"Sunrise on the Moon!" said Redgrave, who had stretched himself on
another chair beside her. "A glorious sight, isn't it? But nothing to
what we shall see to-morrow morning--only there doesn't happen to be any
morning just about here."
"Yes," she said dreamily, "glorious, isn't it? That and all the
stars--but I can't think anything yet, Lenox, it's all too mighty and
too marvellous. It doesn't seem as though human eyes were meant to look
upon things like this. But where's the earth? We must be able to see
that still."
"Not from here," he said, "because it's underneath us. Come below now,
and you shall see what I promised you."
They went down into the lower part of the vessel and to the after end
behind the engine-room. Redgrave switched on a couple of electric
lights, and then pulled a lever attached to one of the side-walls. A
part of the flooring about six feet square slid noiselessly away; then
he pulled another lever on the opposite side and a similar piece
disappeared, leaving a large space covered only by a thick plate of
absolutely transparent glass. He switched off the lights again and led
her to the edge of it, and said:
"There is your native world, dear. That is your Mother Earth."
Wonderful as the moon had seemed, the gorgeous spectacle which lay
seemingly at her feet was infinitely more magnificent. A vast disc of
silver grey, streaked and dotted with lines and points of dazzling
lights, and more than half covered with vast, glimmering, greyish-green
expanses, seemed to form the floor of the tremendous gulf beneath them.
They were not yet too far away to make out the general features of the
continents and oceans, and fortunately the hemisphere presented to them
happened to be singularly free from clouds.
To the right spread out the majestic outlines of the continents of North
and South America, and to the left Asia, the Malay Archipelago, and
Australia. At the top was a vast, roughly circular area of dazzling
whiteness, and Redgrave, pointing to this, said:
"There, look up a little further north than the middle of that white
patch, and you'll see what no eyes but yours and mine have ever
seen--the North Pole! When we come back we shall see the South Pole,
because we shall approach the earth from the other end, as it were.
"I suppose you recognise a good deal of the picture. All that bright
part up to the north, with the black spots on it, is Canada. The black
spots are forests. That long white line to the left is the Rockies. You
see they're all bright at the north, and as you go south you only see a
few bright dots. Those are the snow-peaks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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