الفصل الفصل 8 · A Lunar Morning

. A Lunar Morning

The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of scenery had

altogether disappeared. The glare of the sun had taken upon itself a

faint tinge of amber; the shadows upon the cliff of the crater wall

were deeply purple. To the eastward a dark bank of fog still crouched

and sheltered from the sunrise, but to the westward the sky was blue

and clear. I began to realise the length of my insensibility.

We were no longer in a void. An atmosphere had arisen about us. The

outline of things had gained in character, had grown acute and varied;

save for a shadowed space of white substance here and there, white

substance that was no longer air but snow, the arctic appearance had

gone altogether. Everywhere broad rusty brown spaces of bare and

tumbled earth spread to the blaze of the sun. Here and there at the

edge of the snowdrifts were transient little pools and eddies of water,

the only things stirring in that expanse of barrenness. The sunlight

inundated the upper two blinds of our sphere and turned our climate to

high summer, but our feet were still in shadow, and the sphere was

lying upon a drift of snow.

And scattered here and there upon the slope, and emphasised by little

white threads of unthawed snow upon their shady sides, were shapes like

sticks, dry twisted sticks of the same rusty hue as the rock upon which

they lay. That caught one’s thoughts sharply. Sticks! On a lifeless

world? Then as my eye grew more accustomed to the texture of their

substance, I perceived that almost all this surface had a fibrous

texture, like the carpet of brown needles one finds beneath the shade

of pine trees.

“Cavor!” I said.

“Yes.”

“It may be a dead world now—but once—”

Something arrested my attention. I had discovered among these needles a

number of little round objects. And it seemed to me that one of these

had moved. “Cavor,” I whispered.

“What?”

But I did not answer at once. I stared incredulous. For an instant I

could not believe my eyes. I gave an inarticulate cry. I gripped his

arm. I pointed. “Look!” I cried, finding my tongue. “There! Yes! And

there!”

His eyes followed my pointing finger. “Eh?” he said.

How can I describe the thing I saw? It is so petty a thing to state,

and yet it seemed so wonderful, so pregnant with emotion. I have said

that amidst the stick-like litter were these rounded bodies, these

little oval bodies that might have passed as very small pebbles. And

now first one and then another had stirred, had rolled over and

cracked, and down the crack of each of them showed a minute line of

yellowish green, thrusting outward to meet the hot encouragement of the

newly-risen sun. For a moment that was all, and then there stirred, and

burst a third!

“It is a seed,” said Cavor. And then I heard him whisper very softly,

“_Life!_”

“Life!” And immediately it poured upon us that our vast journey had not

been made in vain, that we had come to no arid waste of minerals, but

to a world that lived and moved! We watched intensely. I remember I

kept rubbing the glass before me with my sleeve, jealous of the

faintest suspicion of mist.

The picture was clear and vivid only in the middle of the field. All

about that centre the dead fibres and seeds were magnified and

distorted by the curvature of the glass. But we could see enough! One

after another all down the sunlit slope these miraculous little brown

bodies burst and gaped apart, like seed-pods, like the husks of fruits;

opened eager mouths that drank in the heat and light pouring in a

cascade from the newly-risen sun.

Every moment more of these seed coats ruptured, and even as they did so

the swelling pioneers overflowed their rent-distended seed-cases, and

passed into the second stage of growth. With a steady assurance, a

swift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward to

the earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. In a little

while the whole slope was dotted with minute plantlets standing at

attention in the blaze of the sun.

They did not stand for long. The bundle-like buds swelled and strained

and opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips,

spreading a whorl of tiny, spiky, brownish leaves, that lengthened

rapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement was slower

than any animal’s, swifter than any plant’s I have ever seen before.

How can I suggest it to you—the way that growth went on? The leaf tips

grew so that they moved onward even while we looked at them. The brown

seed-case shrivelled and was absorbed with an equal rapidity. Have you

ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand and watched

the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon plants grew

like that.

In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of these

plants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a second

whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a

lifeless stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-green

herbage of bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their

growing.

I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the

eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed

and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this

fringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a

cactus, and swelling visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills with

air.

Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distended form

was rising over the scrub. But here the light fell upon its sleek

sides, and I could see that its colour was a vivid orange hue. It rose

as one watched it; if one looked away from it for a minute and then

back, its outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congested branches

until in a little time it rose a coralline shape of many feet in

height. Compared with such a growth the terrestrial puff-ball, which

will sometimes swell a foot in diameter in a single night, would be a

hopeless laggard. But then the puff-ball grows against a gravitational

pull six times that of the moon. Beyond, out of gullies and flats that

had been hidden from us, but not from the quickening sun, over reefs

and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spiky and fleshy

vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously to take

advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit and seed

again and die. It was like a miracle, that growth. So, one must

imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the

desolation of the new-made earth.

Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, the

stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of

vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes. Conceive it

all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem

watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, wherever there

was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow. And to have the picture of

our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we saw it all

through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are distorted by a

lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very bright there,

and towards the edges magnified and unreal.