The First Men in the Moon

e on t

n them, reaching to the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment of drab and grayish 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 slig

pallor, announced the commencing day. Only the Corona, the Zodiacal light, a huge cone-shaped, luminous

ss of the cliff shadow. Innumerable rounded gray summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity, gave us our fir

hen, sudden, swift, and a

to shift and quiver, and at the touch of the dawn a reek of gray vapour poured upward from the crater floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of gray, thicker and broader

r it would not rise like this-at the mere

pwards. "Lo

?" I

e. See! The stars seem larger. And the little ones and all t

sity. 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 dist

coming as fast as the shadow of a cloud before the s

d my arm. "W

e sunrise

d 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 f

hen-t

able effulgence that took a circular shape, became a bow, became a blaz

ied aloud and turned about blinded, gr

nd 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

ther moment we were spun about again. Round we went and over, and then I was on all fours.

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

e began to roll down a slope, rolling faster and faster, leaping crevasses and rebounding

et, 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

as mitigated by blue spectacles. Cavor bent over me, and I saw his face upside down, his eyes also protected by tinted goggles. H

ed that he had closed some of the shutters in the outer sphere to save me-from the

gasped.

lare outside, an utter change from the gloomy darkness of o

broken. Some little time.... My

d 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

" I said, as though the

t woul

er his knees. He peered through

d!" he sa

ked after a pause. "Have

has evaporated, and the surface of the moon is showing. We are lying on a ban

to explain. He assisted me into a sitting