He was pointing upward over the carcasses. “White light!” he said.
“White light again!”
I looked, and it was even so; a faint white ghost of light in the
remoter cavern roof. That seemed to give me double strength.
“Keep close,” I said. A flat, long Selenite dashed out of the darkness,
and squealed and fled. I halted, and stopped Cavor with my hand. I hung
my jacket over my crowbar, ducked round the next carcass, dropped
jacket and crowbar, showed myself, and darted back.
“Chuzz-flick,” just one arrow came. We were close on the Selenites, and
they were standing in a crowd, broad, short, and tall together, with a
little battery of their shooting implements pointing down the cave.
Three or four other arrows followed the first, then their fire ceased.
I stuck out my head, and escaped by a hair’s-breadth. This time I drew
a dozen shots or more, and heard the Selenites shouting and twittering
as if with excitement as they shot. I picked up jacket and crowbar
again.
“_Now!_” said I, and thrust out the jacket.
“Chuzz-zz-zz-zz! Chuzz!” In an instant my jacket had grown a thick
beard of arrows, and they were quivering all over the carcass behind
us. Instantly I slipped the crowbar out of the jacket, dropped the
jacket—for all I know to the contrary it is lying up there in the moon
now—and rushed out upon them.
For a minute perhaps it was massacre. I was too fierce to discriminate,
and the Selenites were probably too scared to fight. At any rate they
made no sort of fight against me. I saw scarlet, as the saying is. I
remember I seemed to be wading among those leathery, thin things as a
man wades through tall grass, mowing and hitting, first right, then
left; smash. Little drops of moisture flew about. I trod on things that
crushed and piped and went slippery. The crowd seemed to open and close
and flow like water. They seemed to have no combined plan whatever.
There were spears flew about me, I was grazed over the ear by one. I
was stabbed once in the arm and once in the cheek, but I only found
that out afterwards, when the blood had had time to run and cool and
feel wet.
What Cavor did I do not know. For a space it seemed that this fighting
had lasted for an age, and must needs go on for ever. Then suddenly it
was all over, and there was nothing to be seen but the backs of heads
bobbing up and down as their owners ran in all directions.... I seemed
altogether unhurt. I ran forward some paces, shouting, then turned
about. I was amazed.
I had come right through them in vast flying strides, they were all
behind me, and running hither and thither to hide.
I felt an enormous astonishment at the evaporation of the great fight
into which I had hurled myself, and not a little exultation. It did not
seem to me that I had discovered the Selenites were unexpectedly
flimsy, but that I was unexpectedly strong. I laughed stupidly. This
fantastic moon!
I glanced for a moment at the smashed and writhing bodies that were
scattered over the cavern floor, with a vague idea of further violence,
then hurried on after Cavor.
XVIII.
In the Sunlight
Presently we saw that the cavern before us opened upon a hazy void. In
another moment we had emerged upon a sort of slanting gallery, that
projected into a vast circular space, a huge cylindrical pit running
vertically up and down. Round this pit the slanting gallery ran without
any parapet or protection for a turn and a half, and then plunged high
above into the rock again. Somehow it reminded me then of one of those
spiral turns of the railway through the Saint Gothard. It was all
tremendously huge. I can scarcely hope to convey to you the Titanic
proportion of all that place, the Titanic effect of it. Our eyes
followed up the vast declivity of the pit wall, and overhead and far
above we beheld a round opening set with faint stars, and half of the
lip about it well nigh blinding with the white light of the sun. At
that we cried aloud simultaneously.
“Come on!” I said, leading the way.
“But there?” said Cavor, and very carefully stepped nearer the edge of
the gallery. I followed his example, and craned forward and looked
down, but I was dazzled by that gleam of light above, and I could see
only a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purple
floating therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of this
darkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one
puts one’s ear outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormous
hollow, it may be, four miles beneath our feet...
For a moment I listened, then tightened my grip on my crowbar, and led
the way up the gallery.
“This must be the shaft we looked down upon,” said Cavor. “Under that
lid.”
“And below there, is where we saw the lights.”
“The lights!” said he. “Yes—the lights of the world that now we shall
never see.”
“We’ll come back,” I said, for now we had escaped so much I was rashly
sanguine that we should recover the sphere.
His answer I did not catch.
“Eh?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered, and we hurried on in silence.
