Chapter Chapter 7 · Sunrise on the Moon

. Sunrise on the Moon

As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. We

were in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor of

the giant crater. Its cliff-like walls closed us in on every side. From

the westward the light of the unseen sun fell upon them, reaching to

the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment of drab

and greyish rock, lined here and there with banks and crevices of snow.

This was perhaps a dozen miles away, but at first no intervening

atmosphere diminished in the slightest the minutely detailed brilliancy

with which these things glared at us. They stood out clear and dazzling

against a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthly

eyes rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousness

of the sky.

The eastward cliff was at first merely a starless selvedge to the

starry dome. No rosy flush, no creeping pallor, announced the

commencing day. Only the Corona, the Zodiacal light, a huge

cone-shaped, luminous haze, pointing up towards the splendour of the

morning star, warned us of the imminent nearness of the sun.

Whatever light was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs. It

showed a huge undulating plain, cold and grey, a grey that deepened

eastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow.

Innumerable rounded grey summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy

substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity,

gave us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall. These

hummocks looked like snow. At the time I thought they were snow. But

they were not—they were mounds and masses of frozen air.

So it was at first; and then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came the

lunar day.

The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at

its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots

towards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the

touch of the dawn a reek of grey vapour poured upward from the crater

floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of grey, thicker and

broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming

like a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs

were no more than refracted glare beyond.

“It is air,” said Cavor. “It must be air—or it would not rise like

this—at the mere touch of a sun-beam. And at this pace....”

He peered upwards. “Look!” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“In the sky. Already. On the blackness—a little touch of blue. See! The

stars seem larger. And the little ones and all those dim nebulosities

we saw in empty space—they are hidden!”

Swiftly, steadily, the day approached us. Grey summit after grey summit

was overtaken by the blaze, and turned to a smoking white intensity. At

last there was nothing to the west of us but a bank of surging fog, the

tumultuous advance and ascent of cloudy haze. The distant cliff had

receded farther and farther, had loomed and changed through the whirl,

and foundered and vanished at last in its confusion.

Nearer came that steaming advance, nearer and nearer, coming as fast as

the shadow of a cloud before the south-west wind. About us rose a thin

anticipatory haze.

Cavor gripped my arm. “What?” I said.

“Look! The sunrise! The sun!”

He turned me about and pointed to the brow of the eastward cliff,

looming above the haze about us, scarce lighter than the darkness of

the sky. But now its line was marked by strange reddish shapes, tongues

of vermilion flame that writhed and danced. I fancied it must be

spirals of vapour that had caught the light and made this crest of

fiery tongues against the sky, but indeed it was the solar prominences

I saw, a crown of fire about the sun that is forever hidden from

earthly eyes by our atmospheric veil.

And then—the sun!

Steadily, inevitably came a brilliant line, came a thin edge of

intolerable effulgence that took a circular shape, became a bow, became

a blazing sceptre, and hurled a shaft of heat at us as though it was a

spear.

It seemed verily to stab my eyes! I cried aloud and turned about

blinded, groping for my blanket beneath the bale.

And with that incandescence came a sound, the first sound that had

reached us from without since we left the earth, a hissing and

rustling, the stormy trailing of the aerial garment of the advancing

day. And with the coming of the sound and the light the sphere lurched,

and blinded and dazzled we staggered helplessly against each other. It

lurched again, and the hissing grew louder. I had shut my eyes

perforce, I was making clumsy efforts to cover my head with my blanket,

and this second lurch sent me helplessly off my feet. I fell against

the bale, and opening my eyes had a momentary glimpse of the air just

outside our glass. It was running—it was boiling—like snow into which a

white-hot rod is thrust. What had been solid air had suddenly at the

touch of the sun become a paste, a mud, a slushy liquefaction, that

hissed and bubbled into gas.

There came a still more violent whirl of the sphere and we had clutched

one another. In another moment we were spun about again. Round we went

and over, and then I was on all fours. The lunar dawn had hold of us.

It meant to show us little men what the moon could do with us.

I caught a second glimpse of things without, puffs of vapour, half

liquid slush, excavated, sliding, falling, sliding. We dropped into

darkness. I went down with Cavor’s knees in my chest. Then he seemed to

fly away from me, and for a moment I lay with all the breath out of my

body staring upward. A toppling crag of the melting stuff had splashed

over us, buried us, and now it thinned and boiled off us. I saw the

bubbles dancing on the glass above. I heard Cavor exclaiming feebly.

Then some huge landslip in the thawing air had caught us, and

spluttering expostulation, we began to roll down a slope, rolling

faster and faster, leaping crevasses and rebounding from banks, faster

and faster, westward into the white-hot boiling tumult of the lunar

day.

Clutching at one another we spun about, pitched this way and that, our

bale of packages leaping at us, pounding at us. We collided, we

gripped, we were torn asunder—our heads met, and the whole universe

burst into fiery darts and stars! On the earth we should have smashed

one another a dozen times, but on the moon, luckily for us, our weight

was only one-sixth of what it is terrestrially, and we fell very

mercifully. I recall a sensation of utter sickness, a feeling as if my

brain were upside down within my skull, and then—

Something was at work upon my face, some thin feelers worried my ears.

Then I discovered the brilliance of the landscape around was mitigated

by blue spectacles. Cavor bent over me, and I saw his face upside down,

his eyes also protected by tinted goggles. His breath came irregularly,

and his lip was bleeding from a bruise. “Better?” he said, wiping the

blood with the back of his hand.

Everything seemed swaying for a space, but that was simply my

giddiness. I perceived that he had closed some of the shutters in the

outer sphere to save me—from the direct blaze of the sun. I was aware

that everything about us was very brilliant.

“Lord!” I gasped. “But this—”

I craned my neck to see. I perceived there was a blinding glare

outside, an utter change from the gloomy darkness of our first

impressions. “Have I been insensible long?” I asked.

“I don’t know—the chronometer is broken. Some little time.... My dear

chap! I have been afraid...”

I lay for a space taking this in. I saw his face still bore evidences

of emotion. For a while I said nothing. I passed an inquisitive hand

over my contusions, and surveyed his face for similar damages. The back

of my right hand had suffered most, and was skinless and raw. My

forehead was bruised and had bled. He handed me a little measure with

some of the restorative—I forget the name of it—he had brought with us.

After a time I felt a little better. I began to stretch my limbs

carefully. Soon I could talk.

“It wouldn’t have done,” I said, as though there had been no interval.

“No! it _wouldn’t_.”

He thought, his hands hanging over his knees. He peered through the

glass and then stared at me. “Good Lord!” he said. “_No!_”

“What has happened?” I asked after a pause. “Have we jumped to the

tropics?”

“It was as I expected. This air has evaporated—if it is air. At any

rate, it has evaporated, and the surface of the moon is showing. We are

lying on a bank of earthy rock. Here and there bare soil is exposed. A

queer sort of soil!”

It occurred to him that it was unnecessary to explain. He assisted me

into a sitting position, and I could see with my own eyes.