CHAPTER VIII

When they got back they found Murgatroyd pacing up and down the floor of

the deck-chamber, looking about him with serious eyes, but betraying no

other visible sign of anxiety. The _Astronef_ was at once his home and

his idol, and, as Redgrave had said, even his own direct orders would

hardly have induced him to leave her even in a world in which there was

not a living human being to dispute possession of her.

When they had resumed their ordinary clothing the _Astronef_ rose from

the surface of the plain, crossed the encircling wall at the height of a

few hundred feet, and made her way at a speed of about fifty miles an

hour towards the regions of the South Pole.

Behind them to the north-west they could see from their elevation of

nearly thirty thousand feet the vast expanse of the Sea of Clouds.

Dotted here and there were the shining points and ridges of light

marking the peaks and crater-walls which the rays of the rising sun had

already touched. Before them and to the right and left rose a vast maze

of ragged, splintery peaks and huge ramparts of mountain-walls enclosing

plains so far below their summits that the light of neither sun nor

earth ever reached them.

By directing the force exerted by what might now be called the

propelling part of the engines against the mountain masses which they

crossed to right and left and behind, Redgrave was able to take a zigzag

course that carried them over many of the walled plains which were

wholly or partially lit up by the sun, and in nearly all of the deepest

their telescopes revealed something like what they had found within the

crater of Tycho. At length, pointing to a gigantic circle of white light

fringing an abyss of utter darkness, he said:

"There is Newton, the greatest mystery of the moon. Those inner walls

are twenty-four thousand feet high; that means that the bottom, which

has never been seen by human eyes, is about five thousand feet below the

surface of the moon. What do you say, dear--shall we go down and see if

the searchlight will show us anything? You know there may be something

like breathable air down there, and perhaps living creatures who can

breathe it."

"Certainly!" replied Zaidie decisively; "haven't we come to see things

that 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 polished

hull bathed in sunlight, like a star suspended over the unfathomable

gulf of darkness below.

As they sank below the level of the sun-rays, Murgatroyd turned on both

the searchlights. They dropped down ever slowly and more slowly until

gradually the two long, thin streams of light began to spread themselves

out; the lower they went the more the beams spread out, and by the time

the _Astronef_ came gently to a rest they were swinging round her in

broad fans of diffused light over a dark, marshy surface, with scattered

patches of grey moss and reeds, with dull gleams of stagnant water

showing between them.

"Air and water at last! I thought so," said Redgrave, as he rejoined her

on the upper deck; "air and water and eternal darkness! Well, we shall

find life on the moon here if anywhere."

"I suppose we had better put on our breathing-dresses, hadn't we?" asked

Zaidie.

"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 half

carbon-dioxide for all we know; but a few matches will soon tell us

that."

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 head

searchlight, which, in the comparatively rarefied atmosphere, appeared

to have a range of several miles. Redgrave struck a match, and held it

up 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'm

going to see what lunar air is like."

"For Heaven's sake be careful, dear," came the reply in pleading tones

across 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 the

front of the helmets, half an inch or so. Instantly he felt a sensation

like the drawing of a red-hot iron across his skin. He snapped the visor

down and clasped it in its place. For a moment or two he gasped for

breath, 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't

do anything in the dark, and we can see just as well from the upper deck

with the searchlights. Besides, as there's air and water here, there's

no telling but there may be inhabitants of sorts such as we shouldn't

care to meet."

He took her hand, and to Murgatroyd's great relief they went back to the

vessel.

Redgrave then raised the _Astronef_ a couple of hundred feet and, by

directing the repulsive force against the mountain walls, developed just

sufficient energy to keep them moving at about twelve miles an hour.

