The Long Rain

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The Long Rain is a short story by science fiction author Ray Bradbury. This story was originally published in 1950 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.

The first paragraph reads as follows:

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

A lieutenant and three of his men initially survive a crash-landing on the planet Venus, here rendered as a world of perpetual rain, always at dusk and nicknamed "China" as a reference to its inhabitants' diabolical use of water as a means of torture. The men traverse the white and black jungle in search of a "Sun Dome" — a yellow house, warm, dry, round and bright as the sun, maintained by a small floating free globe that serves as an artificial star. The ill-fated explorers eventually succumb to the tortures of the unending downpour and the harsh terrain, losing both their sanity and their lives along the way. Only one of them ultimately survives to find sanctuary.