, measured process, this coming of the Lunar night! For an Earth-day
the sunset slowly faded on the Apennines; the poised Earth widened a
little further--an Earth-day of time, with the Earth-disc visibly
rotating, the faint tracery of its oceans and continents passing in
slow, majestic review.

Another Earth-day interval. Then another. And another. Full night now
enveloped Archimedes. Splotches of Earth-light and starlight sheen
slowly shifted as the night advanced.

Between the great crater and the nearby mountains, the broken,
pseudo-level lowlands lay wan in the Earth-light. A few hundred miles,
as distance would be measured upon Earth. A million million rills were
here. Valleys and ridges, ravines, sharp-walled canyons, cliffs and
crags--tiny craters like pock-marks.

Naked, gray porous rock everywhere. This denuded landscape! Cracked and
scarred and tumbled, as though some inexorable Titan torch had seared
and crumbled and broken it, left it now congealed like a wind-lashed sea
abruptly frozen into immobility.

* * * * *

Moonlight upon Earth so gently shines to make romantic a lover's smile!
But the reality of the Lunar night is cold beyond human rationality.
Cold and darkly silent. Grim desolation. Awesome. Majestic. A frowning
majesty that even to the most intrepid human beholder is inconceivably
forbidding.

And there were humans here now. On this tumbled plain, between
Archimedes and the mountains, one small crater amid the million of its
fellows was distinguished this night by the presence of humans. The
Grantline camp! It huddled in the deepest purple shadows on the side of
a bowl-like pit, a crudely circular orifice with a scant two miles
across its rippling rim. There was faint light here to mark the presence
of the living intruders. The blue-glow radiance of Morrell tube-lights
under a spread of glassite.

The Grantline camp stood mid-way up one of the inner cliff-walls of the
little crater. The broken, rock-strewn floor, two miles wide, lay five
hundred feet below the camp. Behind it, the jagged precipitous cliff
rose another five hundred to the heights of the upper rim. A broad
level shelf hung midway up the cliff, and upon it Grantline had built
his little group of glassite dome shelters. Viewed from above there was
the darkly purple crater floor, the upflung circular rim where the
Earth-light tinged the spires and crags with yellow sheen; and on the
shelf, like