“It is clear,” meditated Cavor, “they are intelligent. One can
hypotheticate certain things. As they have not killed us at once, they
must have ideas of mercy. Mercy! at any rate of restraint. Possibly of
intercourse. They may meet us. And this apartment and the glimpses we
had of its guardian. These fetters! A high degree of intelligence....”
“I wish to heaven,” cried I, “I’d thought even twice! Plunge after
plunge. First one fluky start and then another. It was my confidence
in you! _Why_ didn’t I stick to my play? That was what I was equal
to. That was my world and the life I was made for. I could have
finished that play. I’m certain ... it was a good play. I had the
scenario as good as done. Then.... Conceive it! leaping to the moon!
Practically--I’ve thrown my life away! That old woman in the inn near
Canterbury had better sense.”
I looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. The darkness had given place
to that bluish light again. The door was opening, and several noiseless
Selenites were coming into the chamber. I became quite still, staring
at their grotesque faces.
Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest.
I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls. One elemental
need at least our minds could understand in common. They were bowls of
some metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light;
and each contained a number of whitish fragments. All the cloudy pain
and misery that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape of
hunger. I eyed these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in
dreams, at that time it seemed a small matter that at the end of the
arms that lowered one towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and
thumb, like the end of an elephant’s trunk.
The stuff in the bowl was loose in texture, and whitish brown in
colour--rather like lumps of some cold soufflé, and it smelt faintly
like mushrooms. From a partially divided carcass of a mooncalf that
we presently saw, I am inclined to believe it must have been mooncalf
flesh.
My hands were so tightly chained that I could barely contrive to reach
the bowl; but when they saw the effort I made, two of them dexterously
released one of the turns about my wrist. Their tentacle hands were
soft and cold to my skin. I immediately seized a mouthful of the food.
It had the same laxness in texture that all organic structures seem to
have upon the moon; it tasted rather like a gauffre or a damp meringue,
but in no way was it disagreeable. I took two other mouthfuls. “I
_wanted_--foo’!” said I, tearing off a still larger piece....
For a time we ate with an utter absence of self-consciousness. We ate
and presently drank like tramps in a soup kitchen. Never before nor
since have I been hungry to the ravenous pitch, and save that I have
had this very experience I could never have believed that, a quarter
of a million of miles out of our proper world, in utter perplexity of
soul, surrounded, watched, touched by beings more grotesque and inhuman
than the worst creations of a nightmare, it would be possible for me to
eat in utter forgetfulness of all these things. They stood about us
watching us, and ever and again making a slight elusive twittering that
stood them, I suppose, in the stead of speech. I did not even shiver at
their touch. And when the first zeal of my feeding was over, I could
note that Cavor, too, had been eating with the same shameless abandon.