“I think, nevertheless, that he ascent proposed by our comrade is worth the trouble of being attempted. From that height we’d doubtless be able to descend again inside the crater and make the anticipated observations. Then we could traverse the crater obliquely to emerge through the southern breach, outside which the Selenit could have come to meet us.”
“Isn’t that too long and too difficult an excursion? An ascent of at least 1,500 meters, a descent of 2,500, an eighty-kilometer walk across the floor of the crater and a new ascent to the breach in order to get out!”
“Divide all the figures by six,” retorted Kito, “and you’ll see that it’s not beyond the strength of the giants we are on the lunar world.”
That reply made Goffoël smile; in his eyes, Kito was a dwarf. Nevertheless, Kito was right; men could accomplish the journey that Galston had sketched out easily, even burdened by their suits.
Brifaut thought that he ought to raise an objection.
“The temperature of the Moon will rise considerably as soon as the Sun is irradiating its surface. Are you sure that we can stand up to thirty or forty hours of the increase that will occur after sunrise, if we don’t have the resource of taking refuge in the Selenit?”
“Firstly,” said Uberaba, “our apparatus is constructed so as to absorb as little heat as possible. Secondly, it’s only at the end of thirty or forty hours that the Moon, extremely chilled by a long night of fifteen times twenty-four hours, will attain a high temperature under the action of the solar rays. Finally, don’t forget that we’re at a high altitude, not far from the North Pole, in a region that the sun’s rays always strike obliquely, and remain, in consequence, incapable of brining about an enormous rise in temperature, as in the equatorial regions. Certainly, it’s been calculated that in the latter, the sun warms up to about 184 degrees Centigrade; at our location, it ought not to exceed forty, which is still quite supportable by human beings, and that temperature will only be attained slowly as the Sun rises.”
“In my opinion,” said Lang, “those considerations are of no practical interest. We’d only suffer from the cold or heat of the ground if the boots of our suits were poorly insulated. Given that the apparatus is constructed to reflect or diffuse calorific rays into space rather than absorbing them, we could walk without inconvenience through a five-hundred-degree furnace.”
“Well.” concluded Scherrebek, “We’ve already proved the suits’ resistance to cold; now we’ll see whether they offer equally good protection against heat.”
Five explorers were designated for the first excursion. They were Galston, the second in command, and leader of the party, Brifaut, Lang, Espronceda and Kito.
Madeleine would certainly have liked to accompany her husband, but it was thought prudent not to include a woman in that first expedition, when they did not know exactly what obstacles it might run into. In any case, the only suit that could be adapted for Madeleine’s use was Kito’s. The young woman was promised, in order to console her, that Kito would yield his place to her on another occasion.
Madeleine was anxious at the idea of being separated from her husband in such extraordinary circumstances, but Scherrebek had selected Brifaut because he judged him the most capable, in his capacity as a journalist, of describing the spectacles that the climbers were going to witness.
Two hours later, the little troop set out into the lunar night, while the rest of the crew got ready to move off in the Selenit in order to go around the rim of the crater and take up a position on the plain facing the great southern breach.
Scherrebek was counting on having his share of the spectacle of the sunrise. He would see it rising behind the buttresses of Plato, and would perhaps have, along with the members of the mission who had remained aboard the Selenit, a sight perhaps as beautiful as those who were undertaking the ascent.
Thanks to the marvelous photographic documents that we possess nowadays of our satellite, the explorers were able to orientate themselves reliably. It would have been impossible for them to set forth on such an adventure if they had not had a detailed map of the regions they intended to visit.
They would not have been able to risk themselves on the invisible face of the Moon; the country appeared to them to be an inextricable chaos, and they would also have lacked the infallible guide of the long lunar nights, always suspended at the same height for every point of the hemisphere facing it: the Earth, which the climbers could see shining in its final quarter, forty degrees above the horizon, almost due south. With a reference-point like hat, it was impossible to mistake their direction.
An experiment made with a compass placed flat on the ground had not given any practical result. The magnetic field lacked intensity, and its orientation remained dubious. Fortunately, as is evident, the magnetic needle, so precious on our globe, was superfluous for the explorers of the Moon.
They could make out quite clearly with the naked eye, on the blue disk of the Earth, the bright forms of continents and the dark surface of seas; in places, large bright irregular patches were spread out or disposed in bands, parallel to the equator; they were clouds masking the surface, but rendering the star all the more brilliant.
Linked to one another by a rope, like terrestrial mountain-climbers, equipped with alpenstocks and ice-axes, Galston and his four companions began to climb the slope of the mountain. From the outset they realized that the climb would be child’s play for them, so agile did their lightness render them. They bounded from rock to rock like chamois. Thus, they did not take long to detach the rope that bound them together, and which was only impeding their movements. It took them no more than eight hours, including halts for rest, to effect an ascent that would have taken at least twenty-four hours in terrestrial conditions through such rugged terrain.
