As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. We were in an
enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain. the floor of the giant crater. Its cliff-like
walls closed us in on every side. From the westward the light of the unseen sun fell upon
them, reaching to the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment of drab
and grayish rock, lined here and there with banks and crevices of snow. This was perhaps
a dozen miles away, but at first no intervening atmosphere diminished in the slightest the
minutely detailed brilliancy with which these things glared at us. They stood out clear
and dazzling against a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthly eyes
rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousness of the sky.
The eastward cliff was at first merely a starless selvedge to the starry dome. No rosy
flush, no creeping pallor, announced the commencing day. Only the Corona, the Zodiacal
light, a huge cone-shaped, luminous haze, pointing up towards the splendour of the
morning star, warned us of the imminent nearness of the sun.
Whatever light was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs. It showed a huge
undulating plain, cold and gray, a gray that deepened eastward into the absolute raven
darkness of the cliff shadow. Innumerable rounded gray summits, ghostly hummocks,
billows of snowy substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity, gave
us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall. These hummocks looked like snow.
At the time I thought they were snow. But they were not - they were mounds and masses
of frozen air?
So it was at first, and then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came the lunar day.
The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at its base and
incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots towards us. The distant cliff
seemed to shift and quiver, and at the touch of the dawn a reek of gray vapour poured
upward from the crater floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of gray, thicker and
broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming like a wet
handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs were no more than refracted
glare beyond.
"It is air," said Cavor. "It must be air - or it - would not rise like this - at the mere touch of
a sun-beam. And at this pace. ..."
He peered upwards. "Look! " he said.