I suppose that slanting lateral way was four or five miles long,
allowing for its curvature, and it ascended at a slope that would have
made it almost impossibly steep on earth, but which one strode up
easily under lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites during all
that portion of our flight, and directly they became aware of us they
ran headlong. It was clear that the knowledge of our strength and
violence had reached them. Our way to the exterior was unexpectedly
plain. The spiral gallery straightened into a steeply ascendent tunnel,
its floor bearing abundant traces of the mooncalves, and so straight
and short in proportion to its vast arch, that no part of it was
absolutely dark. Almost immediately it began to lighten, and then far
off and high up, and quite blindingly brilliant, appeared its opening
on the exterior, a slope of Alpine steepness surmounted by a crest of
bayonet shrub, tall and broken down now, and dry and dead, in spiky
silhouette against the sun.
And it is strange that we men, to whom this very vegetation had seemed
so weird and horrible a little time ago, should now behold it with the
emotion a home-coming exile might feel at sight of his native land. We
welcomed even the rareness of the air that made us pant as we ran, and
which rendered speaking no longer the easy thing that it had been, but
an effort to make oneself heard. Larger grew the sunlit circle above
us, and larger, and all the nearer tunnel sank into a rim of
indistinguishable black. We saw the dead bayonet shrub no longer with
any touch of green in it, but brown and dry and thick, and the shadow
of its upper branches high out of sight made a densely interlaced
pattern upon the tumbled rocks. And at the immediate mouth of the
tunnel was a wide trampled space where the mooncalves had come and
gone.
We came out upon this space at last into a light and heat that hit and
pressed upon us. We traversed the exposed area painfully, and clambered
up a slope among the scrub stems, and sat down at last panting in a
high place beneath the shadow of a mass of twisted lava. Even in the
shade the rock felt hot.
The air was intensely hot, and we were in great physical discomfort,
but for all that we were no longer in a nightmare. We seemed to have
come to our own province again, beneath the stars. All the fear and
stress of our flight through the dim passages and fissures below had
fallen from us. That last fight had filled us with an enormous
confidence in ourselves so far as the Selenites were concerned. We
looked back almost incredulously at the black opening from which we had
just emerged. Down there it was, in a blue glow that now in our
memories seemed the next thing to absolute darkness, we had met with
things like mad mockeries of men, helmet-headed creatures, and had
walked in fear before them, and had submitted to them until we could
submit no longer. And behold, they had smashed like wax and scattered
like chaff, and fled and vanished like the creatures of a dream!
I rubbed my eyes, doubting whether we had not slept and dreamt these
things by reason of the fungus we had eaten, and suddenly discovered
the blood upon my face, and then that my shirt was sticking painfully
to my shoulder and arm.
“Confound it!” I said, gauging my injuries with an investigatory hand,
and suddenly that distant tunnel mouth became, as it were, a watching
eye.
“Cavor!” I said; “what are they going to do now? And what are we going
to do?”
He shook his head, with his eyes fixed upon the tunnel. “How can one
tell what they will do?”
“It depends on what they think of us, and I don’t see how we can begin
to guess that. And it depends upon what they have in reserve. It’s as
you say, Cavor, we have touched the merest outside of this world. They
may have all sorts of things inside here. Even with those shooting
things they might make it bad for us....
“Yet after all,” I said, “even if we _don’t_ find the sphere at once,
there is a chance for us. We might hold out. Even through the night. We
might go down there again and make a fight for it.”
I stared about me with speculative eyes. The character of the scenery
had altered altogether by reason of the enormous growth and subsequent
drying of the scrub. The crest on which we sat was high, and commanded
a wide prospect of the crater landscape, and we saw it now all sere and
dry in the late autumn of the lunar afternoon. Rising one behind the
other were long slopes and fields of trampled brown where the
mooncalves had pastured, and far away in the full blaze of the sun a
drove of them basked slumberously, scattered shapes, each with a blot
of shadow against it like sheep on the side of a down. But never a sign
of a Selenite was to be seen. Whether they had fled on our emergence
from the interior passages, or whether they were accustomed to retire
after driving out the mooncalves, I cannot guess. At the time I
believed the former was the case.
“If we were to set fire to all this stuff,” I said, “we might find the
sphere among the ashes.”
Cavor did not seem to hear me. He was peering under his hand at the
stars, that still, in spite of the intense sunlight, were abundantly
visible in the sky. “How long do you think we’ve have been here?” he
asked at last.
“Been where?”
“On the moon.”
“Two earthly days, perhaps.”
“More nearly ten. Do you know, the sun is past its zenith, and sinking
in the west. In four days’ time or less it will be night.”
