An Unknown World

by Pierre de Sélènes

  At the exit from the gorge, once they had circled around the crater, they found themselves close to the limit beyond which human gaze had never penetrated.

  The long fourteen-day march, undertaken in darkness—in spite of the electric lamps, they had traversed many regions almost blind—had not diminished the ardor of Marcel and his companions at all. Every step they took brought them closer to the goal of the marvelous voyage, and as their impatience grew their strength seemed to increase.

  When they crossed the meridian eternally limiting the visibly disk of the satellite, they felt a keen excitement. They knew full well that the spectacle awaiting them on the other hemisphere would be much the same as the one to which their gaze had long become accustomed, but they were doing something that no human being would ever have thought possible and that no one else would ever accomplish.

  Already they were approaching the moment when day would abruptly succeed night.

  In the absence of any atmosphere in which the luminous rays could be reflected, there is no dusk or dawn twilight on the lunar surface. Instead of the subtle and changing tints that render the tradition from night to day so poetic on Earth, the invasion of light is somewhat brutal; the sun suddenly emerged, illuminating everything with an equal glare.

  Rugel, as jealous as an artist skillful in managing his effects, had decided to choose an observation post for his friends that would permit them to enjoy the curious phenomenon as completely as possible.

  Some distance away from the point at which they had reached the invisible hemisphere, an isolated mountain loomed up, easy of access. They climbed its slope to await the appearance of the day star.

  A few minutes before the moment when the light was due to burst forth, the electric lamps were switched off, and the whole country was plunged into a darkness whose profundity the eye sought in vain to fathom.

  Suddenly, it was as if a curtain had been torn away.

  A dazzling light inundated the space; the shadow, as if chased away by the golden arrow launched by the solar disk from the edge of the horizon, seemed to flee toward the Occident.

  The panorama that extended before the gaze of the marveling voyagers was imposing and sublime. The mountain on which they were positioned was standing on the edge of an immense depression, a dried-up sea bed that extended to the left as far as the eye could see, in the background of which isolated craters could be made out—which, as Rugel explained to them, had once formed as many circular islands rising out of the mass of the waves.

  Facing them, limiting the distant horizon, a chain of mountains appeared, much higher than the Cordilleras, whose jagged summits stood out clearly in spite of the distance. The entire region that extended to their base, even more profoundly tormented than all those they had already seen, offered an image of indescribable chaos. There was nothing but convulsed masses, bizarre in form, cut by broad crevasses, hollowed out by countless craters of all sizes. The irresistible power that animates the universe, employed in the formation and destruction of worlds, had never been manifest to them with a similar character of magnificence and horror.

  To their right, the nearest of those craters drew an exclamation of admiration from them. In the center of an almost perfect circle of colossal dimension stood a needle of rock of enormous height, almost pyramidal in form, which the already-ardent sun caused to glitter with an unbearable brightness.

  “How magnificent it all is!” said Jacques, putting himself in communication with Marcel and Lord Rodilan. “How imposing and terrible that eternal solitude and silence is!”

  “That leaves the famous Cirque de Gavarnie far behind,” said Lord Rodilan.27 “if the peak we have before us were in the Pyrenees, a suspension railway to the summit would have been established long ago, and there’d be a hotel on top in which waiters with black jackets and white cravats would serve famished tourists with mutton chops decorated with the pompous name of izard.”28

  “I had a strong suspicion that neither of you would regret this voyage of exploration,” Marcel said. And he was filled with joy at the thought that he had before his eyes a part of the unattainable region on which the imagination of scientists had so far been exercised at hazard. No vain theories for him: it was the reality that his gaze was embracing.

  X. A Dead City

  After sating themselves at their leisure on that grandiose spectacle, the voyagers went back down to the plain and resumed their march under Rugel’s guidance.

  They headed for the edge of the dry sea bed that they had contemplated from the height of the mountain and soon arrived on the crest of a steep cliff, whose vertical wall the waves had once battered. They followed it for some time, always having the vast arid basin to their right, over which their gaze slid to the limits of the visible horizon.

  The march was monotonous and difficult over that rocky and pitted ground. They had to scale long slopes and descend steep ones, following all the sinuosities of the irregular coast, wondering where their guide was taking them. The painful trajectory, which it was necessary to interrupt with frequent halts and long rests, lasted for several days.

  By Marcel’s reckoning they had covered more than sixty kilometers in that fashion when, the cliff becoming abruptly lower, they found themselves before a large plain that sloped gently down into the ocean bed.

  Toward the middle of that plain, and the place where the waves of the vanished sea must once have expired, the eye distinguished confused masses that could have been taken, at that distance, for the debris of rocks that had collapsed in a cataclysm, or a random accumulation of boulders.

  It was toward that point that Rugel was leading them.

