isitive hand over my
contusions, and surveyed his face for similar damages. The back of my
right hand had suffered most, and was skinless and raw. My forehead was
bruised and had bled. He handed me a little measure with some of the
restorative--I forget the name of it--he had brought with us. After a
time I felt a little better. I began to stretch my limbs carefully. Soon
I could talk.

"It wouldn't have done," I said, as though there had been no interval.

"No! it _wouldn't_."

He thought, his hands hanging over his knees. He peered through the glass
and then stared at me.

"Good Lord!" he said. "No!"

"What has happened?" I asked after a pause. "Have we jumped to the
tropics?"

"It was as I expected. This air has evaporated--if it is air. At any
rate, it has evaporated, and the surface of the moon is showing. We are
lying on a bank of earthy rock. Here and there bare soil is exposed. A
queer sort of soil!"

It occurred to him that it was unnecessary to explain. He assisted me into
a sitting position, and I could see with my own eyes.

Chapter 8

A Lunar Morning

The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of scenery had altogether
disappeared. The glare of the sun had taken upon itself a faint tinge of
amber; the shadows upon the cliff of the crater wall were deeply purple.
To the eastward a dark bank of fog still crouched and sheltered from the
sunrise, but to the westward the sky was blue and clear. I began to
realise the length of my insensibility.

We were no longer in a void. An atmosphere had arisen about us. The
outline of things had gained in character, had grown acute and varied;
save for a shadowed space of white substance here and there, white
substance that was no longer air but snow, the arctic appearance had gone
altogether. Everywhere broad rusty brown spaces of bare and tumbled earth
spread to the blaze of the sun. Here and there at the edge of the
snowdrifts were transient little pools and eddies of water, the only
things stirring in that expanse of barrenness. The sunlight inundated the
upper two blinds of our sphere and turned our climate to high summer, but
our feet were still in shadow, and the sphere was lying upon a drift of
snow.

And scattered here and there upon the slope, and emphasised by little
white threads of unthawed snow upon their shady sides, were shapes like
sticks, dry twisted sticks of the same rusty hue as the rock upon which
they lay. That cau