“Cavor!” I cried louder, and the rocks echoed me.
I turned fiercely to the rocks and clambered to the summit of them.
“Cavor!” I cried. My voice sounded like the voice of a lost lamb.
The sphere, too, was not in sight, and for a moment a horrible feeling
of desolation pinched my heart.
Then I saw him. He was laughing and gesticulating to attract my
attention. He was on a bare patch of rock twenty or thirty yards away.
I could not hear his voice, but “jump” said his gestures. I hesitated,
the distance seemed enormous. Yet I reflected that surely I must be
able to clear a greater distance than Cavor.
I made a step back, gathered myself together, and leapt with all my
might. I seemed to shoot right up in the air as though I should never
come down.
It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare, to go
flying off in this fashion. I realised my leap had been altogether too
violent. I flew clean over Cavor’s head and beheld a spiky confusion in
a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp of alarm. I put out my
hands and straightened my legs.
I hit a huge fungoid bulk that burst all about me, scattering a mass of
orange spores in every direction, and covering me with orange powder. I
rolled over spluttering, and came to rest convulsed with breathless
laughter.
I became aware of Cavor’s little round face peering over a bristling
hedge. He shouted some faded inquiry. “Eh?” I tried to shout, but could
not do so for want of breath. He made his way towards me, coming
gingerly among the bushes.
“We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “This moon has no discipline.
She’ll let us smash ourselves.”
He helped me to my feet. “You exerted yourself too much,” he said,
dabbing at the yellow stuff with his hand to remove it from my
garments.
I stood passive and panting, allowing him to beat off the jelly from my
knees and elbows and lecture me upon my misfortunes. “We don’t quite
allow for the gravitation. Our muscles are scarcely educated yet. We
must practise a little, when you have got your breath.”
I pulled two or three little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a time
on a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feeling
of personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learner
of cycling on earth.
It suddenly occurred to Cavor that the cold air in the gully, after the
brightness of the sun, might give me a fever. So we clambered back into
the sunlight. We found that beyond a few abrasions I had received no
serious injuries from my tumble, and at Cavor’s suggestion we were
presently looking round for some safe and easy landing-place for my
next leap. We chose a rocky slab some ten yards off, separated from us
by a little thicket of olive-green spikes.
“Imagine it there!” said Cavor, who was assuming the airs of a trainer,
and he pointed to a spot about four feet from my toes. This leap I
managed without difficulty, and I must confess I found a certain
satisfaction in Cavor’s falling short by a foot or so and tasting the
spikes of the scrub. “One has to be careful, you see,” he said, pulling
out his thorns, and with that he ceased to be my mentor and became my
fellow-learner in the art of lunar locomotion.
We chose a still easier jump and did it without difficulty, and then
leapt back again, and to and fro several times, accustoming our muscles
to the new standard. I could never have believed had I not experienced
it, how rapid that adaptation would be. In a very little time indeed,
certainly after fewer than thirty leaps, we could judge the effort
necessary for a distance with almost terrestrial assurance.
And all this time the lunar plants were growing around us, higher and
denser and more entangled, every moment thicker and taller, spiked
plants, green cactus masses, fungi, fleshy and lichenous things,
strangest radiate and sinuous shapes. But we were so intent upon our
leaping, that for a time we gave no heed to their unfaltering
expansion.
An extraordinary elation had taken possession of us. Partly, I think,
it was our sense of release from the confinement of the sphere. Mainly,
however, the thin sweetness of the air, which I am certain contained a
much larger proportion of oxygen than our terrestrial atmosphere. In
spite of the strange quality of all about us, I felt as adventurous and
experimental as a cockney would do placed for the first time among
mountains and I do not think it occurred to either of us, face to face
though we were with the unknown, to be very greatly afraid.
We were bitten by a spirit of enterprise. We selected a lichenous kopje
perhaps fifteen yards away, and landed neatly on its summit one after
the other. “Good!” we cried to each other; “good!” and Cavor made three
steps and went off to a tempting slope of snow a good twenty yards and
more beyond. I stood for a moment struck by the grotesque effect of his
soaring figure—his dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little round
body, his arms and his knicker-bockered legs tucked up tightly—against
the weird spaciousness of the lunar scene. A gust of laughter seized
me, and then I stepped off to follow. Plump! I dropped beside him.
We made a few gargantuan strides, leapt three or four times more, and
sat down at last in a lichenous hollow. Our lungs were painful. We sat
holding our sides and recovering our breath, looking appreciation to
one another. Cavor panted something about “amazing sensations.” And
then came a thought into my head. For the moment it did not seem a
particularly appalling thought, simply a natural question arising out
of the situation.
“By the way,” I said, “where exactly is the sphere?”
Cavor looked at me. “Eh?”
The full meaning of what we were saying struck me sharply.
“Cavor!” I cried, laying a hand on his arm, “where is the sphere?”
X.
Lost Men in the Moon
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 snow-drifts 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 air 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...”