Mountains of the Moon

A FORMATION of fighting planes, all of the same type and model, cannot be counted on to manœuvre together at the rated speed and ceiling of one alone. Motors and pilots, machinery and mind — both have their daily indispositions and elations. The collective best is never as good as the individual best. But the collective best can be tested, averaged, and gauged almost as definitely as the powers of a single plane; and it was for such a test that our flight of three two-seaters taxied out on the field to find the greatest height at which all were still handy and supple to the controls.

We do not want to fly this February afternoon in this weather, but time is short and each day must show its data sheet. The cold rain of the morning that soaked down the snow banks on each side of the hangar doors has drawn itself up and congealed to a granite-gray cloud ceiling at three thousand feet. As we take off and the land falls away, wet streets of the town below and gray reaches of river throw up weak gleams of light, and across the bay the wharves, buildings, and shipping of the farther shore loom sootily out of the murk. Westward, inland toward the hills, snow clouds are banking up, lead-blue. We climb noisily, aimlessly, in wide circles, looking for a hole in the hard gray sky.

Now, on the edge of the ominous western bank, about halfway up the horizon, the sky is pulled apart. A wisp of color shows — apple-green, tinged with gold. And as we race for it, full throttle, another curtain lifts and the opening turns to blue, like bright sea showing in the far mouth of a cave. The gray cloud roof, steepening its curve down to the horizon, has become also a wall, and as we close with it we sense thickness, and our rift becomes a tunnel to the blue. But the tunnel we enter has no palpable sides; only echelons of weaving, foggy curtains, one behind the other like side drops on a stage, each opening, as we pass, a flanking, indefinite vista of blank fog.

Suddenly one of these swaying curtains drifts in front of our plane, veiling our leader from us. At the same moment Number 3 on our left is lost and the cold stream of cloud breath flows over our faces. The duplicate stick in front of me jerks back toward the padded mass that represents my right knee. We climb and bank steeply outward. No thought of keeping formation now; the whole idea is to get as far as possible from the others in our blindness, for one barely perceptible scrape of wings at flying speed will send two planes fluttering and dropping dead, to the bottom of the air. Once we have forsaken the ground it is hard to realize that we normally inhabit Davy Jones’s new locker.

The compass still spins, the altimeter is rising, my shoulders press hard against their wooden rest, and the roar of the propeller continues. I have no other means of knowing what we do or that we move at all. Always the wet, cold hands of the blind fog pass over my face. Of course the pilot has his turn-and-bank indicator. But this parting from all criterions is also to die a little. . . .

As when a diver rises toward the surface of the sea the water turns translucent, so now the gray fog turns white with opalescent warmths of light until, with a new, shrill cry in the motor, shredding the last wisps of cloud, our plane leaps up into the sun.

No earthly sun is so golden, so dazzling, as this brightness which at first confuses one sense with another; for even when we cover our eyes, long swords of light vibrate and ring across the sky. The fog, the damp, all that has affinity to water evaporates in the thin, cold drafts of the high air. Arid, clear-thinking, and elated, we gradually unshade our eyes and look down for our companion planes.

We have broken through the crust of a hollow planet. Though our altimeter reads eleven thousand, we are still flying but three thousand above an arctic world without a sea; an infinite, snowy plain, broken by mountains and rimmed by mountains. And yet, unlike our own world, it does not contract as we rise higher, and its horizon remains in place although the gold of its sun and the blue of its sky are paling to silver.

Except for one aspect only, this new land would be like an earthly Antarctica; pure, cloudless sky and shining, markless snow, rising and falling from plain to mountain and down to plain again. But it is that one difference which divides the known from the fabulous. The slopes we know rise from the land concavely, like tents, but these cloud hills, convex and rounded like swelling sails, convey bleak thoughts of mountains on the moon. . . .

My pilot turns and points. On the far fields of snow two black dots are slowly moving. I almost look for their trail in the drifts. They turn, grow, and take color, rising fast with a fortymile wind on their tail. We fly toward them, laboring into the teeth of it.

They scud by above us, soundless in the roar of our own motor, as birds drive by, half turned on the wind. The horizon drops with a rush, the snow comes up; then snow and sky and horizon spin, slow down, steady — and we are flying in our place again as the right rear point of the V formation. For, as the other two passed, my pilot nosed up and over on our back, reversing our course to theirs, and then rolled over into normal flight.

The altimeter reads fifteen thousand; the controls are slow. Our leader motions us into closer formation, and we circle about, ready to go down, searching for some bottomless abyss in those hollow mountains of the sky. Suddenly a dark rift appears, small as a window and almost below. Our tails kick up and all three planes drop hawklike in a dive. No time to lose. And I strain back, pushing against the forward edge of my cockpit, trusting our window will not close this time: three ships in close formation, blind in a power dive.

But the dark gap widens, and through it, against a coarse mat of slanting rain, as in a cheap newsprint half-tone, I see a grimy vignette of sooty water, ships at a wharf, and gray concrete buildings. The whole drab, familiar scene widens like a movie ‘fade-out’ reversed. We are through. Our nose comes up. My weight is in the seat again. The slip stream tears at us no longer. And above, the gray stone has rolled back over the blue gate under the mountain.

We lumber along toward the airdrome. You know, when diving into the sea out of the blue and gold sunshine and pausing to stand on the sea bottom, how green and gloomy the light becomes? This murky light is like that, except that it is gray. And the infinite detail of land and water and ships and roads and houses is complicated, needless, tiring — and so dingy.

I think we understand Heaven to be above the sky, because, up there, all things are simple and clear.