CHAPTER VIII
When they got back they found Murgatroyd pacing up and down the floor ofthe deck-chamber, looking about him with serious eyes, but betraying noother visible sign of anxiety. The _Astronef_ was at once his home andhis idol, and, as Redgrave had said, even his own direct orders wouldhardly have induced him to leave her even in a world in which there wasnot a living human being to dispute possession of her.
When they had resumed their ordinary clothing the _Astronef_ rose fromthe surface of the plain, crossed the encircling wall at the height of afew hundred feet, and made her way at a speed of about fifty miles anhour towards the regions of the South Pole.
Behind them to the north-west they could see from their elevation ofnearly thirty thousand feet the vast expanse of the Sea of Clouds.Dotted here and there were the shining points and ridges of lightmarking the peaks and crater-walls which the rays of the rising sun hadalready touched. Before them and to the right and left rose a vast mazeof ragged, splintery peaks and huge ramparts of mountain-walls enclosingplains so far below their summits that the light of neither sun norearth ever reached them.
By directing the force exerted by what might now be called thepropelling part of the engines against the mountain masses which theycrossed to right and left and behind, Redgrave was able to take a zigzagcourse that carried them over many of the walled plains which werewholly or partially lit up by the sun, and in nearly all of the deepesttheir telescopes revealed something like what they had found within thecrater of Tycho. At length, pointing to a gigantic circle of white lightfringing an abyss of utter darkness, he said:
"There is Newton, the greatest mystery of the moon. Those inner wallsare twenty-four thousand feet high; that means that the bottom, whichhas never been seen by human eyes, is about five thousand feet below thesurface of the moon. What do you say, dear--shall we go down and see ifthe searchlight will show us anything? You know there may be somethinglike breathable air down there, and perhaps living creatures who canbreathe it."
"Certainly!" replied Zaidie decisively; "haven't we come to see thingsthat 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 polishedhull bathed in sunlight, like a star suspended over the unfathomablegulf of darkness below.
As they sank below the level of the sun-rays, Murgatroyd turned on boththe searchlights. They dropped down ever slowly and more slowly untilgradually the two long, thin streams of light began to spread themselvesout; the lower they went the more the beams spread out, and by the timethe _Astronef_ came gently to a rest they were swinging round her inbroad fans of diffused light over a dark, marshy surface, with scatteredpatches of grey moss and reeds, with dull gleams of stagnant watershowing between them.
"Air and water at last! I thought so," said Redgrave, as he rejoined heron the upper deck; "air and water and eternal darkness! Well, we shallfind life on the moon here if anywhere."
"I suppose we had better put on our breathing-dresses, hadn't we?" askedZaidie.
"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 halfcarbon-dioxide for all we know; but a few matches will soon tell usthat."
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 headsearchlight, which, in the comparatively rarefied atmosphere, appearedto have a range of several miles. Redgrave struck a match, and held itup 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'mgoing to see what lunar air is like."
"For Heaven's sake be careful, dear," came the reply in pleading tonesacross 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 thefront of the helmets, half an inch or so. Instantly he felt a sensationlike the drawing of a red-hot iron across his skin. He snapped the visordown and clasped it in its place. For a moment or two he gasped forbreath, 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'tdo anything in the dark, and we can see just as well from the upper deckwith the searchlights. Besides, as there's air and water here, there'sno telling but there may be inhabitants of sorts such as we shouldn'tcare to meet."
He took her hand, and to Murgatroyd's great relief they went back to thevessel.
Redgrave then raised the _Astronef_ a couple of hundred feet and, bydirecting the repulsive force against the mountain walls, developed justsufficient energy to keep them moving at about twelve miles an hour.
They began to cross the plain with their searchlights flashing out inall directions. They had scarcely gone a mile before the head-light fellupon a moving form half walking, half crawling among some stuntedbrown-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 withhair it might have passed for some strange type of the ape tribe, butits skin was smooth and of a livid grey. Its lower limbs were evidentlymore powerful than its upper; its chest was enormously developed, butthe stomach was small. The head was big and round and smooth. As theycame nearer they saw that in place of fingernails it had long whitefeelers which it kept extended and constantly waving about as it gropedits way towards the water. As the intense light flashed full on it, itturned its head towards them. It had a nose and a mouth--the nose, longand thick, with huge mobile nostrils; the mouth forming an anglesomething like a fish's lips. Teeth there seemed none. At either side ofthe upper part of the nose there were two little sunken holes--in whichthis thing's ancestors of countless thousands of years ago had once hadeyes.
