What do you say, dear--shall we go down and see if the searchlight will show us anything?
You know there may be something like breathable air down there, and perhaps living creatures who can breathe it." "Certainly!" replied Zaidie decisively; "haven't we come to see things that nobody else has ever seen ?" Redgrave went down to the engine-room, and presently the _Astronef_ changed her course, and in a few minutes was hanging with her polished hull bathed in sunlight, like a star suspended over the unfathomable gulf of darkness below.
As they sank below the level of the sun-rays, Murgatroyd turned on both the searchlights.

They dropped down ever slowly and more slowly until gradually the two long, thin streams of light began to spread themselves out; the lower they went the more the beams spread out, and by the time the _Astronef_ came gently to a rest they were swinging round her in broad fans of diffused light over a dark, marshy surface, with scattered patches of grey moss and reeds, with dull gleams of stagnant water showing between them.
"Air and water at last! I thought so," said Redgrave, as he rejoined her on the upper deck; "air and water and eternal darkness! Well, we shall find life on the moon here if anywhere." "I suppose we had better put on our breathing-dresses, hadn't we ?" asked Zaidie.
"Certainly," he replied, "because, although there is some sort of air, we don't know yet whether we shall be able to breathe it.

It may be half carbon-dioxide for all we know; but a few matches will soon tell us that." Within a quarter of an hour they were again standing on the surface.
Murgatroyd had orders to follow them as far as possible with the head searchlight, which, in the comparatively rarefied atmosphere, appeared to have a range of several miles.

Redgrave struck a match, and held it up level with his head; it burnt with a clear, steady, yellow flame.
"Where a match will burn a man should be able to breathe," he said.

"I'm going to see what lunar air is like." "For Heaven's sake be careful, dear," came the reply in pleading tones across the wire.
"All right; but don't open your helmet till I tell you." He then raised the hermetically closed slide of glass, which formed the front of the helmets, half an inch or so.