My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came into
the upper air. The temperature of the sphere began to rise forthwith.
I knew it behoved me to drop at once. Far below me, in a darkling
twilight, stretched a great expanse of sea. I opened every window I
could, and fell--out of sunshine into evening, and out of evening into
night. Vaster grew the earth and vaster, swallowing up the stars, and
the silvery translucent starlit veil of cloud it wore spread out to
catch me. At last the world seemed no longer a sphere but flat, and
then concave. It was no longer a planet in the sky, but the world of
Man. I shut all but an inch or so of earthward window, and dropped with
a slackening velocity. The broadening water, now so near that I could
see the dark glitter of the waves, rushed up to meet me. The sphere
became very hot. I snapped the last strip of window, and sat scowling
and biting my knuckles, waiting for the impact....
The sphere hit the water with a huge splash: it must have sent it
fathoms high. At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open. Down
I went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere pressing
against my feet, and so drove up again as a bubble drives. And at the
last I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the sea, and my
journey in space was at an end.
The night was dark and overcast. Two yellow pin-points far away showed
the passing of a ship, and nearer was a red glare that came and went.
Had not the electricity of my glow-lamp exhausted itself, I could have
got picked up that night. In spite of the inordinate fatigue I was
beginning to feel, I was excited now, and for a time hopeful, in a
feverish, impatient way, that so my travelling might end.
But at last I ceased to move about, and sat, wrists on knees, staring
at a distant red light. It swayed up and down, rocking, rocking. My
excitement passed. I realised I had yet to spend another night at least
in the sphere. I perceived myself infinitely heavy and fatigued. And so
I fell asleep.
A change in my rhythmic motion awakened me. I peered through the
refracting glass, and saw that I had come aground upon a huge shallow
of sand. Far away I seemed to see houses and trees, and seaward a
curved, vague distortion of a ship hung between sea and sky.
I stood up and staggered. My one desire was to emerge. The manhole was
upward, and I wrestled with the screw. Slowly I opened the manhole. At
last the air was singing in again as once it had sung out. But this
time I did not wait until the pressure was adjusted. In another moment
I had the weight of the window on my hands, and I was open, wide open,
to the old familiar sky of earth.
The air hit me on the chest so that I gasped. I dropped the glass
screw. I cried out, put my hands to my chest, and sat down. For a time
I was in pain. Then I took deep breaths. At last I could rise and move
about again.
I tried to thrust my head through the manhole, and the sphere rolled
over. It was as though something had lugged my head down directly it
emerged. I ducked back sharply, or I should have been pinned face under
water. After some wriggling and shoving I managed to crawl out upon
sand, over which the retreating waves still came and went.
I did not attempt to stand up. It seemed to me that my body must be
suddenly changed to lead. Mother Earth had her grip on me now--no
Cavorite intervening. I sat down heedless of the water that came over
my feet.
It was dawn, a grey dawn, rather overcast, but showing here and there a
long patch of greenish grey. Some way out a ship was lying at anchor,
a pale silhouette of a ship with one yellow light. The water came
rippling in in long shallow waves. Away to the right curved the land,
a shingle bank with little hovels, and at last a lighthouse, a sailing
mark and a point. Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken here
and there by pools of water, and ending a mile away perhaps in a low
shore of scrub. To the north-east some isolated watering-place was
visible, a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest things that I could
see on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky. What strange men
can have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I do
not know. There they are, like pieces of Brighton lost in the waste.
For a long time I sat there, yawning and rubbing my face. At last I
struggled to rise. It made me feel that I was lifting a weight. I stood
up.
I stared at the distant houses. For the first time since our
starvation in the crater I thought of earthly food. “Bacon,” I
whispered, “eggs. Good toast and good coffee.... And how the devil am I
going to get all this stuff to Lympne?” I wondered where I was. It was
an east shore anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.
I heard footsteps scrunching in the sand, and a little round-faced,
friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped about
his shoulders, and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up the
beach. I knew instantly that I must be in England. He was staring
almost intently at the sphere and me. He advanced staring. I daresay I
looked a ferocious savage enough--dirty, unkempt, to an indescribable
degree; but it did not occur to me at the time. He stopped at a
distance of twenty yards. “Hul-lo, my man!” he said doubtfully.
“Hullo yourself!” said I.
He advanced, reassured by that. “What on earth is that thing?” he asked.
“Can you tell me where I am?” I asked.
“That’s Littlestone,” he said, pointing to the houses; “and that’s
Dungeness! Have you just landed? What’s that thing you’ve got? Some
sort of machine?”
“Yes.”
“Have you floated ashore? Have you been wrecked or something? What is
it?”
I meditated swiftly. I made an estimate of the little man’s appearance
as he drew nearer. “By Jove!” he said, “you’ve had a time of it! I
thought you--Well--Where were you cast away? Is that thing a sort of
floating thing for saving life?”
I decided to take that line for the present. I made a few vague
affirmatives. “I want help,” I said hoarsely. “I want to get some stuff
up the beach--stuff I can’t very well leave about.” I became aware of
three other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and straw
hats, coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathing
section of this Littlestone!
“Help!” said the young man; “rather!” He became vaguely active. “What
particularly do you want done?” He turned round and gesticulated. The
three young men accelerated their pace. In a minute they were about me,
plying me with questions I was indisposed to answer. “I’ll tell all
that later,” I said. “I’m dead beat. I’m a rag.”
“Come up to the hotel,” said the foremost little man. “We’ll look after
that thing there.”
I hesitated. “I can’t,” I said. “In that sphere there’s two big bars of
gold.”
They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a new
inquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently they
had the Selenites’ crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had
not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was like
kittens round a beetle. They didn’t know what to do with the stuff. The
fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars, and then
dropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.
“It’s lead, or gold!” said one.
“Oh, it’s _gold_!” said another.
“Gold, right enough,” said the third.
Then they all stared at me, and then they all stared at the ship lying
at anchor.
“I say!” cried the little man. “But where did you get that?”