Aleriel/Part 2/Chapter 1
PART II.— INTRODUCTORY.
THE MYSTERIOUS DOCUMENT.
WE had been married some years, and were settled in our quiet little home at Branscombe, when one morning, just as I was sitting down to breakfast, Maude brought me up with the London paper, and the usual circulars, begging petitions, &c., which came daily to us by the post, a curious little packet with a Swiss postage-stamp and post-mark on it.
"I declare," she said, "this looks like a letter from our wonderful friend, Posela."
"Impossible," I replied. "It cannot have dropped from the sky. How could it have come in a meteor? Well, if we do establish a post from another world, really things have come to a climax."
"I should always have been interested in a letter from your mysterious friend; but now, when we know his story, it is especially interesting. Do open it."
I opened the roll with trembling hands. It was so strange a feeling to be touching a manuscript, not of this earth, earthy, and written by a denizen of another world. The first thing that caught my attention was that it was not of paper or of parchment, but of some soft and light pinkish skin, unlike anything that I had ever seen. It was extremely thin, as, indeed, in the Post-office it was only charged as an ordinary letter; but it appeared, as I unfolded it, sheet by sheet, to be quite a book, closely written over with a bright purple ink. The document was in English, and I had no difficulty in transcribing it, for Posela's handwriting, in our characters, was clear and very delicate.
The first thing that I took out of the packet was a small green note with a curiously ornamented border. It read thus:—
"Dear Friend,—Before I left you I promised to write to you again, and tell you about myself. I doubt not that you have heard from Trehyndra about me, and who I am. But, as much has happened since I was with you on the earth, I give you this narrative of myself and my journeys since we parted. May every blessing rest on you and yours, and may you in time rejoice in a happier world!
CHAPTER I.
Aleriel's Journey Home.–The Moon.
"When I ascended from Trehyndra, I soon attained to regions where man could never in his earth-life exist–far above the earth's atmosphere. Higher and higher I ascended, till the whole of Western Europe opened like a map before me, with Great Britain and Ireland on the blue sea, like a brownish-green triangle on a blue field. Higher and higher still I went, till the white Alps expanded before me, and I saw the realms of Asia opening up, lightened by the dawn. On, higher and higher, till all the earth seemed a huge globe, with part light and part darkness, only varied by the cities' lights.
"As I ascended, I soon came near to one of the great meteor streams that dash through space with the rapidity of cannon-balls. I selected one large meteor, and chaining my car to it, swept with it onwards towards your satellite, which loomed as a distant globe, part light, part dark, in the black ether.
As I drew near it, in the vast realms of space, I loosened my car from the meteor, and then, restoring the power of gravitation, dashed on into the lunar sphere of gravitation towards the southern mountain-region that surrounds the lunar South Pole. It was a wondrously grand, and yet an awful, spectacle,–those vast and desolate rings of lunar mountains. Chain beyond chain, circle beyond circle, ring beyond ring, of extinct volcanoes opened up to my vision,–all glistening in the bright sunlight. To man, the heat would have been fatal. Boiling water was nothing to it. The thermometer rose to what you call 400 degrees. But our natures can bear much greater heat than that. In our own world, so near the sun, we often get it. Higher and more potent than man in vitality, freed from his lower necessities, we can flourish and enjoy a vigorous life where he would die. So the intense heat did not inconvenience me. I only dwelt admiringly on the superb spectacle–a spectacle such as I never saw before; though it was more like, in some points, the scenes on Venus than on the earth. The nearest thing I can liken it to on earth is the view of the Alps from some of the Swiss mountains. I have seen something a little like it when I rested once on the summit of Jungfrau, and looked upon the chains of Alpine peaks,–on Eiger, the Wetterhorn, and far-off Mont Blanc. Peak upon peak, chain upon chain, opened to my view. But the absence of the ring-shape of the mountains marks the difference between the mountain-lands of the earth and those of the moon. In this the lunar mountains are more like ours than those of earth, though Vesuvius and the mountains of the Sandwich Isles are a little like the huge craters of the moon.