  As they drew closer, what they had first taken for an irregular and fortuitous heap took on an appearance of regularity and symmetry. The distance diminished, the forms became more precise; one might have thought that there were the remains of mighty walls, vast quadrilateral formed like plazas, and the stumps of gigantic broken columns scattered here and there, around which heaps of rubble had accumulated.

  “There,” Rugel told them, extending his hand, “are the ruins of one of the cities in which, in the times when lunar humankind lived on the surface, its arts and civilization flourished. I’ve often talked to you about the life of our ancestors, when necessity had not yet constrained them to take refuge in the caverns we occupy today. You now have before your eyes one of the rare vestiges of their presence that has survived the frightful upheavals in the wake of which life disappeared from this region.”

  They were close enough now to be able to appreciate the considerable dimensions of the ancient city. All the private habitations had been reduced to dust, crumbled by the slow and ineluctable work of time. Nothing remained standing but a few remains of monuments constructed to resist the centuries, and that imposing debris gave some idea of the great strength and intelligence of the beings whose life had filled the region.

  Rugel had folded his arms and seemed to be plunged in a profound meditation. All the Diemides forming the escort had stopped too, standing motionless, as if the sight of the ruins had struck them with a religious respect.

  “I can’t help feeling a profound sadness,” Rugel said, “in thinking about that ancient existence, so different from the one to which we’re now reduced. Once, life circulated in abundance around these locations. Water filled those vast basins plowed by numerous ships; dense forests crowned the mountains whose slopes were covered with verdant vegetation. In this city, now destroyed, a numerous active population enjoyed life, breathing in the intoxicating sea breezes and the penetrating odor of the great words. And it has all gone! What remains to those of us still alive today is enclosed within a narrow space, deprived of sunlight, and its days are numbered! Who knows whether some frightful cataclysm might not cut short its duration, and destroy the last vestiges of that wretched humankind?”

  The grandeur of the scene could not leave Marcel and his two companions insensible. What they had before their eyes was the gripping imag
e of the destruction of a world. This was the conclusion of the formidable interplay of the forces of nature, which, after having created a habitable globe and developed and maintained life there for long centuries, began to destroy their work with irresistible obstinacy. In the presence of that fatal evolution, what were the most magnificent discoveries of human genius, and the highest aspirations ever alert and ever unslaked, toward which its mortal nature tended?

  With time, everything dissolved and vanished; and, extinguished in the turn, the worlds orbiting in space around a center of light and life were irrevocably destined to be nothing more than inert and sterile matter once again.

  And the destruction would not stop there.

  Those cadavers floating in the void would, in time, be disaggregated in their turn, returned to the state of cosmic dust in order to form other worlds, which would end in the same way, in an eternal recommencement.

  A sign from Rugel extracted them from those grave thoughts. They went into the ruins of the dead city and wandered through them with a tender respect. They rediscovered the traces of edifices where the men responsible for giving laws to the city had sat, the squares where crowds had assembled, and all the places where they had lived—which is to say, loved and suffered. Nothing remained of all that but the shadow of a memory.

  Rugel stopped them in front of a ruin whose form was reminiscent of a mausoleum, but of vast proportions.

  “This,” he said, “is the tomb destined to perpetuate the memory of a man whose virtues and great actions rendered him worthy of public gratitude. Time has not respected that refuge of death any more than the monuments in which life agitated.”

  The collapsed sepulcher allowed a kind of light dust to be perceived in the interior, perhaps all that remained of the person whose final abode it had been.

  Marcel was astonished by its vast proportions.

  “That’s because the humans who lived on the surface of the Moon were taller than us. During the many centuries that lunar humankind has already been living in a more restricted environment, their stature has gradually diminished.”

  “So,” said Jacques, “the generations that succeeded one another here, as on Earth, left mysterious memories to those who came after them, and those who lived in this place, if they had anticipated our coming, could have said with the poet: Scilicet et tempus veniet cum finibus illis / Agricola… inviniet… Grandisque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris.”29

  It was necessary to set off again, but it was not without regret that the voyagers tore themselves away from that desolate spectacle, the sight of which had stirred up so many disparate emotions in their hearts.

  They resumed their route, following the gradual slope of the terrain.

  Rugel had intended for some time to take them to visit the bed of one of the ancient lunar seas. The opportunity was favorable; the voyagers had ten days of light in front of them, which could not be more usefully employed.

  As the distance that separated them from the shore increased, the ground became progressively lower. The soil over which they were advancing offered a singular aspect: the dazzling whiteness that had been presented, under the sun’s radiance, by the region they had just quit, was succeeded by a darker hue. Instead of the rough and harsh surface, uneven and difficult, over which they had been marching thus far, their feet were now treading on a kind of felted matter, supple and resistant at the same time, which seemed to yield underfoot. Strangely surprised, Marcel bent down to examine it at closer range. He even broke off a few pieces, not without effort, and was studying them attentively when Rugel intervened.

