[* Footnote:  It is a curious thing, that while we were in the sphere we felt not the slightest desire for food, nor did we feel the want of it when we abstained.  At first we forced our appetites, but afterwards we fasted completely.  Altogether we did not consume one-hundredth part of the compressed provisions we had brought with us.  The amount of carbonic acid we breathed was also unnaturally low, but why this was, I am quite unable to explain.]

Chapter 6

The Landing on the Moon

I remember how one day Cavor suddenly opened six of our shutters and blinded me so that I cried aloud at him.  The whole area was moon, a stupendous scimitar of white dawn with its edge hacked out by notches of darkness, the crescent shore of an ebbing tide of darkness, out of which peaks and pinnacles came glittering into the blaze of the sun.  I take it the reader has seen pictures or photographs of the moon and that I need not describe the broader features of that landscape, those spacious ring-like ranges vaster than any terrestrial mountains, their summits shining in the day, their shadows harsh and deep, the gray disordered plains, the ridges, hills, and craterlets, all passing at last from a blazing illumination into a common mystery of black.  Athwart this world we were flying scarcely a hundred miles above its crests and pinnacles.  And now we could see, what no eye on earth will ever see, that under the blaze of the day the harsh outlines of the rocks and ravines of the plains and crater floor grew gray and indistinct under a thickening haze, that the white of their lit surfaces broke into lumps and patches, and broke again and shrank and vanished, and that here and there strange tints of brown and olive grew and spread.

But little time we had for watching then.  For now we had come to the real danger of our journey.  We had to drop ever closer to the moon as we spun about it, to slacken our pace and watch our chance, until at last we could dare to drop upon its surface.

For Cavor that was a time of intense exertion; for me it was an anxious inactivity.  I seemed perpetually to be getting out of his way.  He leapt about the sphere from point to point with an agility that would have been impossible on earth.  He was perpetually opening and closing the Cavorite windows, making calculations, consulting his chronometer by means of the glow lamp during those last eventful hours.  For a long time we had all our windows closed and hung silently in darkness hurling through space.

Then he was feeling for the shutter studs, and suddenly four windows were open.  I staggered and covered my eyes, drenched and scorched and blinded by the unaccustomed splendour of the sun beneath my feet.  Then again the shutters snapped, leaving my brain spinning in a darkness that pressed against the eyes.  And after that I floated in another vast, black silence.