CHAPTER III

The Moon "Falls"

There came, finally, the thing I had been dreading, and if we had been even a few feet nearer the sea level, we should have perished. The moon filled the sky above us and we felt moisture falling on us.

"Rain!" exclaimed Jim. "No, it can't be. It's salt!"

"Tidal wave," I said, "and it's reached almost to the tops of the mountains. We'll get more of it the next time the moon comes around."

A few hours later there was a new sound added to the roaring and screeching of the wind. We looked at each other.

"It's come," I said. "Let's get inside the cabin. We'll be as safe there as anywhere."

We had barely scrambled in and closed the door when simultaneously with the first golden line of the moon over our eastern horizon there appeared a white wall of turbulent water. It seemed higher because we were looking up at it, but I believe now it was not more than six feet. It poured down toward us while we wondered what it would do to us. As it happened, it did nothing of consequence. It swept around the lower part of the plane and came up over the cabin floor. Then it swept on, following the rapidly moving moon toward the west.

"Next time it's going to get us," I remarked to Jim.

But there was no next time. We had seen the moon for the last time, though of course we did not then know it.

It was about four hours later that the moon and the earth collided. Fortunately for us, we were lying flat on the rocks in our sleeping bags. It was our only way of keeping warm, and besides, we had thought it better to get what rest we could before the moon appeared again with its accompanying tidal wave. As I said, we had got so used to earthquakes that we did not notice them.

Then it happened....

When I recovered consciousness, at first, I could not think where I was. I looked around in bewilderment and at the same moment realized that a warm rain was drenching me. My bones ached terribly. A few feet away Jim lay as if he were dead.

I crawled out of my sleeping bag and went over and shook him. He opened his eyes and looked at me blankly for a moment. Then he groaned and tried to grin. "So we're not dead after all?"

"We'll be drowned if we stay here," I said wearily. "Let's try to get inside the cabin. My, it's hot!"

"Hot?" questioned Jim, trying to rise. "So it is. I think all my bones are broken."

After half rising and half crawling we made our way to the plane.

There was not a trace of ice or snow. The sky was covered with heavy low-lying clouds from which the rain was pouring, but the burnished copper glow had entirely disappeared. It was a perfectly normal sky, or would have been in the tropics. It was daylight, but there was no sun to be seen.

We had neither of us any clothes except those we wore. We stripped off our dripping outer things and let them lie where they fell. There was nothing else to do with them until the rain stopped. We found that heavy woolen underclothing was not much more comfortable than furs in that temperature. We settled down in the cabin and proceeded to make the best of things, quite content to be alive.

It was evident that the moon and the earth had met, and that the earth had come out of the encounter with less damage than anyone had anticipated. The rise in temperature had been expected. Undoubtedly it was much greater elsewhere than in the Arctic.

* * * * *

Two Survivors

Jim and I compared notes as to our actual experiences at the moment of the collision. We both remembered the terrible shock and then had known nothing further. We agreed that except for the shaking up we felt no bad effects from the spell of unconsciousness. Scientists have since assumed that in addition to the shock there was the result of the sudden displacement of the fluids in the inner ear which establish equilibrium. There is no reason to suppose that the experience was not universal among those who survived.

Sitting in our monoplane cabin on the top of a Labrador mountain, wiping the perspiration from our faces and waiting for the rain to cease, we had no knowledge of the fearful destruction which almost wiped out all human and animal life. Others have told of tidal waves of boiling water, of the mountains that melted and the great craters which opened in the earth, belching forth molten lava. We knew nothing of this.

The first thing beside the temperature, that told us we were in a different world, was that night did not come. We had let our watches run down, but as the hours passed and daylight remained with us, we began to wonder. Later in the year we would have expected short nights in this latitude, but now there should be six hours of darkness out of the twenty-four.

However, it did not grow dark, and it continued to rain. The idea of what had actually occurred dawned on me even before we got our first glimpse of the sun. That the revolution of a planet on its axis should correspond with the period of its revolution around the sun was quite easily understandable as a theoretical proposition. Its actual effect, the axial revolution of the earth becoming 365 days, could hardly have been predicted.

While the rain continued, Jim and I made no effort to leave our mountain top. I think it was several hours after we had returned to consciousness that we noticed the wind was no longer blowing. We had got so used to its sound that we rather took it for granted, I suppose, and paid no attention to it.

We were sitting in the cabin, listening to the beating rain, when Jim suddenly exclaimed, "Where's that wind?"

"What?" I began, and then paused. There was a dead silence outside.

"It's stopped, apparently," I said after a moment. "I suppose that means we can see what's happened without being blown to pieces. Come on."

I jumped out of the cabin and raced through the pelting rain up the slope of the depression in which we were sheltered. I am not certain what I expected to see when I looked eastward, but it was certainly not that which lay before me.

