His face caught something of my dismay. He stood up and stared about
him at the scrub that fenced us in and rose about us, straining upward
in a passion of growth. He put a dubious hand to his lips. He spoke
with a sudden lack of assurance. “I think,” he said slowly, “we left
it ... somewhere ... about _there_.”
He pointed a hesitating finger that wavered in an arc.
“I’m not sure.” His look of consternation deepened. “Anyhow,” he said,
with his eyes on me, “it can’t be far.”
We had both stood up. We made unmeaning ejaculations, our eyes sought
in the twining, thickening jungle round about us.
All about us on the sunlit slopes frothed and swayed the darting
shrubs, the swelling cactus, the creeping lichens, and wherever the
shade remained the snowdrifts lingered. North, south, east, and west
spread an identical monotony of unfamiliar forms. And somewhere, buried
already among this tangled confusion, was our sphere, our home, our
only provision, our only hope of escape from this fantastic wilderness
of ephemeral growths into which we had come.
“I think, after all,” he said, pointing suddenly, “it might be over
there.”
“No,” I said. “We have turned in a curve. See! here is the mark of my
heels. It’s clear the thing must be more to the eastward, much more.
No!--the sphere must be over there.”
“I _think_,” said Cavor, “I kept the sun upon my right all the time.”
“Every leap, it seems to _me_,” I said, “my shadow flew before me.”
We stared into one another’s eyes. The area of the crater had become
enormously vast to our imaginations, the growing thickets already
impenetrably dense.
“Good heavens! What fools we have been!”
“It’s evident that we must find it again,” said Cavor, “and that soon.
The sun grows stronger. We should be fainting with the heat already if
it wasn’t so dry. And ... I’m hungry.”
I stared at him. I had not suspected this aspect of the matter before.
But it came to me at once--a positive craving. “Yes,” I said with
emphasis. “I am hungry too.”
He stood up with a look of active resolution. “Certainly we must find
the sphere.”
As calmly as possible we surveyed the interminable reefs and thickets
that formed the floor of the crater, each of us weighing in silence the
chances of our finding the sphere before we were overtaken by heat and
hunger.
“It can’t be fifty yards from here,” said Cavor, with indecisive
gestures. “The only thing is to beat round about until we come upon it.”
“That is all we can do,” I said, without any alacrity to begin our
hunt. “I wish this confounded spike bush did not grow so fast!”
“That’s just it,” said Cavor. “But it _was_ lying on a bank of snow.”
I stared about me in the vain hope of recognising some knoll or shrub
that had been near the sphere. But everywhere was a confusing sameness,
everywhere the aspiring bushes, the distending fungi, the dwindling
snow banks, steadily and inevitably changed. The sun scorched and
stung, the faintness of an unaccountable hunger mingled with our
infinite perplexity. And even as we stood there, confused and lost
amidst unprecedented things, we became aware for the first time of a
sound upon the moon other than the stir of the growing plants, the
faint sighing of the wind, or those that we ourselves had made.
Boom ... Boom ... Boom ...
It came from beneath our feet, a sound in the earth. We seemed to hear
it with our feet as much as with our ears. Its dull resonance was
muffled by distance, thick with the quality of intervening substance.
No sound that I can imagine could have astonished us more, or have
changed more completely the quality of things about us. For this sound,
rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed to us as though it could be nothing
but the striking of some gigantic buried clock.
Boom ... Boom ... Boom ...
Sound suggestive of still cloisters, of sleepless nights in crowded
cities, of vigils and the awaited hour, of all that is orderly and
methodical in life, booming out pregnant and mysterious in this
fantastic desert! To the eye everything was unchanged: the desolation
of bushes and cacti waving silently in the wind, stretched unbroken to
the distant cliffs, the still dark sky was empty overhead, and the hot
sun hung and burned. And through it all, a warning, a threat, throbbed
this enigma of sound.
Boom ... Boom ... Boom ...
We questioned one another in faint and faded voices. “A clock?”
“Like a clock!”
“What is it?”
“What can it be?”
“Count,” was Cavor’s belated suggestion, and at that word the striking
ceased.
The silence, the rhythmic disappointment of the silence, came as a
fresh shock. For a moment one could doubt whether one had ever heard a
sound. Or whether it might not still be going on. Had I indeed heard a
sound?
I felt the pressure of Cavor’s hand upon my arm. He spoke in an
undertone, as though he feared to wake some sleeping thing. “Let us
keep together,” he whispered, “and look for the sphere. We must get
back to the sphere. This is beyond our understanding.”
“Which way shall we go?”
He hesitated. An intense persuasion of presences, of unseen things
about us and near us, dominated our minds. What could they be? Where
could they be? Was this arid desolation, alternately frozen and
scorched, only the outer rind and mask of some subterranean world?
And if so, what sort of world? What sort of inhabitants might it not
presently disgorge upon us?
And then, stabbing the aching stillness as vivid and sudden as an
unexpected thunderclap, came a clang and rattle as though great gates
of metal had suddenly been flung apart.
It arrested our steps. We stood gaping helplessly. Then Cavor stole
towards me.
“I do not understand!” he whispered close to my face. He waved his hand
vaguely skyward, the vague suggestion of still vaguer thoughts.
“A hiding-place! If anything came....”