“We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now,” he said.

With a guarded effort I raised myself to the top, and moving as cautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blaze of the sun.  The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirty feet away.

As far as the eye could see over the enormous disorder of rocks that formed the crater floor, the same bristling scrub that surrounded us was starting into life, diversified here and there by bulging masses of a cactus form, and scarlet and purple lichens that grew so fast they seemed to crawl over the rocks.  The whole area of the crater seemed to me then to be one similar wilderness up to the very foot of the surrounding cliff.

This cliff was apparently bare of vegetation save at its base, and with buttresses and terraces and platforms that did not very greatly attract our attention at the time.  It was many miles away from us in every direction; we seemed to be almost at the centre of the crater, and we saw it through a certain haziness that drove before the wind.  For there was even a wind now in the thin air, a swift yet weak wind that chilled exceedingly but exerted little pressure.  It was blowing round the crater, as it seemed, to the hot illuminated side from the foggy darkness under the sunward wall.  It was difficult to look into this eastward fog; we had to peer with half-closed eyes beneath the shade of our hands, because of the fierce intensity of the motionless sun.

“It seems to be deserted,” said Cavor, “absolutely desolate.”

I looked about me again.  I retained even then a clinging hope of some quasi-human evidence, some pinnacle of building, some house or engine, but everywhere one looked spread the tumbled rocks in peaks and crests, and the darting scrub and those bulging cacti that swelled and swelled, a flat negation as it seemed of all such hope.

“It looks as though these plants had it to themselves,” I said.  “I see no trace of any other creature.”

“No insects—­no birds, no!  Not a trace, not a scrap nor particle of animal life.  If there was—­what would they do in the night? ...  No; there’s just these plants alone.”

I shaded my eyes with my hand.  “It’s like the landscape of a dream.  These things are less like earthly land plants than the things one imagines among the rocks at the bottom of the sea.  Look at that yonder!  One might imagine it a lizard changed into a plant.  And the glare!”

“This is only the fresh morning,” said Cavor.

He sighed and looked about him.  “This is no world for men,” he said.  “And yet in a way—­it appeals.”

He became silent for a time, then commenced his meditative humming.

I started at a gentle touch, and found a thin sheet of livid lichen lapping over my shoe.  I kicked at it and it fell to powder, and each speck began to grow.

I heard Cavor exclaim sharply, and perceived that one of the fixed bayonets of the scrub had pricked him.  He hesitated, his eyes sought among the rocks about us.  A sudden blaze of pink had crept up a ragged pillar of crag.  It was a most extraordinary pink, a livid magenta.