The ocean had swept over all the land east of the mountains. It had risen at least three thousand feet, and angry waves were tossing fifty feet below the surface of our mountain. They were beaten down by the rain, or the spray would have warned us of the ocean's nearness before we saw it.

The rain made it difficult to see for any distance, but it was evident that desolation lay before us. Still, we were prepared for that and not discouraged. The steaming water was an evidence that the water's temperature was higher than that of the air. We had no way of determining what the exact temperature was, but I am sure it did not become high enough in that region to destroy marine life. We stood for some time looking out over the ocean in silence.

"It's sure dreary looking," said Jim presently. "I suppose they were all drowned," sweeping his hand in the direction of the settlements we had left. "I'd got to know them well enough so I liked them all," he continued rather sadly.

"No use thinking about it," I answered. "They at least had a gorgeous funeral. It isn't at all certain yet that we're much better off."

"Why? We're alive."

I had been looking west, over valleys and hills steaming like the ocean. I pointed in that direction. "We don't know whether there is anything left except ocean and some land like that. I doubt whether we could subsist very long here."

"There must be animals of some sort we could hunt."

"How long will they live, do you suppose? As soon as these clouds clear away the temperature will go up to an enormous figure, with the sun beating down continuously and no night."

"How hot do you suppose it will get?"

"You can guess about it as well as I can. A hundred and fifty degrees, maybe higher. Certainly hot enough to kill all animal and vegetable life."

* * * * *

Off to a New Land

The tragedy seemed so overwhelming, as I stood on that sandstone cliff and looked out over the water which had buried Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and, as far as I knew, the whole civilized world, that it hardly seemed worth-while for Jim and me to make an effort to survive.

He looked at me curiously. "Buck up, old boy. Things can't be any worse than they seem, and they may be better. We can die fighting, anyway."

"I suppose we'll have to do that, but it hardly seems worth the effort." I thought over the situation for a moment. "I guess the first thing to do is to get the plane in condition to take off as soon as it stops raining. We'll fly toward the pole."

"Maybe we'll find some other people who escaped," he suggested.

"Probably," I replied as we started back to the plane.

I taxied up the gently sloping top of the mountain to a position where we would have room for the take-off. Then we went over it inch by inch without finding anything wrong. I tuned up the engine and it ran as smoothly as a tabby cat purring. We had food enough for several weeks and fuel to carry us about fifteen hundred miles.

When we had satisfied ourselves that we could leave when we wanted to, Jim and I sat down on the rocks and lighted our pipes. We had become skilful in doing that in a driving rain even when the tobacco was damp. There had been no opportunity to dry clothes, and we did not care to wear wet ones even in that steaming temperature. Sickness was one thing we could not afford to risk. Deprived of his normal senses it does not take man long to revert to savagery. As it happened, after the first feeling of strangeness, going without clothes seemed a perfectly natural and sensible thing to do.

Other inhibitions carried over from the destroyed world were harder to get rid of, as our conscientious lawmakers found out later, when they began to reconstruct a civilization based on reason alone. However, such considerations were far enough from the thoughts of Jim and me as we sat there, looking at the sky where the clouds were beginning to break away.

"The rain's stopping," I said. "We won't be able to stay here much longer." Even as I spoke there was a gleam of sunshine.

"That means we've got to decide exactly what we'd better do," said Jim.

"Yes, and we can't afford to make a mistake. If we had enough fuel we might try for Norway. Extreme northern Europe had a better chance of surviving than the rest of the world. No use talking about that, though."

Jim was silent for a minute. "You'll have to decide what's best yourself. Whatever it is will be all right with me."

It seemed likely that if any concerted effort to escape had been made by persons who had access to airplanes and dirigibles--and I had no doubt there had been such an effort--they would have laid a course for Greenland. Settlements on the coast of that great island had doubtless been destroyed by the tidal waves, but the interior would have been a refuge for anyone able to reach it. As far as I could remember, there was not much known of the interior, except that it was mountainous and permanently covered with glaciers. Even an ice covering like that could not long survive the temperatures we were now experiencing. It was possible that it would now be entirely habitable and that there we might find refugees from the United States.

The nearest settlement on Greenland to our present location was Frederiksdal, at the southern point of the island. I had not much hope that it had escaped destruction, and I decided to set a course that would bring us to one of the northern settlements. I outlined my plans to Jim and he agreed that there was nothing to be done that seemed more promising.

I remember that I had a feeling almost of panic as the plane arose and sailed over the strange, turbulent steaming ocean. I felt as if we had been carried back to the early days of the world, before continents were formed and life emerged from chaos.

That feeling lasted only for a few minutes. The plane rose higher and the ocean began to look as oceans always had looked. The clouds were scattered and the sun was shining down on us.