They began to cross the plain with their searchlights flashing out in

all directions. They had scarcely gone a mile before the head-light fell

upon a moving form half walking, half crawling among some stunted

brown-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 with

hair it might have passed for some strange type of the ape tribe, but

its skin was smooth and of a livid grey. Its lower limbs were evidently

more powerful than its upper; its chest was enormously developed, but

the stomach was small. The head was big and round and smooth. As they

came nearer they saw that in place of fingernails it had long white

feelers which it kept extended and constantly waving about as it groped

its way towards the water. As the intense light flashed full on it, it

turned its head towards them. It had a nose and a mouth--the nose, long

and thick, with huge mobile nostrils; the mouth forming an angle

something like a fish's lips. Teeth there seemed none. At either side of

the upper part of the nose there were two little sunken holes--in which

this thing's ancestors of countless thousands of years ago had once had

eyes.

As she looked upon this awful parody of what had once perhaps been a

human face, Zaidie covered hers with her hands and uttered a little moan

of horror.

"Horrible, isn't it?" said Redgrave. "I suppose that's what the last

remnants of the Lunarians have come to. Evidently once men and women,

something like ourselves. I daresay the ancestors of that thing have

lived here in coldness and darkness for hundreds of generations. It

shows how tremendously tenacious Nature is of life.

"Ages ago, no doubt, that brute's ancestors lived up yonder when there

were 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 in

life and had built up civilisations like ours!

"Look, it's going to fish or something. Now we shall see what it feeds

on. I wonder why the water isn't frozen. I suppose there must be some

internal heat left still. A few patches with lakes of lava under them.

Perhaps this valley is just over one, and that's why these creatures

have managed to survive.

"Ah! there's another of them, smaller, not so strongly formed. That

thing's mate, I suppose--female of the species. Ugh! I wonder how many

hundred of thousands of years it will take for _our_ descendants to come

to that."

"I hope our dear old earth will hit something else and be smashed to

atoms before that happens!" exclaimed Zaidie, whose curiosity had now

partly overcome her horror. "Look, it's trying to catch something!"

The larger of the two creatures had groped its way to the edge of the

sluggish, oily water and dropped, or rather rolled, quietly into it. It

was evidently cold-blooded, or nearly so, for no warm-blooded animal

would have taken to such water so naturally. Presently the other dropped

in too, and both disappeared for some moments. Then, in the midst of a

violent commotion in the water a few yards away, they rose to the

surface of the water, the larger with a wriggling, eel-like fish between

its jaws.

They both groped their way towards the edge, and had just reached it and

were pulling themselves out when a hideous shape rose out of the water

behind them. It was like the head of an octopus joined to the body of a

boa-constrictor, but head and neck were both of the same ghastly, livid

grey as the other two creatures. It was evidently blind, too, for it

took no notice of the brilliant glare of the searchlight, but it moved

rapidly towards the two scrambling forms, its long white feelers

trembling out in all directions. Then one of them touched the smaller of

the two shapes. Instantly the rest shot out and closed round it, and

with scarcely a struggle it was dragged beneath the water and vanished.

[Illustration: _A hideous shape rose out of the water behind them._]

Zaidie uttered a little low scream and covered her face again, and

Redgrave said:

"The same old brutal law you see, life preying upon life even on a dying

world, a world that is more than half dead itself. Well, I think we've

seen enough of this place. I suppose those are about the only types of

life we should meet anywhere, and I don't want to know much more about

them. 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 the

scene of the hideous tragedy, "so the sooner we go, the better I shall

like it."

A few minutes later the _Astronef_ was again rising towards the stars

with her searchlights still flashing down into the Valley of Expiring

Life, which had seemed to them even worse than the Valley of Death. As

he followed the rays with a pair of powerful field glasses, Redgrave

fancied that he saw huge, dim shapes moving about the stunted shrubbery

and through the slimy pools of the stagnant rivers, and once or twice he

got a glimpse of what might well have been the ruins of towns and

cities, but the gloom soon became too deep and dense for the

searchlights to pierce and he was glad when the _Astronef_ soared up

into the brilliant sunlight once more. Even the ghastly wilderness of

the lunar landscape was welcome after the nameless horrors of that

hideous abyss.

After a couple of hours' rapid travelling, Redgrave pointed down to a

comparatively small, deep crater, and said:

"There, that is Malapert. It is almost exactly at the south pole of the

moon, and there," he went on, pointing ahead, "is the horizon of the

hemisphere 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," replied

Redgrave, and as the event proved, he was right.