As she looked upon this awful parody of what had once perhaps been ahuman face, Zaidie covered hers with her hands and uttered a little moanof horror.
"Horrible, isn't it?" said Redgrave. "I suppose that's what the lastremnants of the Lunarians have come to. Evidently once men and women,something like ourselves. I daresay the ancestors of that thing havelived here in coldness and darkness for hundreds of generations. Itshows how tremendously tenacious Nature is of life.
"Ages ago, no doubt, that brute's ancestors lived up yonder when therewere 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 inlife and had built up civilisations like ours!
"Look, it's going to fish or something. Now we shall see what it feedson. I wonder why the water isn't frozen. I suppose there must be someinternal heat left still. A few patches with lakes of lava under them.Perhaps this valley is just over one, and that's why these creatureshave managed to survive.
"Ah! there's another of them, smaller, not so strongly formed. Thatthing's mate, I suppose--female of the species. Ugh! I wonder how manyhundred of thousands of years it will take for _our_ descendants to cometo that."
"I hope our dear old earth will hit something else and be smashed toatoms before that happens!" exclaimed Zaidie, whose curiosity had nowpartly overcome her horror. "Look, it's trying to catch something!"
The larger of the two creatures had groped its way to the edge of thesluggish, oily water and dropped, or rather rolled, quietly into it. Itwas evidently cold-blooded, or nearly so, for no warm-blooded animalwould have taken to such water so naturally. Presently the other droppedin too, and both disappeared for some moments. Then, in the midst of aviolent commotion in the water a few yards away, they rose to thesurface of the water, the larger with a wriggling, eel-like fish betweenits jaws.
They both groped their way towards the edge, and had just reached it andwere pulling themselves out when a hideous shape rose out of the waterb
ehind them. It was like the head of an octopus joined to the body of aboa-constrictor, but head and neck were both of the same ghastly, lividgrey as the other two creatures. It was evidently blind, too, for ittook no notice of the brilliant glare of the searchlight, but it movedrapidly towards the two scrambling forms, its long white feelerstrembling out in all directions. Then one of them touched the smaller ofthe two shapes. Instantly the rest shot out and closed round it, andwith scarcely a struggle it was dragged beneath the water and vanished.
_A hideous shape rose out of the water behind them._]
Zaidie uttered a little low scream and covered her face again, andRedgrave said:
"The same old brutal law you see, life preying upon life even on a dyingworld, a world that is more than half dead itself. Well, I think we'veseen enough of this place. I suppose those are about the only types oflife we should meet anywhere, and I don't want to know much more aboutthem. I vote we go and see what the invisible hemisphere is like."
"I have had all I want of this side," said Zaidie, looking away from thescene of the hideous tragedy, "so the sooner we go, the better I shalllike it."
A few minutes later the _Astronef_ was again rising towards the starswith her searchlights still flashing down into the Valley of ExpiringLife, which had seemed to them even worse than the Valley of Death. Ashe followed the rays with a pair of powerful field glasses, Redgravefancied that he saw huge, dim shapes moving about the stunted shrubberyand through the slimy pools of the stagnant rivers, and once or twice hegot a glimpse of what might well have been the ruins of towns andcities, but the gloom soon became too deep and dense for thesearchlights to pierce and he was glad when the _Astronef_ soared upinto the brilliant sunlight once more. Even the ghastly wilderness ofthe lunar landscape was welcome after the nameless horrors of thathideous abyss.
After a couple of hours' rapid travelling, Redgrave pointed down to acomparatively small, deep crater, and said:
"There, that is Malapert. It is almost exactly at the south pole of themoon, and there," he went on, pointing ahead, "is the horizon of thehemisphere which no earthborn eyes have ever seen."
"Except ours," said Zaidie somewhat inconsequently, "and I wonder what_we_ shall see."
"Probably something very like what we have seen on this side," repliedRedgrave, and as the event proved, he was right.
