CHAPTER VII
"Well, Madame, we've arrived. This is the moon and there is the earth.To put it into plain figures, you are now two hundred and forty thousandodd miles away from home. I think you said you would like breakfast onthe surface of the World that Has Been, and so, as it's about eleveno'clock earth-time, we'll call it a _dejeuner_, and then we'll go andsee what this poor old skeleton of a world is like."
"Oh, then we shan't actually have breakfast on the moon?"
"My dear child, of course you will. Isn't the _Astronef_ restingnow--right now as they say in some parts of the States--on the top ofthe crater wall of Tycho? Aren't we really and actually on the surfaceof the moon? Just look at this frightful black and white, god-forsakenlandscape! Isn't it like everything that you've ever learnt about themoon? Nothing but light and shade, black and white, peaks of mountainsblazing in sunlight, and valleys underneath them as black as the hingesof----"
"Tophet," said Zaidie, interrupting him quickly. "Yes, I see what youmean. So we'll have our _dejeuner_ here, breathing our own niceatmosphere, and eating and drinking what was grown on the soil of dearold Mother Earth. It's a wee bit paralysing to think of, isn't it, dear?Two hundred and forty thousand miles across the gulf of Space--and wesitting here at our breakfast table just as comfortable as though wewere in the Cecil in London, or the Waldorf-Astoria in New York!"
"There's nothing much in that, I mean as regards distance. You see,before we've finished we shall probably, at least I hope we shall, beeating a breakfast or a dinner together a thousand million miles or morefrom New York or London. Your Ladyship must remember that this is onlythe first stage on the journey, the jumping-off place as you called it.You see the distance from Washington to New York is--well, it isn't evena hop, skip and a jump in comparison with----"
"Oh yes, I see what you mean of course, and so I suppose I had bettercut off or short-circuit such sympathies with Mother Earth as are notconnected with your noble self, and get breakfast ready. How's that?"
"Well," said Lord Redgrave, looking at her as she rose from the table,"I think our honeymoon in Space is young enough yet to make it possiblefor me to say that your Ladyship's opinion is exactly right."
"That's a hopeless commonplace! Really, Lenox, I thought you werecapable of something better than that."
"My dear Zaidie, it has been my fate to have many friends who have hadhoneymoons on earth, and some of their experience seems to be that theman who contradicts his wife during the first six weeks of matrimonysimply makes an ass of himself. He offends her and makes himselfunhappy, and it sometimes takes six months or more to get back tobearings."
"What a lot of silly men and women you must have known, Lenox. Is thatthe way Englishmen start marriage in England? If it is, I don't wonderat Englishmen coming across the Atlantic in liners and air-ships and soon to get American wives. I guess you can't understand your ownwomenfolk."
"Or perhaps they don't understand us; but anyhow, I don't think I'vemade any great mistake."
"No, I don't think you have. Of course if I thought so I wouldn't behere now. But this is very well for a breakfast talk; all the same, Ishould like to know how we are going to take the promenade you promisedme on the surface of the moon?"
"Your Ladyship has only to finish her breakfast, and then everythingshall be made plain to her, even the deepest craters of the mountains ofthe moon."
"Very well, then, I will eat swiftly and in obedience; and meanwhile, asyour Lordship seems to have finished, perhaps----"
"Yes, I will go and see to the mechanical necessities," said Redgrave,swallowing his last cup of coffee, and getting up. "If you'll come downto the lower deck when you've finished, I'll have your breathing-suitready for you, and then we'll go into the air-chamber."
"Thanks, dear, yes," she said, putting out her hand to him as he leftthe table, "the ante-chamber to other worlds. Isn't it just lovely?Fancy me being able to leave one world and land on another, and have youto say just those few words which make it all possible. I wonder whatall the girls of all the civilised countries of earth would give just tobe me right now."
"They could none of them give what you gave me, Zaidie, because you seefrom my point of view there's only one Zaidie in the world--or asperhaps I ought to say just now, in the Solar System."
