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showed a huge undulating plain, cold and gray, a gray that deepened
eastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow. Innumerable
rounded gray summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy substance,
stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity, gave us our first
inkling of the distance of the crater wall. These hummocks looked like
snow. At the time I thought they were snow. But they were not--they were
mounds and masses of frozen air.
So it was at first; and then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came the lunar
day.
The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at
its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots towards
us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the touch of the
dawn a reek of gray vapour poured upward from the crater floor, whirls and
puffs and drifting wraiths of gray, thicker and broader and denser, until
at last the whole westward plain was steaming like a wet handkerchief held
before the fire, and the westward cliffs were no more than refracted glare
beyond.
"It is air," said Cavor. "It must be air--or it would not rise like
this--at the mere touch of a sun-beam. And at this pace...."
He peered upwards. "Look!" he said.
"
What?" I asked.
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