rushed out. But it brought to his nostrils odors strange and yet
strangely familiar. He was oddly light-headed, irresponsible as a
child as he shouted and danced and threw himself high in the air, to
laugh childishly at the pure pleasure of his light landing.

The sun made long shadows of two ludicrous figures that went leaping
and racing across the rocks. Their strength was prodigious, and they
were filled with an upwelling joy of living and the combined urge of
an eternity of spring-times. The very air tingled with life; there was
overpowering intoxication in this potent, exhilarating breath from a
world new-born.

The ground that they crossed so recklessly was a vast honeycomb of
caves. Between the rocks the soil was soft with the waters from
melting ice, and the men laughed as they floundered at times in the
oozing mud. Beyond was a lake, and it was blue with a depth of color
that was almost black, a reflection of the deep, velvet blackness of
the sky overhead. And beyond that was the sloping side of an extinct
volcano.

"Up--up!" Jerry shouted. "From up there we will see the whole
world--the whole moon!" He laughed as he repeated the exultant phrase:
"The moon--the whole moon!"

* * * * *

Despite their strength which carried them in wild bounds across
impassable chasms, their laboring lungs checked them in the ascent.
The joyous inebriation was wearing off. Winslow met his companion's
eyes sheepishly as they stopped where a sheer cliff of basalt above
caught and held the warmth of the sun's rays. Behind them it rose a
straight hundred feet, and before stretched a vast panorama. The sun
was mounting now in the sky. It brought into strong relief the welter
of volcanic waste that extended in bold detail through the clear air
far out to the horizon, where, misty and dim, the first vaporous
clouds were forming from the steaming earth.

And as they watched, the depressing bareness and emptiness of that
gray-black expanse was changing. Far to the east a pink flush was
spreading on the hills. It wavered and flowed, and it changed, as they
watched, to deep areas of orange and red. The delicate pink swept in
waves over valleys and hills, a vast kaleidoscopic coloration that
rioted over a strange world.

In silence it spilled into the valley below. The slope they had
traversed was radiant with color.

At their feet the ground was in motion: it heaved and rolled in
countless places.