When they reached the summit, the great plain that formed the center of the crater appeared, partly-invaded by the impenetrable shadows projected by the mountains of the southern edge. To their right, still toward the south, profound gorges yawned, veritable gulfs into which the Earth’s light did not insinuate itself, and which seemed to divide the rim into concentric rings.
They communicated their impressions to one another by means of their telephones.
“That great mass detached from the wall,” Lang explained, “results from an enormous landslide. An entire section of the mountain has slid into the bottom of the crater.”
“The Moon is definitely a dead world,” said Brifaut. “All this is nothing but a desert of stone.”
“Wait!” said Espronceda. “We’ll see in a few hours whether or not the floor of Plato is carpeted with vegetation.”
“Perhaps we’ll find a forest with tall trees,” said Galston.
“More like something analogous to mosses or lichens,” Kito opined.
“The explorers had several hours to wait before sunrise, for they had climbed up more rapidly than they had anticipated. They installed themselves as comfortably as possible in order to try to get a little sleep while they waited for daybreak.
X. Sunrise
Standing up, facing westwards—which, for the Moon, in accordance with the conventions of astronomers, is where the sun rises—Gaston and his four companions watched. According to the calculations of Lang and Kito, the Sun was due to appear in a matter of minutes, but nothing—not the slightest glimmer—announced its approach.
“If zodiacal light were due, as some have sustained, to the persistence of a nebulous zone around the Sun, we would have seen it appear some time ago,” said Espronceda. “It is, therefore, only a phenomenon of refraction in the upper layers of the terrestrial atmosphere.
“Twilight, such as we observe it on our globe, and which results from the diffusion of light by the atmosphere, doesn’t exist in the Moon. That doesn’t mean that there’s no transition between night and broad daylight, because, given the slowness of the Moon’s movement, rotating on its axis twenty-nine times slower than the Earth, sunrise last for a long time. Between the moment when
the upper edge of the disk appears and the moment when the lower edge rises above the horizon in its turn, an hour goes by. It follows that for an hour, a point for which the sun is rising receives more light progressively, and passes gradually, in consequence, from absolute obscurity to full daylight.”
The explorers were about to have the opportunity to observe that phenomenon.
A luminous dot appeared in the west, in a fissure in the mountainous crest that barred the horizon. It grew, like a violet flame of extraordinary intensity, which soon caused the bright earthlight to pale.
“Use your leaded screens!” advised Galston, over the telephone.
The climbers slid the glass plates designed to stop ultra-violet radiation into the grooves fitted behind the viewports of their helmets for that purpose, to avoid the risk of being blinded. They had withdrawn their arms from the sleeves of their suits and were able to manipulate the various objects freely that they had at their service inside the apparatus.
Brifaut had sat down on a rock to contemplate that sunrise, such as he had never seen.
“How deformed the sun appears!” he said.
The flame was projected in a plume against the black background of the sky.
“It’s not deformed,” Kito replied. “On the contrary, you’re seeing it in its true aspect, when the radiance of its protuberances isn’t absorbed by an atmospheric envelope. That plume that you perceive is one of the gigantic eruptions of incandescent gas with which the surface of the sun is constantly bristling, and which the air prevents us from distinguishing on Earth. Our astronomers have only been able to discover them during eclipses or by means of the spectroscope. Here, for us, the sun would have no rays; on the other hand, it won’t appear to be round, but crowned with irregular flames.”
The luminous patch slowly grew, and, while the bottom of the crater and the base of the mountain remained plunged in shadow, the explorers saw the rocks light up around them on the summit. Small as the part of the sun was that projected over the horizon, the objects struck by its light were already resplendent, in the bleak lunar desert, as if they belonged to another world.
Gradually, as the flame expanded, other tongues of fire sprang forth into the blackness of the firmament, underlined by a violet and fulgurant streak. On the flank of the mountain that served the voyagers as an observatory, the darkness slowly descended. Within the dominant blue tint, the Terrans distinguished steaks of brown and ocher on the rocks, which betrayed the presence of metallic oxides. In the ensemble, the aspect of those rocks was reminiscent of that of marble, but they were less compact in texture.
In spite of its glare, the sun did not extinguish the lights in the sky. The stars and he Earth were still perceptible, and the breaking day did not give birth to the azure so dear to the inhabitants of our world.
For an hour, the explorers watched the show scent of the star. In spite of the leaded screens, they were often obliged to turn their eyes away in order not to be dazzled. The daylight descended gradually over the eastern slopes of the enclosure and reached the bottom of the crater.
“Look,” remarked Espronceda. “The edge of the circular plain at the foot of the rampart directly below us is still in shadow, although a luminous patch is forming some distance away on the floor. That proves that the central part is convex and that the edges are depressed, as in almost all the lunar craters. In sum, it’s not a plain that the rim encloses but a sunken dome, something like one of the faces of an enormous lens.”
