'These came this morning, sir. I thought you ought to know. They're a bit—er—peculiar.'
'All right. I'll look at 'em.'
The secretary departed with some relief, and the president turned back to his interrupted work. Half an hour later, he remembered the pile of papers and took up the covering letter which lay on top.
A name standing out amid the type caught his eye. He stiffened, stared at it and began to read more carefully. The heading was a Liverpool address, and the date a fortnight old.
'Dear Sir,' it began. 'On the sixteenth of June last, the S.S. Turkoman, to which I was medical officer, rescued a man at a point not far from the Solomon Islands. He was found drifting in a native canoe and, judging from his condition, had been in it for some days. The results of such exposure were aggravated by the serious ill-treatment he had received in the form of severe cuts and wounds. At first it appeared to be impossible to save him, but his body eventually responded to treatment, though his mind still wandered.
'He was a man of considerable education, and gave his name as Stephen Dawcott. Upon arrival here, I placed him in a mental home. During the next four months I was absent, and when I returned, it was to find that he had made good his escape. The authorities were mystified and handed to me the enclosed manuscript, which he had left behind. They saw it as the raving of a madman, but to me it seems a matter requiring a less facile explanation. I await your reply with interest.'
The signature was 'John Haddon,' and to it were appended the letters, 'M.D.'
The president frowned as he set aside the letter and took up the manuscript. There had been a Stephen Dawcott, an anthropologist of some note, aboard the Scintilla. But the Scintilla was lost. From the day she had left the flying field on her maiden trip to the Moon, nearly a year ago. not a word had been heard from her. She had roared from Earth into mysterious non-existence.
But Stephen Dawcott had been aboard her; he was sure of that. He, and others of the Lunar Archaeological Society, had seen Dawcott's among the faces at the windows before the Scintilla took off. And now the man was reported as having been picked up in Melanesia, of all unlikely places. The president's frown deepened as he began to read the manuscript: —
The Scintilla behaved in an exemplary manner on her outward journey. She justified the high hopes of her designers by the smooth swiftness with which she leapt out from Earth. Captain Toft was delighted with her performance, and swore that there could be no sweeter ship to handle in all the ether.
Those of us who had taken part in earlier space-flights agreed unreservedly. The new Danielson acceleration compensators had proved their worth, and ridded space-flying for evermore of the starting strain and its unpleasant effects. In design, furnishing, and facilities for carrying such fragile relics as we might find, the Scintilla was a credit to the Lunar Archaeological Society who had built and so lavishly equipped her.
The perfect start, followed by the peaceful smoothness of our voyage, could have raised no apprehensions in the most psychic soul. Indeed, what possible cause could there be for apprehension? The silver globe before us was worn out, arid and still with the supreme stillness of death. No ship cruising above that gutted shell of a world had seen sign of as much life as lies in a blade of grass. Even the crater of Linni, which had been suspected of harbouring the last vestiges of life, had been found as barren as the rest.
'Dead,' I murmured, as we gazed out of the living-cabin windows at the withered satellite. 'All the "fitful-fevers" done and gone; a whole world mummified and at rest.'
But I did not know Luna then. I did not know to the full that desperation with which life strives and clings. ...
We made first for the North-East Quadrant, and sank to a gentle landing on the glittering, metallic dust which makes the crater of Aristarchus the brightest spot on the face of the Moon.
This was to be a preliminary trip. Our object was to survey the ground for future operations rather than make them ourselves. A number of sites were to be examined and reported upon, with a view to deciding which would be the most profitable to excavate. Aristarchus held little of interest for us, save the almost obliterated remains of a small settlement upon the northern side.
The details of our trip are of little interest here, so I merely record that we moved next, unprofitably, to the Mare Crisium, and thence across the equator to Tycho. Next, Clavius, greatest of all the craters, provided quantities of material, and showed indisputably that a great civilisation had once flourished in what is now only a vast bowl of sand and rock, a hundred and forty miles in diameter. Thus we came at last to the Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity....
Who named this immense oval plain? I cannot remember, but I do know that he saw it only through a telescope, two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away. He did not see it as we did—a huge sterile stretch, grey-floored and gloomy. Had he been able to stand upon one of the tortured mountains at its brink and look out across that sombre desolation of sand, he would have called it, not the Sea of Serenity, but the Sea of Foreboding....
We sailed slowly across to the North-West. Every member of the expedition was at the windows, scanning the featureless floor for any sign the ancient Lunarians might have left.
Until now we had felt no uneasiness. All the Moon is bare, but the harshness of its vistas had not played upon our nerves; it was only what we had expected and could scarcely affect us, but now the monotony of this great, dry sea-bed seemed to impress us all in greater or lesser degree. Unromantic scientists though we were, we felt a misgiving which none of us was willing to put into words.
And then, less than twenty miles from the far side of the sea, the steady throbbing of our rockets was interrupted. The firing tubes began to stutter uncertainly. I was with Captain Toft when the chief engineer rang through and reported that it would be necessary to descend for repairs.
The hasty glance which Toft gave through the control-dome windows told me that he had conceived the same distaste for the locality as had the rest of us. He decided swiftly to make for the cliffs now looming ahead at the sea's edge. There could be no better landing surface than the level, grey sand beneath us, but he preferred to stop near its confines. With some anxiety, he inquired the extent of the failure, but was told that this could not be ascertained while in flight.
The Scintilla continued to forge lamely ahead, gradually sinking. She took the sand at length some two hundred yards from those high, perpendicular cliffs which once had stood like the ramparts of giants against a beating sea.
The Captain left the dome to interview the engineer, and I made my way to the central saloon. A deal of chatter greeted me as I opened the door. My colleagues were peering excitedly at the cliffs; all signs of their depression had vanished. Robson, the leader of the scientific side of the expedition, drew me forward and thrust a pair of field-glasses into my hands.
'Look at those cliffs, man. Just look at them!'
I focused eagerly. The sand in the immediate foreground was dotted with rocks of all sizes which had fallen from the heights, and beyond them was a line of darkness which hid the cliff-face in deep shadow. The meagre, reflected light was just enough to show regular markings of some kind. I fancied that I could make out the carved figure of a man.
'Wait a minute,' cried Robson, as he turned and dashed from the room.
A moment later, a searchlight was playing a flood of brilliance on to a scene which caused us to gasp incredulously. The surface of the granite-like rock, to the height of some seventy or eighty feet, was covered with carvings in high relief —an involved, ingenious ordering of the figures of men, animals, and conventional forms.