here. Then we saw what looked like a great fissure—an open scar rifted in a glistening, polished metallic plateau. Grey-black steam was rising, condensing in the humid night-air. The hidden fires of the bowels of the little planet seemed close at this one point. As we stared, a red glow for a moment tinged the steam with a red and greenish reflection of some subterranean glare, far down.
Nothing but metal desert. But presently, as we slid forward, no more than a few thousand feet above the rocky surface now, Jan murmured suddenly,
"Look off there. Like a little oasis, isn't it?"
There was a patch of what seemed to be rocky soil. Just a few hundred acres in extent, set in a cup-like depression with little buttes and needle-spires and the strewn boulders of the metal waste surrounding it. A clump of tangled vegetation covered it—a fantastic miniature jungle of interlaced, queerly shaped little trees, solid with air-vines and pods and clumps of monstrous, vivid-colored flowers. It was an amazing contrast to the bleakness of the bronze desert.
"Well, that's more like it," Jan exclaimed. "Not all desert, Bob. See that?"