THE SENTINEL
Arthur C. Clarke
1951 Avon Periodicals Inc.
The next time you see the full moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let
your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a
small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the great walled plain,
one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium-the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles
in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never
been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.
Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and
equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were
also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our
surface vehicles couldn’t cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisiurn is very flat. There are none of
the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of
any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking
us wherever we wished to go.
I was geologist-or selenologist, if you want to be pedantic in charge of. the group exploring the
southern region of the Mare. We had crossed a hundred miles of it in a week, skirting the foothills
of the mountains along the shore of what was once the ancient sea, some thousand million years
before. When life was beginning on Earth, it was already dying here. The waters were retreating
down the flanks of those stupendous cliff s, retreating into the empty heart of the Moon. Over the
land which we were crossing, the tideless ocean had once been half a mile deep, and now the only
trace of moisture was the hoarfrost one could sometimes find in caves which the searing sunlight
never penetrated.
We had begun our journey early in the slow lunar dawn, and still had almost a week of Earth-time
before nightfall. Half a dozen times a day we would leave our vehicle and go outside in the
spacesuits to hunt for interesting minerals, or to place markers for the guidance of future travelers.
It was an uneventful routine. There is nothing hazardous or even particularly exciting about lunar
exploration. We could live comfortably for a month in our pressurized tractors, and if we ran into
trouble we could always radio for help and sit tight until one of the spaceships came to our rescue.
I said just now that there was nothing exciting about lunar exploration, but of course that isn’t true.
One could never grow tired of those incredible mountains, so much more rugged than the gentle
hills of Earth. We never knew, as we rounded the capes and promontories of that vanished sea,
what new splendors would be revealed to us. The whole southern curve of the Mare Crisiurn is a
vast delta where a score of rivers once found their way into the ocean, fed perhaps by the torrential
rains that must have lashed the mountains in the brief volcanic age when the Moon was young.
Each of these ancient valleys was an invitation, challenging us to climb into the unknown uplands
beyond. But we had a hundred miles still to cover, and could only look longingly at the heights
which others must scale.
We kept Earth-time aboard the tractor, and precisely at 22.00 hours the final radio message would
be sent out to Base and we would close down for the day. Outside, the rocks would still be burning
beneath the almost vertical sun, but to us it was night until we awoke again eight hours later. Then
one of us would prepare breakfast, there would be a great buzzing of electric razors, and someone
would switch on the short-wave radio from Earth. Indeed, when the smell of frying sausages began
to fill the cabin, it was sometimes hard to believe that we were not back on our own world -
everything was so normal and homely, apart from the feeling of decreased weight and the unnatural
slowness with which objects fell.
It was my turn to prepare breakfast in the corner of the main cabin that served as a galley. I can
remember that moment quite vividly after all these years, for the radio had just played one of my
favorite melodies, the old Welsh air, “David of the White, Rock.”
Our driver was already outside in his space-suit, inspecting our caterpillar treads. My assistant,
Louis Garnett, was up forward in the control position, making some belated entries in yesterday’s
log.
As I stood by the frying pan waiting, like any terrestrial housewife, for the sausages to brown, I let
my gaze wander idly over the mountain walls which covered the whole of the southern horizon,
marching out of sight to east and west below the curve of the Moon. They seemed only a mile or
two from the tractor, but I knew that the nearest was twenty miles away. On the Moon, of course,
there is no loss of detail with distance-none of that almost imperceptible haziness which softens and
sometimes transfi