“Cavor!” I cried louder, and the rocks echoed me.
I turned fiercely to the rocks and clambered to the summit of them.
“Cavor!” I cried. My voice sounded like the voice of a lost lamb.
The sphere, too, was not in sight, and for a moment a horrible feeling
of desolation pinched my heart.
Then I saw him. He was laughing and gesticulating to attract my
attention. He was on a bare patch of rock twenty or thirty yards away.
I could not hear his voice, but “jump” said his gestures. I hesitated,
the distance seemed enormous. Yet I reflected that surely I must be
able to clear a greater distance than Cavor.
I made a step back, gathered myself together, and leapt with all my
might. I seemed to shoot right up in the air as though I should never
come down....
It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare, to go
flying off in this fashion. I realised my leap had been altogether too
violent. I flew clean over Cavor’s head and beheld a spiky confusion
in a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp of alarm. I put out
my hands and straightened my legs.
[Illustration: “I realised my leap had been too violent”]
I hit a huge fungoid bulk that burst all about me, scattering a mass of
orange spores in every direction, and covering me with orange powder.
I rolled over spluttering, and came to rest convulsed with breathless
laughter.
I became aware of Cavor’s little round face peering over a bristling
hedge. He shouted some faded inquiry. “Eh?” I tried to shout, but
could not do so for want of breath. He made his way towards me, coming
gingerly among the bushes.
“We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “This moon has no discipline.
She’ll let us smash ourselves.”
He helped me to my feet. “You exerted yourself too much,” he said,
dabbing at the yellow stuff with his hand to remove it from my garments.
I stood passive and panting, allowing him to beat off the jelly from my
knees and elbows and lecture me upon my misfortunes. “We don’t quite
allow for the gravitation. Our muscles are scarcely educated yet. We
must practise a little, when you have got your breath.”
I pulled two or three little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a time
on a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feeling
of personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learner
of cycling on earth.
It suddenly occurred to Cavor that the cold air in the gully, after
the brightness of the sun, might give me a fever. So we clambered back
into the sunlight. We found that beyond a few abrasions I had received
no serious injuries from my tumble, and at Cavor’s suggestion we were
presently looking round for some safe and easy landing-place for my
next leap. We chose a rocky slab some ten yards off, separated from us
by a little thicket of olive-green spikes.
“Imagine it there!” said Cavor, who was assuming the airs of a trainer,
and he pointed to a spot about four feet from my toes. This leap I
managed without difficulty, and I must confess I found a certain
satisfaction in Cavor’s falling short by a foot or so and tasting the
spikes of the scrub. “One has to be careful, you see,” he said, pulling
out his thorns, and with that he ceased to be my Mentor, and became my
fellow learner in the art of lunar locomotion.
We chose a still easier jump and did it without difficulty, and then
leapt back again, and to and fro several times, accustoming our muscles
to the new standard. I could never have believed had I not experienced
it, how rapid that adaptation would be. In a very little time indeed,
certainly after fewer than thirty leaps, we could judge the effort
necessary for a distance with almost terrestrial assurance.
And all this time the lunar plants were growing around us, higher and
denser and more entangled, every moment thicker and taller, spiked
plants, green cactus masses, fungi, fleshy and lichenous things,
strangest radiate and sinuous shapes. But we were so intent upon our
leaping, that for a time we gave no heed to their unfaltering expansion.
An extraordinary elation had taken possession of us. Partly, I think,
it was our sense of release from the confinement of the sphere. Mainly,
however, the thin sweetness of the air, which I am certain contained a
much larger proportion of oxygen than our terrestrial atmosphere. In
spite of the strange quality of all about us, I felt as adventurous
and experimental as a cockney would do placed for the first time among
mountains; and I do not think it occurred to either of us, face to
face though we were with the Unknown, to be very greatly afraid.
We were bitten by a spirit of enterprise. We selected a lichenous kopje
perhaps fifteen yards away, and landed neatly on its summit one after
the other. “Good!” we cried to each other; “good!” and Cavor made three
steps and went off to a tempting slope of snow a good twenty yards and
more beyond. I stood for a moment struck by the grotesque effect of his
soaring figure--his dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little round
body, his arms and his knickerbockered legs tucked up tightly--against
the weird spaciousness of the lunar scene. A gust of laughter seized
me, and then I stepped off to follow. Plump! I dropped beside him.
We made a few gargantuan strides, leapt three or four times more, and
sat down at last in a lichenous hollow. Our lungs were painful. We sat
holding our sides and recovering our breath, looking appreciation at
one another. Cavor panted something about “amazing sensations.” And
then came a thought into my head. For the moment it did not seem a
particularly appalling thought, simply a natural question arising out
of the situation.
“By the way,” I said, “where exactly is the sphere?”
Cavor looked at me. “Eh?”
The full meaning of what we were saying struck me sharply.
“Cavor!” I cried, laying a hand on his arm, “where is the sphere?”