The sweat started out upon her forehead. Above her head, the escape-valve fluttered feebly, she imagined. What a death! Such a death as Poe might have conceived! Already, she believed that she had some difficulty in breathing. The sunlight seemed dimmer, somehow. Were her ears singing? No; it was only the recurrence of the escape-valve's twitter. She groaned, and the reverberation echoed in the helmet like the roar of a lunar beast.
Sick with terror, she turned and scrambled on hands and knees up the rocky sides of the crater until she stood upon the summit of the ridge. There was no sign of the Ring anywhere--only the scarred, spiked plain, with its white sepulchers of rock. Tears of self-pity burned in her eyes; but she could not wipe them away, and they drained down her cheeks and lips into her mouth. They would be looking for her--waiting for her! What agonies would her lover now be suffering, searching that dead, empty plain with his field-glasses for the shadow of the moving thing which meant so much to him!
She found herself panting, and tried to control her bosom in the belief that, by so doing, she could economize the breath of life. Fifty minutes had now been consumed since she had left the Ring. Perhaps it was only a short distance away--just there, or there--its beckoning tripod hidden from her feverish gaze by the moon's curvature. Only ten minutes left of life! How should she spend them? In vain rushes for escape, like a dying bull? That would be fruitless. Better to remain where her friends might perchance see her through their glasses. The valve chirruped almost inaudibly. Only a few minutes more--eight--seven! She must signal, wave something--her handkerchief! Mechanically she felt for her pocket! Only the hard surface of the vacuum armor. She stood upon the block of burnt porphyritic rock and waved her arms wildly. These leprous cliffs, these whitened ridges were like a charnel-house of white bones--her graveyard! The pinnacles were waving back at her. She was dying! Was she already dead, perhaps? Had her soul escaped through the valve, and was it now hovering over that grotesquely clad thing that had been she? The woman who died on the moon! The lady in the moon! Where had the lady come from? In a flying machine.