The thing was exasperating—­it was absurd.  Here we were just arrived upon the moon, amidst we knew not what wonders, and all we could see was the gray and streaming wall of the bubble in which we had come.

“Confound it!” I said, “but at this rate we might have stopped at home;” and I squatted on the bale and shivered, and drew my blanket closer about me.

Abruptly the moisture turned to spangles and fronds of frost.  “Can you reach the electric heater,” said Cavor.  “Yes—­that black knob.  Or we shall freeze.”

I did not wait to be told twice.  “And now,” said I, “what are we to do?”

“Wait,” he said.

“Wait?”

“Of course.  We shall have to wait until our air gets warm again, and then this glass will clear.  We can’t do anything till then.  It’s night here yet; we must wait for the day to overtake us.  Meanwhile, don’t you feel hungry?”

For a space I did not answer him, but sat fretting.  I turned reluctantly from the smeared puzzle of the glass and stared at his face.  “Yes,” I said, “I am hungry.  I feel somehow enormously disappointed.  I had expected—­I don’t know what I had expected, but not this.”

I summoned my philosophy, and rearranging my blanket about me sat down on the bale again and began my first meal on the moon.  I don’t think I finished it—­I forget.  Presently, first in patches, then running rapidly together into wider spaces, came the clearing of the glass, came the drawing of the misty veil that hid the moon world from our eyes.

We peered out upon the landscape of the moon.

Chapter 7

Sunrise on the Moon

As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes.  We were in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor of the giant crater.  Its cliff-like walls closed us in on every side.  From the westward the light of the unseen sun fell upon them, reaching to the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment of drab and grayish rock, lined here and there with banks and crevices of snow.  This was perhaps a dozen miles away, but at first no intervening atmosphere diminished in the slightest the minutely detailed brilliancy with which these things glared at us.  They stood out clear and dazzling against a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthly eyes rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousness of the sky.

The eastward cliff was at first merely a starless selvedge to the starry dome.  No rosy flush, no creeping pallor, announced the commencing day.  Only the Corona, the Zodiacal light, a huge cone-shaped, luminous haze, pointing up towards the splendour of the morning star, warned us of the imminent nearness of the sun.

Whatever light was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs.  It showed a huge undulating plain, cold and gray, a gray that deepened eastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow.  Innumerable rounded gray summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity, gave us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall.  These hummocks looked like snow.  At the time I thought they were snow.  But they were not—­they were mounds and masses of frozen air.