A storm on Orana ... somehow it made him shudder, hearing the terror in her tiny voice.
III
He slept again. And when he awoke the little interior of the Orite spaceship was busy with the activities of landing. Through one of the bullseye ports beside him, Nixon stared down at the strange new world. Beneath them now it was a great, darkly dim expanse of gaunt naked mountains. A place, by the look of it, seemingly of monstrous desolation.
The spaceship settled lower. Now Nixon could see the huge, naked mountain peaks. They were like greenish polished spires of glass, towering up into a queer orange-tinted haze of the Orana night. Beneath the topping spires, the vast gaunt mountains spread out in serrated ranks. The sides of them were polished cliff-ramps, bleak, precipitous slopes dropping down into the great chasms of the valleys where the orange haze was thicker so that the bottoms were an empty blur.
He found Nona standing down on the floor, between him and the bullseye port.
"There—Orana," she said.
He was puzzled. "But Tork told me it was a very small asteroid," he said. "Those mountains, those canyons—so huge—"
A little world, but so monstrously contorted by some great cataclysm of nature in its birth, that everything on it was tremendous. As Nixon stared down, it seemed that there could be easily ten miles, as distance would be measured on Earth, between the tops of these towering spires and the ragged gashes of deeps between them. A vast world, vast with the hugeness of this amazing panorama of utter, bleak desolation. Somehow there was a majesty to it. A brooding landscape, awesome in its sweep of barren immensity. And it was sinister—the monstrous, brittle-looking cliff-faces, smooth and green, with the orange hazes whirling about them, and the shadows in the depths murky with purple mystery.
"It looks large to you?" Nolan said. "Then you can understand how much bigger it looks to us."