"Very prettily said, sir!" she laughed, when she had given him his duereward for his courtly speech. "I am too dazed with all these wondersabout me to----"
"To reply to it? You've given me the most convincing reply possible. Nowfinish your breakfast, and I'll tell you when the breathing-dresses andthe air-chamber are ready. By the way, don't forget your cameras. It'squite possible we may find something worth taking pictures of, and youneedn't trouble much about the weight. You know, you and I and all thatwe carry will only weigh about a sixth of what we did on the earth."
"Very well, then, I'll take the whole-plate apparatus as well as thekodak and the panorama camera. When I'm ready, Murgatroyd will tell youto come down."
"But isn't he coming with us too?"
"My dear girl, if I were to ask Murgatroyd to leave the _Astronef_there'd be a mutiny on board--a mutiny of one against one. No, he's lefthis native world; but he says he's done it in a ship that's made withBritish steel out of English iron mines, smelted, forged and fashionedin English works, and so to him it's a bit of England, however far awayfrom Mother Earth it may be; and if you ever see Andrew Murgatroyd's bighead and good, ungainly body outside the _Astronef_ in any of theworlds, dead or alive, that we're going to visit--well, when we get backto Mother Earth you may ask me----"
"I don't think I'll have to ask you for anything, Lenox. I believe if Iwanted anything you'd know before I did, so go away and get thosebreathing-dresses ready. I didn't come to the moon to talk commonplaceswith a husband I've been married to for nearly three days."
"Is it really as long as that?"
"Oh, don't be ridiculous, even if you are beyond the limits of earthlyconventionalities. Anyhow, I've been married long enough to want my ownway, and just now I want a promenade on the moon."
"The will of her Ladyship is a law unto her servant, and that which shehath said shall be done! If you come down on to the lower deck in tenminutes everything shall be ready."
With this he disappeared down the companion-way.
About five minutes afterwards Andrew Murgatroyd showed his grizzled,long-bearded face with its high forehead, heavy brows, and broad-seteyes, long nose and shaven upper lip, just above the stairway and said,for all the world as though he might have been giving out the number ofthe hymn in his beloved Ebenezer at Smeaton:
"If it pleases yer Ladyship, his Lordship is ready, and if you'll pleasecome down I'll show you the way."
"Oh, thank you, Mr. Murgatroyd!" said Zaidie, getting up and goingtowards the companion-way; "but I'm afraid you don't think that--I meanyou don't seem to take very much interest----"
"If your Ladyship will pardon me," said the old man, standing aside tolet her go down, "it is not my business to think on board his Lordship'svessel. I am his servant, and my fathers have been his fathers' servantsfor more years than I'd like to count. If it wasn't that way I wouldn'tbe here. Will your Ladyship please to come down?"
Zaidie bowed her beautiful head in recognition of this ages-olddevotion, and said as she passed him, more sweetly than he had everheard human lips speak:
"Thank you, Mr. Murgatroyd. You've taught me something in those fewwords that we have no knowledge of in the States. Good service is ashonourable as good mastership. Thank you."
Murgatroyd put up his lower lip and half smiled with his upper, for hewas not yet quite sure of this radiant beauty, who, according to hisideas, should have been English and wasn't. Then, with a rather clumsyand yet eloquent gesture, he showed her the way down to the air-chamber.
She nodded to him with a smile as she passed in through the air-tightdoor, and when she heard the levers swing to and the bolts shoot intotheir places she felt as though, for the time bein
g, she had saidgoodbye to a friend.
Her husband was waiting for her almost fully clad in hisbreathing-dress. He had hers all ready to put on, and when the necessarychanges and investments had been made, Zaidie found herself clad in acostume which was not by any means unlike the diving-dresses of commonuse, save that they were very much lighter in construction.
The helmets were smaller, and not having to withstand outside pressurethey were made of welded aluminum, lined thickly with asbestos, not tokeep the cold out, but the heat in. On the back of the dress there was asquare case, looking like a knapsack, containing the expandingapparatus, which would furnish breathable air for an almost unlimitedtime as long as the liquefied air from a cylinder hung below it passedthrough the cells in which the breathed air had been deprived of itscarbonic acid gas and other noxious ingredients.
