An International Mission to the Moon

by Jean Petithuguenin

  Madeleine, who had accompanied her husband during excursions to the Valley of the Alps and Archimedes, was enthused.

  The massif of the Alps, impressive by virtue of the number of its peaks, which separates broad and profound depressions, offers nothing more grandiose than the valley in question, an immense breach a hundred and thirty kilometers long, which cut the mountain range into two stumps and connected like a dried-up canal the Sea of Rains and the Sea of Cold. It is a great rectilinear avenue bordered by sheer cliffs whose crests rise to an altitude of 3,600 meters. Narrow gorges open astonishing perspectives at intervals in its giant walls. Depending on the phase of the long lunar day, the abysms hollowed out between the rocks light up with intrinsic radiance, which alternates dazzling reflections with opaque shadows, or remain, by contrast, plunged in impenetrable darkness.

  Archimedes is especially curious because of the regularity of its rim, formed by several stages of superimposed cliffs. In fact, to embrace its whole extent with the gaze, the explorers were obliged to make an ascent of its rampart, for the interior plain measures seventy kilometers in diameter.

  Having reached that culminating point, at an altitude of 2,210 meters, Madeleine thought that she had been transported to the ruins of a colossal Roman circus.

  “I find it hard to believe,” she said to her husband, “that all those extraordinary formations, so regular, are only due to the hazard of natural processes. It seems simpler to me to imagine that intelligent beings once lived here, thousands of centuries ago, and that we’re finding the vestiges of their civilization. What will have become of monuments like the pyramids of Egypt, cities like Paris, London and New York, when humankind has disappeared, after ten million years of abandonment? An animate being arrived from another world would no longer discover anything but effaced forms and heaps of rubble, and would believed that he was in the presence of natural piles of rocks.

  “Remember what the ruins of Angkor Thom, the ancient Khmer city in Cambodia, were like only a few years ago, when our archeologists had not yet saved it from the invasions of the virgin forest. Nature, however, had only reclaimed them five hundred years before. Well, if intelligent beings had once raised constructions here, which had no reason to resemble our human edifices, or even to possess the rigidity of lines in which our architecture delights, they have been subjected to the insults of time. For want of wind and rain, the torrid heat of long days and the intense cold of long nights have taken charge of their disintegration.

  “Who can tell what these vestiges represent? Perhaps they’re the remains of immense shelters raised against the cold and the heat, whose roofs have disappeared. The weakness of gravity at the lunar surface renders the edification of immense vaults plausible, supported at intervals by pillars, which later collapsed, in the central plains of the craters.”

  “I’m inclined to think as you do about that subject,” Brifaut replied, “but we’ll do well not to sustain such opinions before our scholarly comrades if we don’t want them to make fun of us.”

  The passage of the Selenit between Aristillus, Autolycus and Archimedes enabled the explorers to make the acquaintance of “grooves.”15 Having gone around Archimedes to reach its southern edge, they were, in fact, stopped by an abyss more than a kilometer in width, which opened abruptly in the plain and whose edges were level with the surrounding soil. That enormous ditch striped the Sea of Rains south of Archimedes for as far as the eye could see, in the region that selenographers have baptized the Marsh of Putrefaction.16

  The explorers took turns to go out in suits to contemplate that fine specimen of a kind of accident characteristic of the lunar soil that depresses the rims and centers of craters. Discovered for the first time in 1786 by the astronomer Schroeter, grooves have since been discovered in numerous regions of the Moon. More than a thousand are counted today.

  The one by which the explorers had been stopped was a gulf whose bottom was invisible. The sun only illuminated the top of the northern wall, causing it to appear as a bright white band, which descended almost vertically beneath the feet of the travelers. Here and there on the dazzling rocks, however, colored patches and streaks were discernible. Reflection from the illuminated surface cast some light on the opposite all, which the sun could not reach, and its glimmer descended quite a long way into the abyss. Lower still, however, everything was drowned in darkness.