Contrary to many ingenious speculations which have been indulged in by

both scientist and romancer, they found that the hemisphere, which for

countless ages had never been turned towards the earth, was almost an

exact replica of the visible one. Fully three-fourths of it was

brilliantly illuminated by the sun, and what they saw through their

glasses was practically the same as what they had beheld on the

earthward side; huge groups of enormous craters and ringed mountains,

long, irregular chains crowned with sharp, splintery peaks, and between

these vast, deeply depressed areas, ranging in colour from dazzling

white to grey-brown, marking the beds of the vanished lunar seas.

As they crossed one of these, Redgrave allowed the _Astronef_ to sink to

within a few thousand feet of the surface, and then he and Zaidie swept

it with their telescopes. Their chance search was rewarded by something

they had not seen in the sea-beds of the other hemisphere.

These depressions were far deeper than the others, evidently many

thousands of feet below the average surface, but the sun's rays were

blazing full into this one, and, dotted round its slopes at varying

elevations, they made out little patches which seemed to differ from the

general surface.

"I wonder if those are the remains of cities," said Zaidie. "Isn't it

possible that the old peoples of the moon might have built their cities

along the seas just as we do, and that their descendants may have

followed the waters as they retreated, I mean as they either dried up or

disappeared into the centre?"

"Very probable indeed, dearest of philosophers," he said, picking her up

with one arm and kissing the smiling lips which had just uttered this

most 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 have

been the Pacific of the Moon.

When they were within about a couple of thousand feet of the surface it

became perfectly plain that Zaidie was correct in her hypothesis. The

vast sea floor was thickly strewn with the ruins of countless cities and

towns, which had been inhabited by an equally countless series of

generations of men and women, who had perhaps lived and loved in the

days when our own world was a glowing mass of molten rock, surrounded by

the envelope of vapours which has since condensed to form our oceans.

They dropped still lower and ran diagonally across the ocean-bed, and as

they did so Zaidie's proposition was more and more completely confirmed,

for they saw that the towns and cities which stood highest were the most

dilapidated, and that the buildings had evidently been torn and crumbled

away by the action of wind and water, snow and ice.

The nearer they approached to the central and deepest depression, the

better preserved and the simpler the buildings became, until down in the

lowest depths they found a collection of low-built square edifices,

scarcely better than huts, which had clustered round the little lake

into which, ages before, the ocean had dwindled. But where the lake had

been there was now only a shallow depression covered with grey sand and

brown rock.

Into this they descended and touched the lunar surface for the last

time. A couple of hours' excursion among the houses proved that they had

been the last refuge of the last descendants of a dying race, a race

which had socially degenerated just as the succession of cities had done

architecturally, age by age, as the long-drawn struggle for mere

existence 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 strewn

with myriads and myriads of bones, and there were myriads more scattered

round what had once been the shores of the dwindling lake. Here, as

elsewhere, there was not a sign or a record of any kind--carving or

sculpture. If there were any such on the surface of the moon they had

not discovered them. The buildings which they had seen evidently

belonged to the decadent period during which the dwindling remnants of

the Selenites asked only to eat and drink and breathe.

Inside the great Pyramid of the City of Tycho they might, perhaps, have

found something--some stone or tablet which bore the mark of the

artist's hand; elsewhere, perhaps, they might have found cities reared

by older races, which might have rivalled the creations of Egypt and

Babylon, but they had neither time nor inclination to look for these.

All that they had seen of the Dead World had only sickened and saddened

them. The untravelled regions of Space peopled by living worlds more

akin to their own were before them. The red disc of Mars was glowing in

the zenith among the diamond-white clusters which gemmed the black sky

behind him.

More than a hundred millions of miles had to be traversed before they

would be able to set foot on his surface, and so, after one last look

round the Valley of Death about them, Redgrave turned on the full energy

of the repulsive force in a vertical direction, and the _Astronef_ leapt

upwards in a straight line for her new destination. The Unknown

Hemisphere spread out in a vast plain beneath them, the blazing sun rose

on 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 the

World that Had Been.