“That will put an end to all the controversies on the matter in question,” said Marcel, “and give full credit to the theory formulated by Camille Flammarion, one of the most celebrated Earthly astronomers, the only one to glimpse the truth.”30
The ascent of the crater was long and difficult. The uneven ground bristling with numerous asperities and scoriform blistered only permitted the voyagers to advance with extreme slowness. When they had reached the summit, however, the dazzling spectacle before their eyes soon made them forget their fatigue.
Beneath their feet, an infinite number of luminous strips departed, which formed as many radii of a gigantic star, which seemed to have fallen from the sky, and those polished and transparent surfaces, in decomposing the light, were resplendent with all the colors of the prism.
“How beautiful it is!” Marcel exclaimed. “On this arid and desolate world, nature has still found the means to produce grandiose effects, and our old Earth, varied as it is, offers nothing similar.”
“Let us admire the Sovereign Being,” said Rugel, “who imprint all his works, until death, with the marks of his supreme grandeur and inexhaustible magnificence.”
Jacques and Lord Rodilan gazed in silence. The meditative soul of the one and the skeptical mind of the other were overwhelmed by the majesty of the sublime scene.
It was, however, necessary to tear themselves away from that contemplation.
“We’ve arrived at the extreme limits of the region that the inhabitants of the Moon have thus far explored,” said Rugel. “When I talked to you about the possibility of taking our research further, you welcomed my proposal enthusiastically. Now, in the presence of the difficulties that await us and the perils we might have to overcome, I hesitate to pursue that enterprise. If it were to have a tragic outcome, I would never forgive myself for having involved you in it...”
Marcel interrupted swiftly. “Thank you for your solicitude, Rugel, my friend, but we’re not men to recoil before obstacles of any sort. Those who have crossed the distance separating the Noon from the Earth won’t allow themselves to be frightened by a few molehills to climb and ditches to traverse.”
“Ditches and molehills!” Rugel replied, smiling. “But what do your companions think?”
“I’ll go wherever you go,” said Jacques. “I too revere science, and if this expedition will bring us a few new revelations, I want my part in the glory. Anyway, I’m certain that we’ll come back safe and sound. I’m sure that I’ll see the Earth again.”
“As for me,” said Lord Rodilan, with the phlegm that never abandoned him in the gravest circumstances, “I only ask to go forward. If there’s danger, well, so much the better—that’s one attraction more. I ought to have been dead a long time ago; anything that might happen now is of no importance.”
“Well, so be it,” said Rugel. “We’ll launch ourselves into the unknown.
“After resting for a few terrestrial days and carrying out a minute inspection of all the apparatus they were carrying, which was in perfect condition, the voyagers set off resolutely in an eastward direction.
For a month, they continued their route in the same direction, and to their great surprise, the region through which they were traveling had an appearance quite different from those they had already traversed. The granitic ground on which they were walking no longer presented violent asperities and the abrupt outcrops of inferior strata that gave the other hemisphere of the Moon such a tormented character. Immense spaces extended before them whose almost flat surface only exhibited faint undulations. Nothing blocked their path or limited their gaze; the horizon continued to flee before them, and formed a perfect circle no matter where they were, of which they were always the center.
The 354-hour night took them by surprise, and then gave way to a day of equal length, and still they were advancing through those bleak solitudes in which no cry vibrated and in which no breeze lifted the dust beneath their feet, where everything was frozen and motionless. It was like an immense sea suddenly petrified wile calm. Had it not been for the somber hue of the rocks on which they were treading they might have believed that they were in the vast Sahara desert. Here, though, no oasis offered the shade of its palm trees and the murmur of its spring to their thirsty gaze. No caravan saluted them in passing.
They went on and on, guided by the stars alone.
The voyagers required well-tempered souls and intrepid hearts not to succumb to the burden of that frightful isolation.
Even in their saddest hours, Marcel and his two friends had never felt their resolution weaken, but in spite of their firmness, they were gradually penetrated by a mournful sentiment, and in those open spaces they were oppressed, as in the depths of a sepulcher.
Sometimes, Marcel tried to react against the sentiment, and words of encouragement came to his lips into which he strove to impart some cheerfulness, but his attempts were unechoed. Jacques’ melancholy seemed to have increased, and Lord Rodilan could no longer find his joyful humor and mocking bonhomie. Rugel remained grave; his face had never lost its affability and softness; he seemed inaccessible to fatigue; discouragement had no purchase on that heart, full of the love of science.
The troop of Diemides marched with marvelous unison, in which no trace of weakness showed. Recruited from the youngest, most vigorous and most intelligent member of their class, they understood the importance of the mission that their leader had accepted, and as they had absolute confidence in him, they had no doubt about the final result of the enterprise.
The second period of night had just ended and the first rays of sunlight were already inundating the sky when an irregular black line appeared on the horizon, which the voyagers greeted with joy. They were finally coming to the end of the interminable plain! Compared with that desperate monotony, the most abrupt and difficult terrain that might be offered to them would at least offer them the image of life.