  Scherrebek had packets of powder brought, of the kind used to make fireworks, which can burn in a vacuum. The Selenit had a small supply of them, for the circumstance had been anticipated in which it might be necessary to produce light or hat, or send a signal, when it was not possible to employ electricity. The cartridges were ignited by means of a fuse. Scherrebek ignited three of them, which were thrown successively into the gulf.

  They were seen to fall with the slowness characteristic of the lunar world and descend to a depth so vertiginous that when they could no longer be perceived, no one could affirm that they had reached the bottom before going out. The explorers, standing on the edge of the cliff, shivered at the thought that one of them might fall into that unfathomable crevasse. Some astronomers estimate the depth of the fissures as ten thousand meters.

  Having returned to the Selenit, the voyagers did not fail to exchange their reflections.

  “When one thinks,” said Bojardo, “that one false move or imprudence would have been sufficient to tip the Selenit into that abyss! Our bones would have remained on the Moon for all eternity, which, deserted and desolate as it is, already gives the impression of a cemetery.”

  “A grandiose cemetery!” retorted Scherrebek, smiling. “I’m convinced that we’ll all get back safe and sound from this expedition, but if some misfortune were to overtake me before the return and I died here, it wouldn’t displease me to be buried here. I can imagine myself quite serenely, beneath a crag, in a crater or in the middle of the plain, as a witness to the first journey of human beings to the Moon.”

  “That’s not very cheerful, you know,” said Uberaba. “Suppose we talk about something else.”

  After the visit to Archimedes, they studied the map and observed that the grooves parallel to the Apennines would prevent the Selenit reaching the mountain chain directly. The machine would be obliged to go southwards as far as the vicinity of Eratosthenes after having searched for a passage between the groove that departed south-westwards from Archimedes and another running parallel to the Apennines. There was a tongue of land there, it seemed, some five or six kilometers wide, which served as a bridge between the Marsh of Putrefaction and the southern region of the Sea of Rains.

  They set forth again, therefore, going along the groove south of Archimedes. A few hours later, having covered about a hundred kilometers of rocky terrain, sometimes felted by the strange vegetation that the explorers had discovered in the crater Plato, they saw the majestic crests of the Apennines rising over the horizon. Then the Selenit veered southwards in order to travel along the transversal groove, and after a further journey of several hours, was finally able to reach the foot of the mountains. The stage, interrupted by rest periods and brief reconnaissance trips in suits, had lasted for twenty-four hours. Now the explorers were confronted by an enormous irregular cliff pitted by innumerable fissures, which the Apennine chain formed in dipping abruptly toward the Sea of Rains.

  Since leaving Plato they had drawn closer to the equator, and, as it was nearly half way through the lunar day, the sun was floating in the vicinity of the zenith. The lunar terrain was therefore overheated. By means of a specially-graduated mercury thermometer, Lang was able to establish that the temperature rose to a hundred and twenty degrees in the parts that the sun’s rays struck vertically. Although the Selenit’s insulation had shown itself to be perfect thus far, Scherrebek judged it prudent to keep the machine in the shade of the cliff, where a thermometer exposed to the reflection of nearby surfaces did not indicate more than twenty degrees.

  The discussed the formation of the Apennines.


  “The chains of the lunar mountains,” said Uberaba, “are the traces of great fractures that have split the crust. One of the lips of the fracture has sunk; the other has remained in projection, constituting a cliff whose thickness might reach that of the crust itself at the moment of its formation. Although the depth of the fault was considerable, the internal mass of the liquid nucleus of the Moon expanded over the inferior fragment and covered it with a layer of lava. That is what gave rise to the great plains that are designated by the name of Seas.”

  “Some astronomers,” said Lang, “even think that the seesaw movement must have been powerful enough, aided by lateral pressures, to make the superior fragment slide over the inferior one, bringing it to rest in a cantilever fashion, while the inferior fragment itself, thus overloaded, sank down into the liquid nucleus. That hypothesis explains why the edges of the plains are at a shallower depth than the center, as the measurement of shadows permits the observation.