I made designedly for Tycho,–the metropolitan crater, as your astronomers call it. The huge circle of ramparts (but little lower than the loftiest mountains of Europe), in terrific precipices of a mile or more in sheer descents, opened before me. The enclosed region of the ring was larger than many an English county, but it was a vast desert; not an even plain, but rugged, with piles of rocks, relics of ancient volcanic eruptions. The central cones stood out somewhat as the Malverns stand in the midst of the plain of Worcestershire. Fancy the circle complete–the Cotswolds and Welsh mountains some ten or twenty times more lofty–up to the level of the taller Alps; the Malverns raised to Ben Cruachan; the plains of Worcester and Hereford and Gloucester a lifeless desert covered with rocks, and you may gain a feeble conception of what Tycho is.
All was dead around me. Not a city, not a house, not a tree, not even a blade of grass was to be seen. All horror, desolation, death! And yet, withal, Nature, even in that dead world, has a certain strange beauty.
I made for the central group of mountains (which I have likened to the Malverns). Here on their southern slope I descended. The shock was violent, though I tried to soften the fall. I dismounted from my car and trod another world, the third world I had visited. It was a solemn and sublime feeling,–that of treading a fresh world in space.
I clambered up the chief peak of the central mountain of Tycho. Around me stretched the desert-plain for some twenty miles on every side, and then, beyond and above all, the mighty ring of mountains, without a break, only varied, here and there, by the long shadows of their rocks.
I paused and gazed a long time on this wonderful, but desert, scene, and then, longing to expand my view, I strove to fly. But in vain. There was no atmosphere to support me, so I had to return to my car and to set its motive forces at work so as to cast off the gravitating power of the great orb about me and to float in ether over its surface. I passed over the ridge of Tycho to some four miles' altitude above the plains and crater-valleys. Again ring beyond ring of mountain circles—some glistening white, some shaded—opened to my eyes. It was a grand scene of confusion such as Alps or Himalayas cannot approach. I first resolved to turn towards the south, to the great ring of Clavius,—almost as large as Wales, with peaks as lofty as the Andes, and with ninety craters in its vast expanse,—about as many volcanoes as surface for the whole earth. I mounted its lofty rampart, and resting on the highest peak, as high as Chimborazo, i.e., some 23,000 feet, contemplated the superb and yet most strange scene.
These ring-mountains of the moon are almost as large as countries on the earth, and Clavius was more like a Swiss canton than a crater. Vast forces had been here at work! Were they the huge convulsions that destroyed life on your satellite? If not, if life could have existed in these lunar rings, each of them would be a separate country, as separated from the others as France is from Spain or Italy. Such ridges could not easily be passed by any but flying animals; but flying animals and a dense atmosphere probably never existed on the moon. If ever life existed on that world, it must have been very varied in its developments.
I dwelt on these thoughts as I rested upon the topmost peak of Clavius. I stayed there as long as one of your earth-days, and watched the shadows deepening on the cliffs. Then I thought of the bitter dreariness of the long night in this dead world; and before the shadows had lengthened on the craters I flew northward towards the equator.
I set forward my ether car and made for the twin rings (each as large as an English county) which men call Stoefler and Maurolycus. I thus again returned into the realm of Tycho, for two of his great rays came from his vast crater to Stoefler. These two ring-systems were in themselves most wonderful. Maurolycus with its ramparts as lofty as the Andes, and Stoefler as the Alps. Here, on one of the peaks between the two vast rings, I rested and looked for a while on the terrible desolation around me. A thousand peaks were in sight, chain beyond chain, ridge beyond ridge, of mountains;—the vast, glittering region of the lunar South Pole on the one side, and to the north the huge crater-chain rising in successive lines. "Is all this," I thought, "the result of the terrific convulsions that ruined life upon this satellite, or is it but the nature of this world—a world of mountain ranges,—of huge craters,—of volcanic action?"
Then I rose upwards into the dark airless expanse of ether, and directed my car to the mighty ring of Ptolomæus.