They grasped the ropes tightly, standing on tiptoe for what seemed ages. Suddenly, the Ring struck with a noise like that of a giant sledge-hammer upon a boiler. The accompanying jar, however, was comparatively slight. Burke touched his forelock. "We have arrove!" he remarked, with a grin. "All out for the moon!" PART IV ON THE MOON I "We have arrove! All out for the moon!" repeated Burke, the would-be humorist. "Get ready for the quarantine officer!" They all looked at one another incredulously. Save for the jar and the thunder of the blow when the Ring struck the moon's surface, there was nothing to suggest or indicate that they were not still moving through space, except the minor facts that the port-holes were curtained by a sitting cloud of white dust and that the deadlight was totally obscured. There was no motion now, but there had been no motion before. Their journey had been very much like that entertaining side-show at Coney Island, where the passengers on an imitation ship gain a vivid impression of _mal de mer_ by sitting perfectly still while the shore, sea, and sky revolve topsyturvy about them. Yet, to quote the never-failing Burke, there they were! But were they _there_? Wasn't it all a mad sort of dream? Too much liquid air or something? Had they really ever moved an inch? Weren't they still just roosting on the staging in the aerodrome at Washington, and stirring up a big dust with their old propeller? Rhoda was actually convinced, for the moment, that they had never started at all, and her illusion might have persisted had not Bennie called her attention to the fact that the dust cloud had suddenly subsided, dropping like a stone, owing to the complete absence of any supporting atmosphere, and leaving the sky clear and dark as on a winter's night. Through the now transparent window, the surface of the moon, blazing under the blinding rays of the sun, became instantly visible, like a desert at high noon. But what a desert! The Ring was lying in the center of a small, circular plain, rimmed by a coruscated rocky wall--a "craterlet" such as Rhoda and Bennie had studied through the great telescope at Georgetown. For some distance about the Ring's circumference, the soft, porous rock composing the surface had been deeply eroded by the blast from the tractor and grooves and furrows of large size radiated from the point where they had come to rest. Far from being level, the plain around the crater bristled with pinnacles and peaks of every size and shape, suggesting stalagmites on the floor of a cave--strange and grotesque creations of the erosion of prehistoric winds.