6. The Landing On The Moon
I REMEBER how one day Cavor suddenly opened six of our shutters and blinded me so
that I cried aloud at him. The whole area was moon, a stupendous scimitar of white dawn
with its edge hacked out by notches of darkness, the crescent shore of an ebbing tide of
darkness, out of which peaks and pinnacles came glittering into the blaze of the sun. I
take it reader has seen pictures or photographs of the moon and that I need not describe
the broader features of that landscape, those spacious ringlike ranges vaster than any
terrestrial mountains, their summits shining in the day, their shadows harsh and deep, the
gray disordered plains, the ridges, hills, and craterlets, all passing at last from a blazing
illumination into a common mystery of black. Athwart this world we were flying scarcely
a hundred miles above its crests and pinnacles. And now we could see, what no eye on
earth will ever see, that under the blaze of the day the harsh outlines of the rocks and
ravines of the plains and crater floor grew gray and indistinct under a thickening haze,
that the white of their lit surfaces broke into lumps and patches, and broke again and
shrank and vanished, and that here and there strange tints of brown and olive grew and
spread.
But little time we had for watching then. For now we had come to the real danger of our
journey. We had to drop ever closer to the moon as we spun about it, to slacken our pace
and watch our chance, until at last we could dare to drop upon its surface.
For Cavor that was a time of intense exertion; for me it was an anxious inactivity. I
seemed perpetually to be getting out of his way. He leapt about the sphere from point to
point with an agility that would have been impossible on earth. He was perpetually
opening and closing the Cavorite windows, making calculations, consulting his
chronometer by means of the glow lamp during those last eventful hours. For a long time
we had all our windows closed and hung silently in darkness hurling through space.
Then he was feeling for the shutter studs, and suddenly four windows were open. I
staggered and covered my eyes, drenched and scorched and blinded by the unaccustomed
splendour of the sun beneath my feet. Then again the shutters snapped, leaving my brain
spinning in a darkness that pressed against the eyes. And after that I floated in another
vast, black silence.
Then Cavor switched on the electric light, and told me he proposed to bind all our
luggage together with the blankets about it, against the concussion of our descent. We did
this with our windows closed, because in that way our goods arranged themselves
naturally at the centre of the sphere. That too was a strange business; we two men
floating loose in that spherical space, and packing and pulling ropes. Imagine it if you
can! No up nor down, and every effort resulting in unexpected movements. Now I would
be pressed against the glass with the full force of Cavor's thrust, now I would be kicking
helplessly in a void. Now the star of the electric light would be overhead, now under foot.
Now Cavor's feet would float up before my eyes, and now we would be crossways to
