otlet downward to the earth
and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. In a little while the
whole slope was dotted with minute plantlets standing at attention in the
blaze of the sun.

They did not stand for long. The bundle-like buds swelled and strained and
opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips,
spreading a whorl of tiny, spiky, brownish leaves, that lengthened
rapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement was slower
than any animal's, swifter than any plant's I have ever seen before. How
can I suggest it to you--the way that growth went on? The leaf tips grew
so that they moved onward even while we looked at them. The brown
seed-case shrivelled and was absorbed with an equal rapidity. Have you
ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand and watched the
little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon plants grew like
that.

In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of these
plants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a second
whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a lifeless
stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-green herbage of
bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their growing.

I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the eastward
a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed and bent,
dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this fringe was the
silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a cactus, and swelling
visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills with air.

Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distended form
was rising over the scrub. But here the light fell upon its sleek sides,
and I could see that its colour was a vivid orange hue. It rose as one
watched it; if one looked away from it for a minute and then back, its
outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congested branches until in a
little time it rose a coralline shape of many feet in height. Compared
with such a growth the terrestrial puff-ball, which will sometimes swell a
foot in diameter in a single night, would be a hopeless laggard. But then
the puff-ball grows against a gravitational pull six times that of the
moon. Beyond, out of gullies and flats that had been hidden from us, but
not from the quickening sun, over reefs and banks of shining rock, a
bristling beard of spiky and fleshy vegetation was strainin