If he looked in the direction of the sun, the ground looked a pale, golden brown. It was the same if he looked away from the sun, beyond his own long shadow. But to left or right the colours got darker, to a richer deep brown. If he looked under his feet, or at a handful of soil in his hand, the colour was a deep charcoal grey, sometimes even a black.

But anyhow the Moon colours looked pale and lifeless when he looked at the blue armbands on his suit, his blue lunar overshoes, the brilliant black and gold and silver of the Shoemaker, and especially the ice-blue of the Earth, when he looked up.

He knew he would have to learn to take account of all this, learn to read the landscape on its own terms, in its own conditions of light and shadow.

He did a little geologizing.

He was standing on a dark plain, its surface evidently sculpted by craters, of all dimensions, craters on craters. There were rolling hills, almost like dunes, their form softened and fluid, their flanks littered with boulders thrown out of the larger craters. And close by he could make out smaller craters, almost rimless pits in the soil, and the centre of each one was marked by a spot of fused glass, a remnant of the punch which had dug out that particular pit.

It was a landscape unlike any he had seen on Earth.

The mountains — foothills of the Aristarchus crater rim walls — rose up like topped-off pyramids into the black sky, their sides dauntingly steep. There was no easy comparison with terrestrial features; the hills were neither as crag sharp as the granite of the Rockies, nor as smoothly rounded as the ice rivers of Norway.

And besides, almost all of Earth’s features — certainly all of the mountains — were young, at any rate by comparison with what he would find on the Moon. Some of the mountains of the Moon were almost as old as the Solar System itself.

But the shadows of the mountains were not the wells of darkness he had expected, for light, reflected from nearby slopes and plains, softened the shadows. The light, reflected from the rocky ground, was, of course, Moonlight: precisely that, the very light which illuminated Earth’s night sky.

He’d ridden through Moonlight across a quarter of a million miles. And now, standing here, he and Geena were bathed in it.

He shivered.

He took a step forward, over dust and broken rock. The Moon gave him a firm footing, beneath a layer of looser dust that compressed like unpacked snow.

The loose stuff varied from place to place, from maybe a few inches thick to perhaps a foot. He knew the reason for that: the regolith was created by a hail of micrometeorite bombardment, and it deepened and matured with time.

So when he walked into a patch of softer dust, he was walking somewhere older.