A Honeymoon in Space
They found the walking exceedingly easy, although their boots were
purposely weighted in order to counteract, to some extent, the great
difference in gravity. A few minutes brought them to the outskirts of
the city. It had no walls and exhibited no signs of any devices for
defence. Its streets were broad and well-paved, and the houses, built of
great blocks of grey stone joined together with white cement, looked as
fresh and unworn as though they had only been built a few months,
whereas they had probably stood for hundreds of thousands of years. They
were flat-roofed, all of one storey and practically of one type.
There were very few public buildings, and absolutely no attempt at
ornamentation was visible. Round some of the houses were spaces which
might once have been gardens. In the midst of the city, which appeared
to cover an area of about four square miles, was an enormous square
paved with flag-stones, which were covered to the depth of a couple of
inches with a light grey dust, which, as they walked across it, remained
perfectly still save for the disturbance caused by their footsteps.
There was no air to support it, otherwise it might have risen in clouds
about them.
From the centre of this square rose a huge pyramid nearly a thousand
feet in height, the sole building of the great silent city which
appeared to have been raised most probably as a temple by the hands of
its long-dead inhabitants.
When they got nearer they saw a white fringe round the steps by which it
was approached, and they soon found that this fringe was composed of
millions of white-bleached bones and skulls, shaped very much like those
of terrestrial men, save that they were very much larger, and that the
ribs were out of all proportion to the rest of the skeleton.
They stopped awe-stricken before this strange spectacle. Redgrave
stooped down and took hold of one of the bones, a huge femur. It broke
in two as he tried to lift it, and the piece which remained in his hand
crumbled instantly to white powder.
"Whoever they were," he said, "they were giants. When air and water
failed above, they came down here by some means and built this city. You
see what enormous chests they must have had. That would be Nature's last
struggle to enable them to breathe the diminishing atmosphere. These, of
course, were the last descendants of the fittest to breathe it; this was
their temple, I suppose, and here they came to die--I wonder how many
thousand years ago--perishing of heat, and cold, and hunger, and thirst;
the last tragedy of a race, which, after all, must have been something
like ourselves."
"It's just too awful for words," said Zaidie. "Shall we go into the
temple? That seems one of the entrances up there, only I don't like
walking over all those bones."
"I don't suppose they'll mind if we do," replied Redgrave, "only we
mustn't go far in. It may be full of cross passages and mazes, and we
might never get out. Our lamps won't be much use in there, you know, for
there's no air. They'll just be points of light, and we shan't see
anything but them. It's very aggravating, but I'm afraid there's no help
for it. Come along."
They ascended the steps, crushing the bones and skulls to powder beneath
their feet, and entered the huge, square doorway, which looked like a
rectangle of blackness against the grey-white of the wall. Even through
their asbestos-woven clothing they felt a sudden shock of icy cold. In
those few steps they had passed from a temperature of tenfold summer
heat into one below that of the coldest spots on earth. They turned on
the electric lamps which were fitted to the breastplates of their
dresses, but they could see nothing save the thin thread of light
straight in front of them. It did not even spread. It was like a
polished needle on a background of black velvet.
All about them was darkness impenetrable, and so they reluctantly turned
back to the doorway, leaving all the mysteries which that vast temple of
a long-vanished people might contain to remain mysteries to the end of
time.
They passed down the steps again and crossed the square, and for the
next half-hour Zaidie was busy taking photographs of the pyramid with
its ghastly surroundings, and a few general views of this strange City
of the Dead.
CHAPTER VIII
When they got back they found Murgatroyd pacing up and down the floor of
the deck-chamber, looking about him with serious eyes, but betraying no
other visible sign of anxiety. The _Astronef_ was at once his home and
his idol, and, as Redgrave had said, even his own direct orders would
hardly have induced him to leave her even in a world in which there was
not a living human being to dispute possession of her.
When they had resumed their ordinary clothing the _Astronef_ rose from
the surface of the plain, crossed the encircling wall at the height of a
few hundred feet, and made her way at a speed of about fifty miles an
hour towards the regions of the South Pole.
Behind them to the north-west they could see from their elevation of
nearly thirty thousand feet the vast expanse of the Sea of Clouds.
Dotted here and there were the shining points and ridges of light
marking the peaks and crater-walls which the rays of the rising sun had
already touched. Before them and to the right and left rose a vast maze
of ragged, splintery peaks and huge ramparts of mountain-walls enclosing
plains so far below their summits that the light of neither sun nor
earth ever reached them.
By directing the force exerted by what might now be called the
propelling part of the engines against the mountain masses which they
crossed to right and left and behind, Redgrave was able to take a zigzag
course that carried them over many of the walled plains which were
wholly or partially lit up by the sun, and in nearly all of the deepest
their telescopes revealed something like what they had found within the
crater of Tycho. At length, pointing to a gigantic circle of white light
fringing an abyss of utter darkness, he said:
"There is Newton, the greatest mystery of the moon. Those inner walls
are twenty-four thousand feet high; that means that the bottom, which
has never been seen by human eyes, is about five thousand feet below the
surface of the moon. What do you say, dear--shall we go down and see if
the searchlight will show us anything? You know there may be something
like breathable air down there, and perhaps living creatures who can
breathe it."