They soon arrived at the foot of a kind of wall formed of gigantic blocks of black basalt, which rose up sheerly, as if the igneous masses, under pressure of incredible force, had been ripped from the surface of the ground, hurled into space and then, suddenly seized by the low ambient temperature, had crystallized without being deformed.
That formidable upsurge was prolonged as far as the eye could see in both a northerly and a southerly direction; there was no possibility of going around it, and they resolved to get over it, still heading east. The undertaking was difficult, and would have made lesser men retreat.
Between the violently-projected blocks, which, more often than not, were tangled and overlapping at their base, there were only narrow and dangerous passages hardly large enough for them to penetrate one by one, whose floor, as smooth as glass, made walking uncertain and perilous. The feet slipped continually; the falls thus produced might have been fatal if the voyagers had not taken the precaution of attaching themselves together with long cords. When one of them was about to lose his footing and threatened to fall into some fissure in which he would unfailingly be crushed, he was caught by those preceding and following him. Then it was necessary, with great difficulty, by hauling on the rope, to bring him back up to the surface and continue the interrupted march.
Sometimes they found themselves facing some colossal block whose compact surface offered no way through. They were obliged then to attempt to climb over. A few Diemides, hoisted on to the shoulders of their companions, hollowed out holes in the rock with the aid of their pickaxes, plunged iron spikes into them, and then, climbing on to those improvised steps, dug further holes over their heads, all the way to the summit of the obstacle. Everyone followed them, and more than once, Lord Rodilan, suspended by his hands and feet from that parrot-ladder congratulated himself on having conserved a flexibility and vigor in his limbs that permitted him to execute acrobatic feats.
When the block was surpassed, they found themselves in the presence of new difficulties and perils, but the marvelous spectacles offered to their gaze by that strangely convulsed
nature offered Rugel and his friends abundant compensation for their troubles.
Arranged in perfect symmetrical order, long series of enormous columns loomed up there with cylindrical bases and capitals that might have been carved by the hands of the most delicate artists.
Elsewhere, slender grooves jutting out from thick walls, came together in ogival arches, and they might have thought that they were in one of the Gothic cathedrals elevated by ardent and mystical faith by the Christians of the Middle Ages.
Often, densely-packed ridges arranged in stages of different heights and dimensions, depicted gigantic organs, and it was astonishing not to hear torrents of harmony springing from their flanks. In their capricious formation the rocks affected the most varied forms; Marcel pointed out to his companions an ancient burg similar to those overlooking the banks of the Rhine. Everything was there: the long ramparts with battlements, pierced with loopholes, flanked at intervals by pepper-pot towers and surmounted by a keep from which it seemed that the voice of a watchman announcing noble visitors might ring out at any moment.
Elsewhere again, there were imposing cathedrals, with their powerful buttresses, their bold arches, and their slender steeples raising their pointed tips toward the sky.
At one moment, Lord Rodilan gripped Jacques’ arm, stopping him suddenly. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Westminster Abbey!”
Before them, in fact, isolated in a large space, stood a marvelous Gothic construction with slim colonnettes, regular ogives and dentellate rose-windows, unmistakable reminiscent of the architectural gem that mirrors its lacy stonework in the waves of the Thames.
“That’s utterly astonishing,” said Jacques. “The caprices of nature are infinite! Never, it’s necessary to admit, have the chisels of the most skillful artists produced anything more regular, more finished and more perfect.”
Rugel and Marcel had been seized with admiration, and behind them, the troop of Diemides stood mute with surprise.
No human eye had ever contemplated those sublime spectacles, and they all felt a legitimate pride in having dared to penetrate into that inaccessible region in order to discover its astonishing secrets.
They went on, and the fantastic palaces were succeeded by enormous basilicas and vast arenas that seemed to be disposed to receive innumerable crowds of spectators. And over all those architectural treasures, whose astonishing variety even the richest imagination would not have been able to conceive, the sun poured its rays, the intensity of which was untempered by anything. Under the ardent light, those walls, pilasters, columns, steps, obelisks and pyramids were resplendent with a dazzling glare.
That accumulation of marvels left far behind everything that had been celebrated on Earth by enthusiastic voyagers or sung by poets, the famous colonnades of the coast of Antrim constituting the Giant’s Causeway, which glorify Ireland, or even Fingal’s Cave, where pale specters, the heroes of the legends of Ossian, gather by night to talk once again about battles and love.
In spite of the difficulties of every sort presented by walking through those disorderly masses, it was with a sentiment of regret that the voyagers drew away, and they often looked back to see once again, before they disappeared over the horizon, the bizarre silhouettes of those monstrous edifices, which seemed to have been built by the hands of genies.
The country into which they penetrated on emerging from the basaltic region offered a totally different aspect. There, by a strange fantasy of nature, the ancient commotions of the ground had projected to the surface an enormous layer of primitive rocks in which porphyry was dominant. The route became much easier, for the cooling seemed to have gripped the molten mass at a moment of calm. Save for a few blocks strewn at hazard, no serious obstacle impeded their progress.