  “A little while ago,” he said, “you saw what remains of human life. You now have before your eyes one of the last vestiges of the transformations of matter on the surface of the world, where everything is now dead.”

  Marcel continued to examine the debris he was holding, curiously. There were flexible silky fibers of great tenacity, offering a striking analogy with asbestos, which is encountered on Earth in places where the magnesium silicate commonly known as serpentine is accumulated.

  Rugel explained to him that the waters that had originally covered a vast area of the Moon’s surface had contained considerably quantities of a substance that terrestrial chemists call magnesia, or magnesium oxide, which is only encountered in nature in combination with other substances. As the seas had dried up, that magnesia had combined with the silica held in suspension in the water and had gradually formed enormous deposits, of which they were now looking at a curious specimen.

  “That,” said Marcel, “is the solution to a problem that has long preoccupied the scientists of Earth and suggested many hypotheses. People wondered how the dark and greenish tint observed in the vast lunar depressions could have been produced, which some stubbornly tried to explain by the presence of otherwise-inexplicable vegetation. It’s evident that this mineral moss absorbs a considerable fraction of the light that strikes it; the light reflected by large expanses of it is therefore faint by comparison with that reflected by the continents and bare rocks.”

  “Well,” said Lord Rodilan, who had been interested by that conversation, “our exploration will not have been futile if it enriches astronomical science with one discovery more.”

  They continued walking, still moving deeper and deeper into the bed of the ancient sea. Sometimes, they encountered a few craters of mediocre elevation, which had doubtless once formed submarine volcanoes, and, thinking about the multiplicity of those outlets that were to be found on the Moon’s surface, even in the depths of the seas, they could not help wondering what a powerful force the interior fire that filled the planet must have had, and what frightful revolutions those incessant expansions had produced in the solid crust that covered it without suppressing it.

  They had reached the utmost depths of the sea they were crossing—a depth estimated by Marcel at four kilometers. There. the mineral “moss” carpeting the ground had accumulate in thicker layers, and when the necessity to rest obliged them to stop, the three inhabitants of Earth were able to lie down on something resembling thick grass. They might have imagined that they were in some valley in Switzerland or the Pyrenees if the silence and desolation around them had not recalled them to a sentiment of reality.

  The appearance of that layer, with its uniform dark green tint, over which no tree extended its shade, where no flower grew and whose implacable immobility was never disturbed by any breeze, penetrated them with an insurmountable sadness. They hastened to escape its depressing influence.

  When Rugel set off in a direction that would bring them back to the continent, therefore, they followed him eagerly, and it was with a sort of sentiment of liberation that they set foot once again on what, on the world they had quit, they would have been able to call firm ground.

  They then found themselves, without transition, in a tormented region in which, the further they went forward, the more difficult marching became. Enormous blisters and abysms with sheer walls obliged them to change direction continually. Nevertheless, they were edging gradually northwards, where a crater appeared on the horizon that appeared to be the objective that Rugel wanted to reach. Having faith in their guide, they went forth bravely; the marvels that they had witnessed were a sure guarantee that they would be rewarded for their trouble.

  Having arrived at the last of the crests forming the mountainous region, they saw a rather vast plain extended at their feet, in the middle of which stood, in majestic isolation, the crater whose summit they had already distinguished from afar.

  The ground before their eyes presented a very particular appearance; from the summit of the mountain where the crater opened dazzling white streaks radiated in straight lines over its flanks and far into the plain, where, gradually diminishing in width, they ended up petering out. Between these luminous stripes, the rocky ground seemed dull and almost dark. Marcel, Jacques and Lord Rodilan were struck with surprise and admiration.

  “Ah!” Marcel exclaimed. “A crater with a ray system
!”

  Rugel smiled. His friends’ astonishment appeared to cause him considerable satisfaction.

  “I would have liked to take you to see the gigantic circle to which your astronomers have given, as you have told me, the name of the scientist Tycho Brahe, but the time and the means were lacking. I wanted at least to set before your eyes a specimen of one of the most astonishing cosmic phenomena that our planet presents. A few more steps and you’ll be able to examine it at close range.”

  They descended to the plain and advanced toward the nearest of the strange stripes. As they got closer they distinguished something akin to a layer of polished vitrified material evenly distributed on the ground, as smooth as a mirror, which reflected the sun’s light in all its intensity.

  “Our scientists,” said Rugel, “explain this phenomenon as follows: at the time when the lunar surface began to solidify and the central fire as still fully active, enormous quantities of gas and vapor formed in the bosom of the igneous mass. At certain points, where the interior pressure was irresistible, either because the crust was thinner or because the volcano’s chimney was insufficient to give passage to the gaseous materials, the crust around the crater was split in a star-shaped pattern. Gases escaped by that means, raised to a temperature of which we now have no idea, and, under the action of the extremely intense heat, the ground was vitrified, the sides of the fissure welded together, and these regular bright strips were formed, which must present a strange appearance to those who contemplate them from far away.”