The pressure of air inside the helmet automatically regulated thesupply, which was not permitted to circulate through the other portionsof the dress. The reasons for this precaution were very simple. Grantedthe absence of atmosphere on the moon, any air in the dress, which waswoven of a cunning compound of silk and asbestos, would instantly expandwith irresistible force, burst the covering, and expose the limbs of theexplorers to a cold which would be infinitely more destructive than thehottest of earthly fires. It would wither them to nothing in a moment.
A human hand or foot--we won't say anything about faces--exposed to thesummer or winter temperature of the moon--that is to say, to itssunlight and its darkness--would be shrivelled into dry bone in amoment, and therefore Lord Redgrave, foreseeing this, had provided thebreathing-dresses. Lastly, the two helmets were connected, for purposesof conversation, by a light wire, the two ends of which were connectedwith a little telephonic receiver and transmitter inside each of thehead-dresses.
"Well, now I think we're ready," said Redgrave, putting his hand on thelever which opened the outer door.
His voice sounded a little queer and squeaky over the wire, and for thematter of that so did Zaidie's as she replied:
"Yes, I'm ready, I think. I hope these things will work all right."
"You may be quite sure that I shouldn't have put _you_ into one of themif I hadn't tested them pretty thoroughly," he replied, swinging thedoor open and throwing out a light folding iron ladder which was hingedto the floor.
They were in the shade cast by the hull of the _Astronef_. For about tenyards in front of her Zaidie saw a dense black shadow, and beyond it astretch of grey-white sand lit up by a glare of sunlight which wouldhave been intolerable if it had not been for the smoke-coloured slips ofglass which had been fitted behind the glass visors of the helmets.
Over it were thickly scattered boulders and pieces of rock bleached anddesiccated, and each throwing a black shadow, fantastically shaped andyet clearly defined on the grey-white sand behind it. There was no soil,and all the softer kind of rock and stone had crumbled away ages ago.Every particle of moisture had long since evaporated; even chemicalcombinations had been dissolved by the alternations of heat and coldknown only on earth to the chemist in his laboratory.
Only the hardest rocks, such as granites and basalts, remained.Everything else had been reduced to the universal grey-white impalpablepowder into which Zaidie's shoes sank when she, holding her husband'shand, went down the ladder and stood at the foot of it--first of theearth-dwellers to set foot on another world.
Redgrave followed her with a little spring from the centre of the ladderwhich landed him with strange gentleness beside her. He took both hergloved hands and pressed them hard in his. He would have kissed hiswelcome to the World that Had Been if he could, but that of course wasout of the question, and so he had to be content with telling her thathe wanted to.
Then, hand in hand, they crossed the little plateau towards the edge ofthe tremendous gulf, fifty-four miles across and nearly twenty thousandfeet deep, which forms the crater of Tycho. In the middle of it rose aconical mountain about five thousand feet high, the summit of which wasjust beginning to catch the solar rays. Half of the vast plain wasalready brilliantly illuminated, but round the central cone was asemicircle of shadow of impenetrable blackness.
"Day and night in this same valley, actually side by side!" said Zaidie.Then she stopped and pointed down into the brightly lit distance, andwent on hurriedly, "Look, Lenox; look at the foot of the mountain there!Doesn't that seem like the ruins of a city?"
"It does," he said, "and there's no reason why it shouldn't be. I'vealways thought that, as the air and water disappeared from the upperparts of the moon, the inhabitants, whoever they were, must have beendriven down into the deeper parts. Shall we go down and see?"
"But how?" she said.
He pointed towards the _Astronef_. She nodded her helmeted head, andthey went back towards the vessel.
A few minutes later the Space-Navigator had risen from her resting-placewith an impetus which rapidly carried her over half of the vast crater,and then she began to drop slowly into the depths. She grounded gently,and presently they were standing on the ground about a mile from thecentral cone. This time, however, Redgrave had taken the precaution tobring a magazine rifle and a couple of revolvers with him in case anystrange monsters, relics of the vanished fauna of the moon, might stillbe taking refuge in these mysterious depths. Zaidie, although like agood many American girls she could shoot excellently well, carried noweapon more offensive than the photographic apparatus aforesaid.
