We started off, moving stealthily with the most exaggerated precautions
against noise. We went towards a thicket of scrub. A clangour like
hammers flung about a boiler hastened our steps. “We must crawl,”
whispered Cavor.
The lower leaves of the bayonet plants, already overshadowed by the
newer ones above, were beginning to wilt and shrivel so that we could
thrust our way in among the thickening stems without serious injury. A
stab in the face or arm we did not heed. At the heart of the thicket I
stopped, and stared panting into Cavor’s face.
“Subterranean,” he whispered. “Below.”
“They may come out.”
“We must find the sphere!”
“Yes,” I said; “but how?”
“Crawl till we come to it.”
“But if we don’t?”
“Keep hidden. See what they are like.”
“We will keep together,” said I.
He thought. “Which way shall we go?”
“We must take our chance.”
We peered this way and that. Then very circumspectly, we began to crawl
through the lower jungle, making, so far as we could judge, a circuit,
halting now at every waving fungus, at every sound, intent only on
the sphere from which we had so foolishly emerged. Ever and again
from out of the earth beneath us came concussions, beatings, strange,
inexplicable, mechanical sounds; and once, and then again, we thought
we heard something, a faint rattle and tumult, borne to us through the
air. But fearful as we were we dared essay no vantage-point to survey
the crater. For long we saw nothing of the beings whose sounds were so
abundant and insistent. But for the faintness of our hunger and the
drying of our throats that crawling would have had the quality of a
very vivid dream. It was so absolutely unreal. The only element with
any touch of reality was these sounds.
Figure it to yourself! About us the dreamlike jungle, with the silent
bayonet leaves darting overhead, and the silent, vivid, sun-splashed
lichens under our hands and knees, waving with the vigour of their
growth as a carpet waves when the wind gets beneath it. Ever and again
one of the bladder fungi, bulging and distending under the sun, loomed
upon us. Ever and again some novel shape in vivid colour obtruded.
The very cells that built up these plants were as large as my thumb,
like beads of coloured glass. And all these things were saturated
in the unmitigated glare of the sun, were seen against a sky that
was bluish black and spangled still, in spite of the sunlight, with
a few surviving stars. Strange! the very forms and texture of the
stones were strange. It was all strange, the feeling of one’s body was
unprecedented, every other movement ended in a surprise. The breath
sucked thin in one’s throat, the blood flowed through one’s ears in a
throbbing tide--thud, thud, thud, thud....
And ever and again came gusts of turmoil, hammering, the clanging and
throb of machinery, and presently--the bellowing of great beasts!