The First Men in the Moon

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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 crou

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 wat

ks 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

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dead world

ese needles a number of little round objects. And it seeme

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

my pointing fing

ded 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 o

vor. And then I heard h

if

ad come to no arid waste of minerals, but to a world that lived and moved! We watched intensely. I r

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 a

nto 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

en 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 t

n putting forth a second whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a lifeless stretch of litter

rd condition swayed and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this fringe was the silhouette

e 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, o

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,