He lifted her up to the bottom of the slope. Together, up a great
jagged expanding ramp which presently was twenty feet wide, arduously
they climbed upward. Inexorable expansion! New spaces every moment were
opening up beneath their feet. A tiny rift in the jagged metal ground,
in a moment was a little gully. Metal stones were apparent now, and
tiny pits into which one might thrust a finger. The edge of the slope
chanced to be beside Carter; and he gazed down from here on the top of
the pointer--down to the concrete circular top of the sundial. Hundreds
of feet down there, a vast, shining moonlit surface spread out now to
the blurred horizon! Huge pits, gullies, ravines were inky black.
On the jagged spires and little butte-tops the moonlight was molten
silver. It was a weird, naked scene of gray and yellow-white rocks,
fantastic as a Lunar landscape!
Then just for a moment, with mental viewpoint changed, Carter envisaged
the actuality. How big, compared to his original six-foot stature, was
he now? A sixteenth of an inch perhaps? If his father were here in the
garden, bending close over the sundial pointer with a light, he might
still be able to see him and the girl as they struggled up the sloping
narrow top edge of the sundial pointer!
Amazing how nothing is absolute, but wholly comparative to something
else! He had told Lea that they were not going very far! Only from the
house to the sundial in the garden. But, based on his present size, his
father and Alice off there in the house now, were at least sixty or
seventy miles away!
"This is the valley," Lea panted. "I can recognize now. It almost
closed upon me as I grew large. I can remember climbing up to here."
The edges of the giant upward slope had drawn away, so that with
tumbled boulders intervening, Carter could no longer see them. He and
Lea were in a depression, like a huge cauldron with its scooped-out
bottom almost level--a place a hundred feet in diameter. Steadily the
crawling expansion of all the scene continued. It seemed a uniform rate
of expansion now.
"That pellet lasts a long time, Lea." He tried to grin at her. "Don't
you suppose its effect is about over?"
"Oh, no! There is a great distance yet."
Distance; size! Meaningless terms. He and Lea--as his father would
view it--were not going very far in terms of distance! Just two
tiny creatures, almost too small to be seen, struggling on the
one-eighth-inch-thick top of the sundial pointer!
"You say we go into a valley?" he suddenly demanded. "I don't see any
valley."
"This one," the girl said.
A few feet from them there was a rift, like a little crescent slash.
A foot wide and twice as deep, it began here and curved off into the
distance. But presently it was a gully--a ragged, curving little
canyon fifty feet wide with broken walls that towered above them as
they went into it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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