“I don’t agree,” said Lang. “The marked curvature of the lunar surface is sufficient to explain the phenomenon you’re pointing out, of which many astronomers, in my opinion, have made a false interpretation. For the crest behind which the sun is rising, the limit of the horizon on a perfectly horizontal plain would be precisely over the zone that’s lighting up first; beyond it, the bottom is normally below the horizon, in the same way that the three-kilometer zone limiting the enclosure on the other side of the crater is for us.”
XI. Lunar Vegetation13
The sun was now floating over the mountains, rising obliquely toward the south.
They could distinguish quite clearly, in the illuminated part of the crater, the pale streaks that all observers have noticed in the central plain of Plato at daybreak. It is only when the sun is already very high, toward the sixth day of the lunar cycle, that the floor begins to darken; it is almost black in the epoch of the full moon, to such an extent that ancient astronomers called it the Black Lake.
“Now we can try to go down,” Galston proposed. “I think we’ll find a route without too much difficulty.”
The descent was more challenging than the climb, because on that side the slope was steeper, and if the landslipped section had not formed an immense bank against the cliff, the explorers would have had a great deal of difficulty reaching their goal. Thanks to that bank, however, although it was very uneven, they were able to make their way down from the top of the mountain, leaping from rock to rock, sometimes from a height of ten or twelve meters at a distance of twenty or twenty-five. They were intoxicated by the sensation of their lightness, and Galston, who retained his composure most fully, was obliged to remind his companions to be prudent.
Finally, they reached the plain at the foot of the cliff, pale and tinted like marble, which, except for the collapsed sections, rose up in fits and starts, forming a series of gigantic steps. And always, behind the dazzling crests, the starry black sky extended.
Brifaut bent down and scratched a dark patch with the tip of his gauntlet. He detached a gray fibrous mass from it, which had almost the same texture as German tinder.
The others drew nearer in order to look at it, and then the explorers put themselves in telephonic communication.
“Lunar vegetation!” said Lang.
“Some kind of fungus or lichen,” said Brifaut.
“That piece must be a dead, or in a state of suspended animation,” Galston declared.
Brifaut introduced it into his suit via the valves, in order to conserve it and study it at his leisure, an irrefutable witness of at least vegetable life on the surface of the Moon.
That felt-like substance was extended in many places on the ground, but it also left large areas uncovered. It presumably only proliferated at times of great warmth, then invading the pale-hued stony regions.
The explorers were delighted with their discovery.
Their horizon was so limited that they could no longer perceive the crater’s rim except toward the east, at the place where they had descended and with which they were still, so to speak, in touch.
Orientating themselves by means of the Earth, they set forth in search of the breach by way of which they were to rejoin the Selenit. They found it and passed through it without overmuch difficulty. The found the vessel in the exact spot fixed for the rendezvous.
They had departed about thirty hours before, and throughout that time they had been obliged to eat, breathe and sleep without emerging from their suits, so they were glad finally to be able to liberate themselves from their carapaces.
Everything had gone well aboard the Selenit during their absence. Scherrebek and his companions had watched the sun rise over the Sea of Rains and had had time to carry out a few experiments. They had gone out in suits equipped with various measuring devices.
They had ascertained that there as a very tenuous atmosphere on the surface of the Moon, whose pressure was not even equivalent to a millimeter of mercury, whereas, on Earth, it requires a column of 760 millimeters of mercury to compensate for the pressure of the air. It appeared to be composed primarily of carbon dioxide, a substance at the expense of which vegetation can develop.
A thermometer exposed in the sunlight had risen to seventy-six degrees. Sheltered from the direct radiance and turned toward a fully-illuminated reflective surface at a distance of ten meters, it had marked a maximum of twelve degrees. Turned toward the shadow, it had fallen well below zero, and Scherrebek had been obliged to withdraw i
t to prevent it from freezing. As he had anticipated, the temperature of objects on the Moon was absolutely dependent on the intensity of the calorific radiation to which they were subject.
Scherrebek had calculated, with Garrick, that the Selenit could travel about six hundred kilometers over the lunar surface without using up too great a quantity of explosive. That almost represented a traversal of the Sea of Plains. They had established in consequence a program of exploration that permitted them to visit the Alps with their Great Valley north-west of the Sea of Rains; the three remarkable craters Aristillus, Autolycus and Archimedes, to the west; the chain of the Apennines, the largest on the Moon, to the south-west; then the crater Eratosthenes; and finally, if no accident disturbed the plan, Copernicus, the king of annular mountains, with its aureole of radiant bands.
XII. At the Foot of the Apennines14
It had already been five times twenty-four hours since the international mission had arrived safely on the Moon. That was a great deal, when one considered the precarious conditions of existence for eleven people in the immense desert. It was very little to explore regions as vast as those that Scherrebek had resolved to travel.
The members of the expedition had nevertheless found the time and energy to visit, after Plato, the Great Valley of the Alps and the group of three remarkable craters, Aristillus, Autolycus and Archimedes.
An International Mission to the Moon Page 8