Contrary to many ingenious speculations which have been indulged in byboth scientist and romancer, they found that the hemisphere, which forcountless ages had never been turned towards the earth, was almost anexact replica of the visible one. Fully three-fourths of it wasbrilliantly illuminated by the sun, and what they saw through theirglasses was practically the same as what they had beheld on theearthward side; huge groups of enormous craters and ringed mountains,long, irregular chains crowned with sharp, splintery peaks, and betweenthese vast, deeply depressed areas, ranging in colour from dazzlingwhite to grey-brown, marking the beds of the vanished lunar seas.
As they crossed one of these, Redgrave allowed the _Astronef_ to sink towithin a few thousand feet of the surface, and then he and Zaidie sweptit with their telescopes. Their chance search was rewarded by somethingthey had not seen in the sea-beds of the other hemisphere.
These depressions were far deeper than the others, evidently manythousands of feet below the average surface, but the sun's rays wereblazing full into this one, and, dotted round its slopes at varyingelevations, they made out little patches which seemed to differ from thegeneral surface.
"I wonder if those are the remains of cities," said Zaidie. "Isn't itpossible that the old peoples of the moon might have built their citiesalong the seas just as we do, and that their descendants may havefollowed the waters as they retreated, I mean as they either dried up ordisappeared into the centre?"
"Very probable indeed, dearest of philosophers," he said, picking her upwith one arm and kissing the smiling lips which had just uttered thismost reasonable deduction. "Now we'll go down and see."
He diminished the vertically repulsive force a little, and the_Astronef_ dropped slantingly towards the bed of what might once havebeen the Pacific of the Moon.
When they were within about a couple of thousand feet of the surface itbecame perfectly plain that Zaidie was correct in her hypothesis. Thevast sea floor was thickly strewn with the ruins of countless cities andtowns, which had been inhabited by an equally countless series ofgenerations of men and women, who had perhaps lived and loved in thedays when our own world was a glowing mass of molten rock, surrounded bythe envelope of vapours which has since condensed to form our oceans.
They dropped still lower and ran diagonally across the ocean-bed, and asthey did so Zaidie's proposition was more and more completely confirmed,for they saw that the towns and cities which stood highest were the mostdilapidated, and that the buildings had evidently been torn and crumbledaway by the action of wind and water, snow and ice.
The nearer they approached to the central and deepest depression, thebetter preserved and the simpler the buildings became, until down in thelowest depths they found a collection of low-built square edifices,scarcely better than huts, which had clustered round the little lakeinto which, ages before, the ocean had dwindled. But where the lake hadbeen there was now only a shallow depression covered with grey sand andbrown rock.
Into this they descended and touched the lunar surface for the lasttime. A couple of hours' excursion among the houses proved that they hadbeen the last refuge of the last descendants of a dying race, a racewhich had socially degenerated just as the succession of cities had donearchitecturally, age by age, as the long-drawn struggle for mereexistence had become keener and keener until the two last essentials,air and water, had failed--and then the end had come.
The streets, like the square of the great Temple of Tycho, were strewnwith myriads and myriads of bones, and there were myriads more scatteredround what had once been the shores of the dwindling lake. Here, aselsewhere, there was not a sign or a record of any kind--carving orsculpture. If there were any such on the surface of the moon they hadnot discovered them. The buildings which they had seen evidentlybelonged to the decadent period during which the dwindling remnants ofthe Selenites asked only to eat and drink and breathe.
Inside the great Pyramid of the City of Tycho they might, perhaps, havefound something--some stone or tablet which bore the mark of theartist's hand; elsewhere, perhaps, they might have found cities rearedby older races, which might have rivalled the creations of Egypt andBabylon, but they had neither time nor inclination to look for these.
All that they had seen of the Dead World had only sickened and saddenedthem. The untravelled regions of Space peopled by living worlds moreakin to their own were before them. The red disc of Mars was glowing inthe zenith among the diamond-white clusters which gemmed the black skybehind him.
More than a hundred millions of miles had to be traversed before theywould be able to set foot on his surface, and so, after one last lookround the Valley of Death about them, Redgrave turned on the full energyof the repulsive force in a vertical direction, and the _Astronef_ leaptupwards in a straight line for her new destination. The UnknownHemisphere spread out in a vast plain beneath them, the blazing sun roseon their left, and the brilliant silver orb of the earth on their right,and so, full of wonder and yet without regret, they bade farewell to theWorld that Had Been.