In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of these plants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a second whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a lifeless stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-green herbage of bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their growing.

I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun.  And beyond this fringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a cactus, and swelling visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills with air.

Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distended form was rising over the scrub.  But here the light fell upon its sleek sides, and I could see that its colour was a vivid orange hue.  It rose as one watched it; if one looked away from it for a minute and then back, its outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congested branches until in a little time it rose a coralline shape of many feet in height.  Compared with such a growth the terrestrial puff-ball, which will sometimes swell a foot in diameter in a single night, would be a hopeless laggard.  But then the puff-ball grows against a gravitational pull six times that of the moon.  Beyond, out of gullies and flats that had been hidden from us, but not from the quickening sun, over reefs and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spiky and fleshy vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously to take advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit and seed again and die.  It was like a miracle, that growth.  So, one must imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the desolation of the new-made earth.

Imagine it!  Imagine that dawn!  The resurrection of the frozen air, the stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes.  Conceive it all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem watery and weak.  And still around this stirring jungle, wherever there was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow.  And to have the picture of our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we saw it all through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are distorted by a lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very bright there, and towards the edges magnified and unreal.

Chapter 9

Prospecting Begins

We ceased to gaze.  We turned to each other, the same thought, the same question in our eyes.  For these plants to grow, there must be some air, however attenuated, air that we also should be able to breathe.

“The manhole?” I said.

“Yes!” said Cavor, “if it is air we see!”

“In a little while,” I said, “these plants will be as high as we are.  Suppose—­suppose after all—­ Is it certain?  How do you know that stuff is air?  It may be nitrogen—­it may be carbonic acid even!”