Within the cave the air seemed warmer than before, perhaps because I was
flushed and tired from my exertion. The radiant light from the rocks was
soft. Here all was quiet and peace.
At once I threw myself upon Nona’s couch, stretching my limbs, head
pillowed upon my crooked arm. For a time, as before she stood regarding
me. There was in her gaze now no fear, but a curious softness. I sensed
it. With sudden thought she smiled, and swam across the cave. She got a
stone, hollowed out like a cup. She filled it at the stream and offered
it to me. I drank gratefully.
Again I was conscious of hunger. The fungus-like food was unsatisfying.
I made Nona understand, and she seemed distressed. I could see she
wanted to feed me but had no other food.
Finally she motioned me to lie quiet. I watched her as she stretched
herself prone on the ground near me. Her head was raised; she was
looking keenly, carefully about the cave. Then she began swimming,
slowly, stealthily, no more than a foot or two above the cave floor,
circling about, up along the walls, back overhead following the line of
the ceiling.
Once, when she was hovering over by the side wall, I saw her grow
suddenly alert. I followed her steady gaze; and on a rock fifty feet
from her I made out the outlines of something lying motionless. It
looked like a lizard some three feet long, with white eyes standing out
from its forehead. It was because of the eyes that I first saw it.
Nona was in midair. Then, like a wasp she darted at that thing on the
rock.
The lizard—I shall call it that—saw her coming. It leaped, and sailed
across the cave. I saw it that it had webbed membranes connecting its
six outstretched legs.
Nona turned in the air after it, her slim body as sinuous as her waving
hair itself. She was faster than the lizard, but again, on the opposite
side of the cave, it eluded her.
Back and forth across the cave they went. Often the reptile would dash
for one of the passageways but Nona with her greater intelligence,
always anticipated it and was there to bar its way.
The lizard seemed jointed all over, and it could turn in the air with
extraordinary swiftness. But not so swift as Nona. Once the reptile
whirled back and forth on a sustained flight. Nona followed its every
twist and turn as one bird follows another.
At last she had it in her arms, in midair at the center of the cave.
Calling to me in triumph, she struggled with it, fighting her way down
to the ground.
I started toward her, but her voice and gesture waved me away. The
lizard was screaming—a shrill, hideous scream. But she had its back
bent across her knee. Its spine broke with a crack. It lay still.
By one foreleg she held its quivering body up to me; she was laughing
with happiness as she sought my applause.
We ate the meat of its tail and legs; and satiated, I lay somnolent on
the robes and watched Nona moving about the cave. She extinguished the
fire, and at last approached me timidly. I did not notice her. My eyes
were half closed. I was vaguely planning my own hunting for
food—wondering if there would be other reptiles larger, for me to
capture.
A twitch at the coverings on which I was lying aroused me. Nona was
pulling a robe out from under me for herself. I pushed it toward her.
I did not move. It was very soundless in the cave with only the
murmuring of the stream. Nona curled up on her robe near me. Thus we lay
silent; but I felt her shy gaze always upon me and suddenly I came back
to complete wakefulness.
We stared wordlessly at each other until her gaze timidly dropped. With
heart racing, I moved myself slowly toward her. I was afraid to frighten
her; but she moved, not away, but to me. Abruptly my arms were around
her.
Thus I found my habitable world and my mate—beyond which the legitimate
needs of man do not go.
* * * * *
The days that followed were happy ones for us both. We lived in our cave
and seldom left it. The securing of food, preparing it, eating it, and
sleeping until we were hungry again—this was our life.
Animals, yet both of us with the latent intelligence of civilized human
beings! Our spoken language came very fast. We seemed to be pent up with
words, which once spoken were remembered almost without conscious
effort. So it is with your Earth-children who are the despair of their
parents because sometimes they do not talk until they are almost two
years old. They have it stored up—and when they do give voice, their
fluency is amazing.
Our language? I cannot tell you what it was; I do not know. It seemed
almost as though we were inventing it as we went along.
Nona, in her spiritual and mental existence, was the counterpart of
myself. Who she was, where she had come from—those questions she could
not answer. Her mental life had started on the meteor with herself
almost a matured woman. One’s mental life, you will realize, is
dependent exclusively upon memory. And Nona’s memory previous to the
time of our meeting was short and dim. Perhaps human memory only exists
with spoken language—or social intercourse of a similar kind. I do not
know. Even your hermit speaks, or has spoken to his fellow man.
Time passed. How much time I cannot say. A month—five months perhaps.
Time is as inconstant as the wind itself, as you would very soon
perceive were you to live in semi-darkness, eating when you could get
the food, sleeping when you were tired—and with no mechanical timepiece
or its equivalent to measure arbitrarily your passing existence.
The securing of a steady and varied supply of food gave us trouble. The
day came when we could not capture a lizard. The fungus-like stuff Nona
was growing I had begun heartily to dislike. I had searched every corner
of the cave and its passageways for a lizard and had come back
unsuccessful.
Nona had started a fire and was sitting beside it drying her hair. Water
was evaporating from her shoulders; she had been in the stream. A few
molluscs, or something of the kind, lay at her feet.
“See!” she cried triumphantly. “They are to eat. My man Nemo can get
them—they are in the water.”
I broke them open and ate one. It was good. I kissed her approvingly and
her arms clung about my neck. Nona always was happiest in my
approbation; she seemed to think of nothing save how to win it.
When her caresses were passed, I stood up.
“How do I get them?” I demanded. “Nona must show me once—then I will
get very many of them for us to eat.”
Nona led me to the stream and we waded into it waist-deep. I had bathed
here, but I had never been further along. Nona had, however. She led me
forward to where the water went under a low archway of our cave and
thence into the bowels of the meteor.
The river-bed under my feet began sloping downward. The water deepened
around me—to my chest, shoulders, almost to my neck. I was terrified. I
pulled back from Nona’s hand which was drawing me along. Her hair was
floating out like golden seaweed around us. The milk-white water was
under her uptilted chin.
Her eyes smiled at me tenderly. “No,” she said. “My man Nemo never can
he be afraid.”
Afraid! I could not let her see that. I grunted scornfully, and we went
forward.
The water rose to my own chin. We were well underground now—the ceiling
of this subterranean passageway was hardly a foot above my head. In
front of me I could see where the ceiling touched the water.
Suddenly I remembered Nona. One of her hands still held mine—the other
was braced against a projection of the side wall to hold us against the
gentle current that pressed us forward. The water now almost reached the
top of her head. I could see her face beneath the surface. Her mouth was
opened round and wide; a stream of air bubbles came gurgling up from it.
Her chest was expanding and contracting rhythmically and swiftly,
seemingly with great effort, like a man panting after an exhausting run.
_She was breathing the water!_