  “The great lunar mountain chains, therefore, always have one abrupt slope, the one that represents the upper lip of the fracture, and one gentle slope, which corresponds to the surface of the uplifted fragment. Cliffs are frequent all over the Moon. Some of them have edges that are almost intact, having not been disaggregated by time, and which present themselves like perfectly straight and regular terraces—such as, for instance, the famous Straight Wall, which is observed in the southern hemisphere and extends over a length of a hundred and fifty kilometers. One doesn’t see anything on the Moon comparable to the phenomena of large-scale wrinkling that had contributed so much to the formation of the terrestrial relief.”

  After this short lecture on selenography, primarily improvised for René and Madeleine Brifaut, the explorers studied the details of the project they had conceived of climbing one of the highs summits in the Apennines. The culminating point of that chain attains and altitude of 5,600 meters and there is a series of crests, extending over the whole of the range, that rose to five thousand meters or more.

  The mission selected a peak that overlooks the last buttresses of the chain between the Sea of Rains and the Torrid Gulf,17 Mount Wolff, from which the view ought to extend over a radius of about a hundred and thirty kilometers. That summit is certainly not the highest, but its relative isolation, its situation in the corner of the massif, over the line of separation of two vast plains, and its proximity to the crater Eratosthenes, a hundred kilometers to the south-east, ought to render the ascent particularly interesting.

  Madeleine was in the process of observing a part of the mountain through the narrow frame of a porthole when she uttered an exclamation and stepped back instinctively

  “An avalanche!” she said.

  Garrick leapt forward to replace her at the porthole. He saw a section of the mountain, the orientation of which exposed it fully to the sun, and enormous rocks detached from the summit falling down its near-vertical wall, sometimes rebounding from asperities.

  The Selenit was not a hundred meters from the place on which the avalanche was about to fall!

  One last leap, and the blocks shattered on the plain, bursting like bombs and hurling their debris in all directions.

  No noise had reached the ears of the explorers, but when the blocks hit the ground, the later transmitted a feeble vibration to the Selenit.

  Garrick and Madeleine reported to the other members of the expedition what they had just seen.

  “It’s not astonishing,” said Scherrebek, “that the mountain is disintegrating under the action of the burning sun after having been subjected during the lunar night to a cold more than two hundred degrees below zero.”

  “Do you think,” Madeleine said, “that it would be prudent to venture into the mountains, at the risk of being surprised by an avalanche like that one?”

  “Our route isn’t orientated toward the sun,” declared Scherrebek. “We can’t postpone the ascent, for we still have a considerable program to complete and the lunar day will soon begin to decline.”

  The expedition was to comprise Scherrebek, Goffoël, Garrick, Bojardo and Uberaba. The captain thought it prudent never to expose more than half the crew at a time, in order that the other could organize a rescue if necessary, and remain capable of maneuvering the Selenit.

  The ascent was demanding. The explorers were obliged to search for a route on a mountain whose form they only knew approximately, and which was terribly steep. In addition, they were inconvenienced by the ardor of the sun, to which they avoided exposing themselves for long as much as was possible, all the more so as the exercise they were undertaking was already contributing to making them very hot. Thus, having got half way, they were obliged to take a few hours rest. It was not until twenty-four hours after leaving the Selenit that they reached the summit.

  The summit in question formed a narrow plateau on to which the sun was darting its rays vertically. The view extended in one direction over the Sea of Rains to the north, and in the other over the Torrid Gulf to the south. The two plains were traversed by numerous white streaks, which glittered as if they had been strewn with diamond dust. Those shiny zones all seemed to be radiating from the same point, situated behind the crater Eratosthenes, whose western wall could be distinguished, very high and regular, barring the Torrid Gulf to the east.

  “Those bands are coming from Copernicus,” Goffoël telephoned to Scherrebek. “It’s four hundred kilometers away to the north-west. We can’t see it, but we can see its aureole, whose glare is most vivid at this point in the lunar cycle.”

