The man at the top of the ladder, as the boat approached the Moon, would become scared and start shouting: "Stop! Stop! I'm going to bang my head!" That was the impression you had, seeing her on top of you, immense, and all rough with sharp spikes and jagged, saw-tooth edges. This is how we did the job: in the boat we had a ladder: one of us held it, another climbed to the top, and a third, at the oars, rowed until we were right under the Moon that's why there had to be so many of us (I only mentioned the main ones). There was always a flight of tiny creatures - little crabs, squid, and even some weeds, light and filmy, and coral plants - that broke from the sea and ended up on the Moon, hanging down from that lime-white ceiling, or else they stayed in midair, a phosphorescent swarm we had to drive off, waving banana leaves at them. On those nights the water was very calm, so silvery it looked like mercury, and the fish in it, violet-colored, unable to resist the Moon's attraction, rose to the surface, all of them, and so did the octopuses and the saffron medusas. They held quite a few of us: me, Captain Vhd Vhd, his wife, my deaf cousin, and sometimes little Xlthlx - she was twelve or so at that time. We used to go out with those little rowboats they had in those days, round and flat, made of cork. The spot where the Moon was lowest, as she went by, was off the Zinc Cliffs. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.
#Italo calvino distance of the moon full#
There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair's-breadth well, let's say a few yards anyway. The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high nobody could hold them back. Orbit? Oh, elliptical, of course: for a while it would huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while. But the whole business of the Moon's phases worked in a different way then: because the distance from the Sun was different, and the orbits, and the angle of something or other, I forgot what as for eclipses, with Earth and Moon stuck together the way they were, why, we had eclipses every minute: naturally, those two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly, first one, then the other. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon: when she was full - nights as bright as day, but with a butter-colored light - it looked as if she were going to crush us when she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind and when she was waxing, she came forward with her horns so low she seemed about to stick into the peak of a promontory and get caught there.
How well I know! - old Qfwfq cried, - the rest of you can't remember, but I can. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away: the tides that the Moon herself caused in the Earth's waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth.
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