The first astonished silence was succeeded by a babel of excited talk. Everyone spoke at once, and no one listened. And no wonder; compared to this revelation, our earlier discoveries dwindled to mere nothings. It seemed that we might have found the lunar Book of the Dead carved upon this mighty stone page.
Chapter Two
CORPSES OF THE MOON
Robson came back and started to tow me in the direction of the space-suit lockers. He continued to babble excitedly as he lifted the clumsy garments from their hooks. The suits were essential, for although, contrary to expectation, it had been found that some air still existed upon the Moon, and in the deepest craters was almost breathable during the lunar day, yet the rarity of such as lingered in the beds of the vanished seas compelled artificial aid.
As we left the ship and drew near the cliffs, I think there was no doubt in any of our minds that the design was picture-writing of some kind. The irregular repetition of certain glyphs practically established the fact. None of us, of course, could yet attempt any translation, but the photographers were already arranging their cameras to provide a record for more leisured study.
I watched them work with an untraceable sense of uneasiness creeping over me. I have said before, and I repeat, that although I am a hard-headed scientist, I was nevertheless aware of a distinctly unscientific misgiving....
The rest were too enthusiastic, too occupied with pointing out details and symbols which might, or might not, be analogous with similar symbols on Earth, to share my anxiety; and I did not mention it—it was too irrational, illogical.
It was Robson who made the great find. He had gone close up to the cliff, and was examining a floridly incised square of the surface. Presently his cry sounded in all our receivers:
'A door,' he said. There's a door in the cliff!'
We crowded up to him and found that the square was bordered all around by a narrow crack. Millennia ago, when there had been a wind upon the Moon, the grey sand had drifted up at the foot, but it took only a few moments' scratching to lay bare the threshold of the stone panel. Already, at the ruins in Clavius, we had established that the luna practice had been to swing a door upon a central pivot so that it turned sidewise through ninety degrees, leaving a passage to either side.
Accordingly. Robson flung himself upon one side and pushed. Finding it immovable, he transferred his strength to the other. It moved back an inch or so and then stuck. Spurred on, he brought every once of his strength to bear, and slowly the great rock door, which would have defied the efforts of three men on Earth, swung around.
Without hesitation, he switched on the light at his belt and walked in. We followed him for ten yards; then he stopped.
'Another door.' he complained irritably. 'They certainly meant to preserve whatever's inside. Let's have some more light on this.'
The second door was plainer than the outer, and the only sign on it was a deep-graven circle. As I looked at that circle, my premonitions intensified. The circle—the world-wide sign of infinity, eternity—could it be possible that here, on Luna ...?
I almost called upon the others to stop, but realised in time how weakly my warning would fall before their exploring zest.
'It's sealed,' someone discovered. He pointed to a dozen or more blobs of black, shiny composition fixed across the jambs. On each of these, too, was impressed the sign of the circle.
To the non-anthropologist, it may seem strange that I should have attached an Earthly importance to the sign of the circle here on the Moon. But it is, with the possible exception of the cross, the earliest and most widely used of symbols. It was significant of man's will to immortality in all parts of the globe from far back in prehistory and it remains significant still. It had dominated the lives of many races, and now here it was again—on the Moon!
I stood unhappily aside and watched the rest break the seals. But the door still refused to yield, even to the efforts of five men. They drew their knives and fell to scraping out a tight-plugged paste around the edges. They tried again, but still the stone square stood adamant.
Robson suggested a small charge of explosive. 'The door has no value,' he pointed out. 'There's no carving on it except the circle.' The rest agreed, after a momentary hesitation. Ten minutes later, the face of the door was cracked across, and a crow-bar was levering the fragments apart. The barrier soon succumbed, and we scrambled over the ruins to arrive in a large hewn room. Here and there, black openings in the walls suggested corridors to further rooms, but we gave them little attention at present, for our interest was centred in a scatter of long boxes lying on the floor.
They were made of some grey metal which reflected the rays of our lamps only dully. One, close by the door, had suffered from the explosion. The lid was loosened and lay awry. Through the space it had opened, there hung a human hand....
Robson laid hold of the battered edge and wrenched the lid clean away. As his eyes fell on the contents, he started back in surprise. We hurried to his side and stared down in astonishment—men of Earth looking for the first time upon a man of the Moon!
He was perfectly preserved, and we, poor fools, wondered at the artistry which had been able so to conserve an unshrouded corpse that after thousands—perhaps millions—of years, it could have appeared to have lived but yesterday. Not one of us guessed the truth about that body. We were sufficiently conceited to believe that no race could have surpassed us in any branch of knowledge.
We looked down upon the Moonman, noting his almost unbelievable chest development; remarking his brown pigmentation and the Mongolian slant of his eyes; observing that he was a little shorter than the shortest of us, and telling one another that he was brachycephalic; classifying him. If any one of us happened to notice that the lips were drawn back in a smile, he did not mention it—of what interest to a scientist is a dead man's smile ...?
When we returned to the Scintilla for rest and replenishment of our oxygen supplies, Captain Toft greeted us with the information that the wear in our firing tubes was more extensive than had been suspected. It would take, he thought, nearly twenty-four hours to effect the replacements.
The delay irritated him, for he had meant to follow daylight around the Moon to the invisible side. The present situation would cause night to overtake us, for the flaring Sun was already not far from the horizon, and the dark line of the two weeks long lunar night was crawling towards us, a bare twelve hours away.
But we did not share his anxiety to be off. Indeed, we welcomed the delay, for it gave us some time for investigation. Night or day would not matter to us in the rock vault.
A dozen specimen coffins were loaded aboard the Scintilla, after we had opened them to assure ourselves that they contained the bodies of six men and six women. With these safely stowed away, we felt at liberty to examine the vault more thoroughly.
There was little to repay detailed investigation of the place itself. No carving or decoration graced the interior, but we found that it and the subsidiary chambers contained a surprising quantity of coffins—altogether, more than four hundred of them.
Each one, when opened, revealed a puzzling device whose purpose we could not guess. As the lid was raised on its hinges, two secondary occurrences took place. At the first loosening of the catches, something inside dropped with a musical tinkle. Investigation revealed the fragments of a small glass globe, smashed to pieces. Then the actual pushing up of the lid thrust, by means of an ingenious arrangement of levers, a slender, hollow glass spike deep into the corpse's flank. This was automatically withdrawn as the lid passed the perpendicular.