Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 26: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

sparks. Doc and I climbed into the harness of the flyers and then, Doc leading, we rose above the walls of the clay pit. It was a strange landscape that lay before us. Behind, the green grass, long and heavy, with here and there a patch of huge green-white flowers resembling clover, gently rose to the base of a great, jet-black cliff some ten - or fifteen miles away. In the binocular flying-goggles its pillar-like forma- tion was plain. Before us, the same grassy meadow stretched for miles and ‘miles into the distance, to meet the oily waters of a smooth green sea, so calm as to be mistaken for part of the level plain. Everywhere rose clusters of deep pyrple crystals, as big as and bigger than that of the pit, with here and there a single huge white one, or, rather, a more or less transparent one, that loomed like an obelisk against the green sky and the green sun. At their bases were the red clay pits, eroded by the tiny rills that wandered from | the base of the black-cliffs down between crimson banks of: clay to the glassy waters of the sea or to one or another of the pits. Stil another thing struck us simultaneously. Despite the apparent size of the world on whose surface we stood, or, rather, in whose atmosphere we floated, the force of gravity was very little greater than on earth. In the pit, we had walked about freely, with approximately the effort of one who wades knee-deep in water. Yet, as we could plainly see, the horizon was a good deal farther away than it would be on earth. There were, of course, several explanations. We might be on a large world of low density. We might be on a hollow planet. This world may have been flattened out more than the earth, into the form of an onion. And we might be at the pole of a world approximately earth-size. 3 The last explanation was soon ruled out, however, for while we were stil! engaged in exploring the long slope below the cliffs, the sun sank into the sea, and myriad stars began to appear, apparently more numerous as well as brighter than in our own system. Indeed, the heavens fairly blazed with white light, a great relief after the green glare of day. Here and there were great red and blue and yellow globes, shining against the white. We saw no other green suns, nor could we detect a satellite, but it was strikingly in support of Doc's theories to note that aside from the greater visibility of most of the stars, which changed the appearance of the heavens greatly, the familiar arrangements of the constellations were all apparent as at home, though most of the colors had changed. Willingly we returned to where the violet sparks of the projector showed low above the grassy slope, to wait beside the cylinder for the morrow. The night was long, nearly twice the length of an earth night, and we later found that the day was correspondingly short, showing that the season was far advanced as on earth, but as a whole the period of rotation of this planet was greater by nearly half than our own. During the night, which We spent star-gazing and planning, we thought that we noticed a sort of reddish glow above the distant cliffs, but we were content to leave further exploration until the morrow. When the sun appeared, we were ready. 24