  The spectacle that the Terrans had before their eyes was truly extraordinary. The plain of the Torrid Gulf, which had become visible as they reached the summit, as resplendent with an almost unsustainable brightness; it would not have been brighter had it been made of white marble. The somber stripes that divided the bands diminished the intensity of the radiation slightly.

  To the north, in the direction of the Sea of Rains, the bands were more widely spaced.

  The white streaks, passing over Eratosthenes, were even prolonged over the massif dominated by Mount Wolff, which extended westwards, like tumultuous waves on a suddenly frozen sea. The mountainous barrier to the east, which separated the northern plain from the southern plain and extended to meet the northern edge of Eratosthenes, was no less chaotic.

  The mountaineers did not weary of contemplating that marvelous panorama, over which the black star-strewn sky extended, dominated at the zenith by a violet-tinted Sun with edges bristling with flames. The Earth was no longer visible; it was new.

  Suddenly, Scherrebek tottered. Goffoël, who was beside him, sustained him and asked, by telephone: “What’s the matter?”

  “The heat!” moaned Scherrebek.—and collapsed completely in Goffoël’s arms.

  The latter lifted him up like a feather, suit and all, and leapt ten meters downhill to a platform sheltered from the sun by a rock-face.

  His comrades joined him, anxiously. Now that their attention was no longer absorbed by the spectacle of the fantastic lunar landscape, they all felt ill at ease. They had stayed exposed to the ardor of the sun for too long without precaution. Their suits had protected them at first, but once the insulating barrier was overheated it only cooled down slowly. They all had the impression of being in a steam-bath, threatened by congestion.

  Their situation was distressing. It was impossible to free themselves from the carapace that was stifling them, but which was also their safeguard. It was impossible to relieve Scherrebek, who could be seen through the viewports of his helmet breathing convulsively.

  Uberaba, who was a doctor of medicine, knew that he could have revived the captain had he been able to intervene, but he had to watch the man’s agony, impotently. There could be no thought of opening the helmet of the suit even for an instant, to administer a drug to the sick man or to refresh him; a vacuum would have been created instantaneously in the apparatus, and Scherrebek would have burst like an overinflated blister.

  They had to content themselves
with setting the Dane down in the shade, in the hope that he would gradually recover a more supportable temperature. They did not even have the resource of increasing the oxygen supply within his suit in order to permit him to breathe more easily, for the controls could only be operated from inside.

  However, the other climbers were not in much better condition than their leader, and were wondering anxiously whether they might not all be about to lose consciousness one after another. They, at least were still capable of struggling. On Uberaba’s advice, they increased the oxygen level of the air in their suits and drew upon their ration of drinking water to moisten their head and face.

  If they wanted to avoid a catastrophe, however, the surest way to do so was to get back to the Selenit as quickly as possible.

  Garrick initially offered to help Goffoël to transport the invalid, but as it was difficult for two men to coordinate their movements on such uneven terrain, Goffoël preferred to take charge of the burden on his own. To carry fifteen kilos—what was that, for him, who was accustomed to weighing a hundred on Earth and who, on the Moon, even counting his suit, weighed no more than sixty? Scherrebek was attached solidly to his back with the aid of ropes, and the little troop set forth, trying always to remain shielded from the direct rays of the sun.

  The explorers scarcely gave any thought any longer to contemplating the grandiose and desolate landscape that extended before their eyes. In the harsh light, unfiltered by any atmosphere, the most distant contours appeared as sharply as the nearest, and the effects of perspective were strangely modified by it. Even when the view extended in reality over a long distance, one had the impression that the scene lacked depth, while the black sky gave the lunar soil, by contrast, the appearance that an open air theater takes on by night; the stage can be illuminated with electric beams, but not the sky, and the artifice is apparent.

  With great difficulty, the explorers regained the Selenit, where they were finally able to take refuge.