"Certainly!" replied Zaidie decisively; "haven't we come to see things
that nobody else has ever seen?"
Redgrave went down to the engine-room, and presently the _Astronef_
changed her course, and in a few minutes was hanging with her polished
hull bathed in sunlight, like a star suspended over the unfathomable
gulf of darkness below.
As they sank below the level of the sun-rays, Murgatroyd turned on both
the searchlights. They dropped down ever slowly and more slowly until
gradually the two long, thin streams of light began to spread themselves
out; the lower they went the more the beams spread out, and by the time
the _Astronef_ came gently to a rest they were swinging round her in
broad fans of diffused light over a dark, marshy surface, with scattered
patches of grey moss and reeds, with dull gleams of stagnant water
showing between them.
"Air and water at last! I thought so," said Redgrave, as he rejoined her
on the upper deck; "air and water and eternal darkness! Well, we shall
find life on the moon here if anywhere."
"I suppose we had better put on our breathing-dresses, hadn't we?" asked
Zaidie.
"Certainly," he replied, "because, although there is some sort of air,
we don't know yet whether we shall be able to breathe it. It may be half
carbon-dioxide for all we know; but a few matches will soon tell us
that."
Within a quarter of an hour they were again standing on the surface.
Murgatroyd had orders to follow them as far as possible with the head
searchlight, which, in the comparatively rarefied atmosphere, appeared
to have a range of several miles. Redgrave struck a match, and held it
up level with his head; it burnt with a clear, steady, yellow flame.
"Where a match will burn a man should be able to breathe," he said. "I'm
going to see what lunar air is like."
"For Heaven's sake be careful, dear," came the reply in pleading tones
across the wire.
"All right; but don't open your helmet till I tell you."
He then raised the hermetically closed slide of glass, which formed the
front of the helmets, half an inch or so. Instantly he felt a sensation
like the drawing of a red-hot iron across his skin. He snapped the visor
down and clasped it in its place. For a moment or two he gasped for
breath, and then he said rather faintly:
"It's no good, it's too cold. It would freeze the blood of a salamander.
I think we'd better go back and explore this place under cover. We can't
do anything in the dark, and we can see just as well from the upper deck
with the searchlights. Besides, as there's air and water here, there's
no telling but there may be inhabitants of sorts such as we shouldn't
care to meet."
He took her hand, and to Murgatroyd's great relief they went back to the
vessel.
Redgrave then raised the _Astronef_ a couple of hundred feet and, by
directing the repulsive force against the mountain walls, developed just
sufficient energy to keep them moving at about twelve miles an hour.
They began to cross the plain with their searchlights flashing out in
all directions. They had scarcely gone a mile before the head-light fell
upon a moving form half walking, half crawling among some stunted
brown-leaved bushes by the side of a broad, stagnant stream.
"Look!" said Zaidie, clasping his arm, "is that a gorilla, or--no, it
_can't_ be a man."
The light was turned full upon the object. If it had been covered with
hair it might have passed for some strange type of the ape tribe, but
its skin was smooth and of a livid grey. Its lower limbs were evidently
more powerful than its upper; its chest was enormously developed, but
the stomach was small. The head was big and round and smooth. As they
came nearer they saw that in place of fingernails it had long white
feelers which it kept extended and constantly waving about as it groped
its way towards the water. As the intense light flashed full on it, it
turned its head towards them. It had a nose and a mouth--the nose, long
and thick, with huge mobile nostrils; the mouth forming an angle
something like a fish's lips. Teeth there seemed none. At either side of
the upper part of the nose there were two little sunken holes--in which
this thing's ancestors of countless thousands of years ago had once had
eyes.
As she looked upon this awful parody of what had once perhaps been a
human face, Zaidie covered hers with her hands and uttered a little moan
of horror.
"Horrible, isn't it?" said Redgrave. "I suppose that's what the last
remnants of the Lunarians have come to. Evidently once men and women,
something like ourselves. I daresay the ancestors of that thing have
lived here in coldness and darkness for hundreds of generations. It
shows how tremendously tenacious Nature is of life.
"Ages ago, no doubt, that brute's ancestors lived up yonder when there
were seas and rivers, fields and forests, just as we have them on earth,
among men and women who could see and breathe and enjoy everything in
life and had built up civilisations like ours!
"Look, it's going to fish or something. Now we shall see what it feeds
on. I wonder why the water isn't frozen. I suppose there must be some
internal heat left still. A few patches with lakes of lava under them.
Perhaps this valley is just over one, and that's why these creatures
have managed to survive.