Underfoot, however, everything was blood red; the rocks they were now skirting sometimes presented bloody streaks to their astonished gazes and sometimes the pink and violet tints of freshly cut flesh.
The inhabitants of the Moon, strangers to any idea of carnage and murder, felt no other impression than that of excited curiosity before this new spectacle, but Marcel and his two friends, who had often witnessed human fury on Earth, and had seen blood flow and mutilated bodies writhe on battlefields, were gripped by a sentiment of horror. Their imagination evoked the memory of those cruel scenes; they felt oppressed, and uttered a sigh of relief when they finally quit that region, which seemed to them to be accursed.
XI. The Eruption
The little caravan continued its eastward march intrepidly. Night made the sky resplendent again with a thousand fires, and the transparency of the ether was such that the eye could distinguish stars of the tenth magnitude without any difficulty.
The Milky Way, which striped the celestial vault above their heads, no longer appeared to them as a splash of diffuse light, but as an accumulation of countless suns, which distance caused to appear very close to one another, and each of which shone with its own light.
They were now traversing a continent quite similar to those which are encountered in large numbers on the visible surface of the Moon; there were the same tightly-packed craters, perforating the rocky crust everywhere, unequal in size, which they had continually to go around, while conserving the determined direction. They had stopped to rest. All of them, weary from a long march, had abandoned themselves to sleep, when one of the Diemides suddenly got up, showing all the signs of great astonishment.
He went to Rugel.
“Master,” he said, “If I’m not mistaken, my ear has just perceived something like a dull rumbling deep underground. One might have thought that it was carts rolling over an iron bridge....”
Without letting him finish, Rugel bent down, commanded silence with a gesture, applied his ear to the bare rock and listened attentively.
A distant noise was audible, transmitted by the vibrations of the solid crust.
Hastily, he woke Marcel and his two companions.
“I believe some formidable cataclysm is in preparation,” he told them, “and that we’re going to witness one of the convulsions of nature that were once so frequent on our globe, and which made the surface so strange and tormented.”
The subterranean noise had become more distinct; it was perceptible without putting an ear to the ground. All the Diemides were on their feet, and their attitude betrayed their apprehension.
“I thought that the lunar surface had been completely refrozen for many centuries,” said Marcel, “and that the central fire had been relegated to such depths hat it was impossible for it to have any external effect.”
“But is that theory well-established?” Jacques observed. “Haven’t certain astronomers, even in our day, observed appreciable changes on the visible surface several times, such as the appearance of new craters and modifications in the form of those that are already known?”
“All that’s very vague,” Marcel replied, “and doesn’t qualify as scientifically demonstrated truth.”
Rugel interrupted them.
“Since lunar humankind has been obliged to renounce living outside and to enclose itself in the caverns that now shelter its existence, no profound commotion has modified the part of the spheroid that extends over our heads, but the central fire that maintains our life still occupies a considerable space in the core and its action is always to be feared. The accident that occurred in the chimney of our elevator, to which you fell victim, proves that the gases that form in the interior and are subject to formidable pressure there can sometimes find fissures through which they escape and spread outside. It’s quite possible that a phenomenon of the same kind is occurring where we are now, and that we might witness some redoubtable eruption. So it’s best not to remain any longer in this country strewn with rocks, and to return to broadly open ground where we’ll be less exposed.”
The voyagers retraced their steps, and stopped in a vast plain that they had traversed after emerging from the porphyry region. The subterranean rumbles could still be heard, and the ground beneat
h their feet was already beginning to move. But it was not like our globe, where the profound shocks we call earthquakes are manifest, with undulations of varying amplitude. The density and thickness of the crust covering the interior fires could not lend itself to those movements, which resembled ocean waves; it was a sort of continuous trepidation, an agitation on the spot, in the midst of which muffled cracking sounds could be discerned.
Those symptoms seemed to Rugel to be menacing. He advised moving even further away from the point that seemed to be the center of the geological phenomenon.
They did not have time.
A dull sound, transmitted by the solid layers, suddenly burst forth, similar to the distant discharge of a hundred artillery pieces firing simultaneously. At the same time, the space lit up with a bloody glare. One of the craters whose summits they could see had just opened up.
The expansive force of the gases had projected into the air, to an incalculable height, the obstacle of solidified lava that had sealed the chimney for centuries, and an enormous column of molten matter was hurled from into space from the gaping opening. That column rose up vertically; in the center it looked like liquid gold; on the edges it was dark red, while green and violet flames burned at its periphery.
That torrent of fire, which launched outside the crater, dragged with it enormous incandescent blocks, which, abruptly seized by the cold of space, burst into sheaves of sparks.
In that airless milieu no sound wave could reach the ears of the witnesses to those detonations, which would have been formidable in the terrestrial atmosphere. The gigantic vomit of flame, spreading out silently into the profound night, seemed to have something supernatural about it, which chilled the soul with a religious terror. At the same time, dense fumes emerged from the volcano, charged with a frightful quantity of ash and scoria, which, rising up in a sinister dome, soon formed a kind of somber vault that hid the entire sky.
An Unknown World Page 29