The first thing that Redgrave did when they stepped out on to the sandysurface of the plain was to stoop down and strike a wax match. There wasa tiny glimmer of light, which was immediately extinguished.
"No air here," he said, "so we shall find no living beings--at any rate,none like ourselves."
They found the walking exceedingly easy, although their boots werepurposely weighted in order to counteract, to some extent, the greatdifference in gravity. A few minutes brought them to the outskirts ofthe city. It had no walls and exhibited no signs of any devices fordefence. Its streets were broad and well-paved, and the houses, built ofgreat blocks of grey stone joined together with white cement, looked asfresh and unworn as though they had only been built a few months,whereas they had probably stood for hundreds of thousands of years. Theywere flat-roofed, all of one storey and practically of one type.
There were very few public buildings, and absolutely no attempt atornamentation was visible. Round some of the houses were spaces whichmight once have been gardens. In the midst of the city, which appearedto cover an area of about four square miles, was an enormous squarepaved with flag-stones, which were covered to the depth of a couple ofinches with a light grey dust, which, as they walked across it, remainedperfectly still save for the disturbance caused by their footsteps.There was no air to support it, otherwise it might have risen in cloudsabout them.
From the centre of this square rose a huge pyramid nearly a thousandfeet in height, the sole building of the great silent city whichappeared to have been raised most probably as a temple by the hands ofits long-dead inhabitants.
When they got nearer they saw a white fringe round the steps by which itwas approached, and they soon found that this fringe was composed ofmillions of white-bleached bones and skulls, shaped very much like thoseof terrestrial men, save that they were very much larger, and that theribs were out of all proportion to the rest of the skeleton.
They stopped awe-stricken before this strange spectacle. Redgravestooped down and took hold of one of the bones, a huge femur. It brokein two as he tried to lift it, and the piece which remained in his handcrumbled instantly to white powder.
"Whoever they were," he said, "they were giants. When air and waterfailed above, they came down here by some means and built this city. Yousee what enormous chests they must have had. That would be Nature's laststruggle to enable them to breathe the diminishing atmosphere. These, ofcourse, were the last descendants of the fittest to breathe it; this wastheir temple, I suppose, and here they came to die--I wonder how manythousand years ago--pe
rishing of heat, and cold, and hunger, and thirst;the last tragedy of a race, which, after all, must have been somethinglike ourselves."
"It's just too awful for words," said Zaidie. "Shall we go into thetemple? That seems one of the entrances up there, only I don't likewalking over all those bones."
"I don't suppose they'll mind if we do," replied Redgrave, "only wemustn't go far in. It may be full of cross passages and mazes, and wemight never get out. Our lamps won't be much use in there, you know, forthere's no air. They'll just be points of light, and we shan't seeanything but them. It's very aggravating, but I'm afraid there's no helpfor it. Come along."
They ascended the steps, crushing the bones and skulls to powder beneaththeir feet, and entered the huge, square doorway, which looked like arectangle of blackness against the grey-white of the wall. Even throughtheir asbestos-woven clothing they felt a sudden shock of icy cold. Inthose few steps they had passed from a temperature of tenfold summerheat into one below that of the coldest spots on earth. They turned onthe electric lamps which were fitted to the breastplates of theirdresses, but they could see nothing save the thin thread of lightstraight in front of them. It did not even spread. It was like apolished needle on a background of black velvet.
All about them was darkness impenetrable, and so they reluctantly turnedback to the doorway, leaving all the mysteries which that vast temple ofa long-vanished people might contain to remain mysteries to the end oftime.
They passed down the steps again and crossed the square, and for thenext half-hour Zaidie was busy taking photographs of the pyramid withits ghastly surroundings, and a few general views of this strange Cityof the Dead.
A Honeymoon in Space Page 8