“But—we’ve only eaten once!”
“I know that. And— But there are the stars!”
“But why should time seem different because we are on a smaller
planet?”
“I don’t know. There it is!”
“How does one tell time?”
“Hunger—fatigue—all those things are different. Everything is
different—everything. To me it seems that since first we came out of
the sphere has been only a question of hours—long hours—at most.”
“Ten days,” I said; “that leaves—” I looked up at the sun for a moment,
and then saw that it was halfway from the zenith to the western edge of
things. “Four days! ... Cavor, we mustn’t sit here and dream. How do
you think we may begin?”
I stood up. “We must get a fixed point we can recognise—we might hoist
a flag, or a handkerchief, or something—and quarter the ground, and
work round that.”
He stood up beside me.
“Yes,” he said, “there is nothing for it but to hunt the sphere.
Nothing. We may find it—certainly we may find it. And if not—”
“We must keep on looking.”
He looked this way and that, glanced up at the sky and down at the
tunnel, and astonished me by a sudden gesture of impatience. “Oh! but
we have done foolishly! To have come to this pass! Think how it might
have been, and the things we might have done!”
“We might do something yet.”
“Never the thing we might have done. Here below our feet is a world.
Think of what that world must be! Think of that machine we saw, and the
lid and the shaft! They were just remote outlying things, and those
creatures we have seen and fought with no more than ignorant peasants,
dwellers in the outskirts, yokels and labourers half akin to brutes.
Down below! Caverns beneath caverns, tunnels, structures, ways... It
must open out, and be greater and wider and more populous as one
descends. Assuredly. Right down at the last the central sea that washes
round the core of the moon. Think of its inky waters under the spare
lights—if, indeed, their eyes _need_ lights! Think of the cascading
tributaries pouring down their channels to feed it! Think of the tides
upon its surface, and the rush and swirl of its ebb and flow! Perhaps
they have ships that go upon it, perhaps down there are mighty cities
and swarming ways, and wisdom and order passing the wit of man. And we
may die here upon it, and never see the masters who _must_ be—ruling
over these things! We may freeze and die here, and the air will freeze
and thaw upon us, and then—! Then they will come upon us, come on our
stiff and silent bodies, and find the sphere we cannot find, and they
will understand at last too late all the thought and effort that ended
here in vain!”
His voice for all that speech sounded like the voice of someone heard
in a telephone, weak and far away.
“But the darkness,” I said.
“One might get over that.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. How am I to know? One might carry a torch, one might
have a lamp— The others—might understand.”
He stood for a moment with his hands held down and a rueful face,
staring out over the waste that defied him. Then with a gesture of
renunciation he turned towards me with proposals for the systematic
hunting of the sphere.
“We can return,” I said.
He looked about him. “First of all we shall have to get to earth.”
“We could bring back lamps to carry and climbing irons, and a hundred
necessary things.”
“Yes,” he said.
“We can take back an earnest of success in this gold.”
He looked at my golden crowbars, and said nothing for a space. He stood
with his hands clasped behind his back, staring across the crater. At
last he signed and spoke. “It was _I_ found the way here, but to find a
way isn’t always to be master of a way. If I take my secret back to
earth, what will happen? I do not see how I can keep my secret for a
year, for even a part of a year. Sooner or later it must come out, even
if other men rediscover it. And then ... Governments and powers will
struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, and
against these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiply the
occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while, if I tell
my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn with
human dead. Other things are doubtful, but that is certain. It is not
as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to
men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battle-ground
and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his
time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can
do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use.
It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again—in
a thousand years’ time.”
“There are methods of secrecy,” I said.
He looked up at me and smiled. “After all,” he said, “why should one
worry? There is little chance of our finding the sphere, and down below
things are brewing. It’s simply the human habit of hoping till we die
that makes us think of return. Our troubles are only beginning. We have
shown these moon folk violence, we have given them a taste of our
quality, and our chances are about as good as a tiger’s that has got
loose and killed a man in Hyde Park. The news of us must be running
down from gallery to gallery, down towards the central parts.... No
sane beings will ever let us take that sphere back to earth after so
much as they have seen of us.”
“We aren’t improving our chances,” said I, “by sitting here.”
We stood up side by side.
“After all,” he said, “we must separate. We must stick up a
handkerchief on these tall spikes here and fasten it firmly, and from
this as a centre we must work over the crater. You must go westward,
moving out in semicircles to and fro towards the setting sun. You must
move first with your shadow on your right until it is at right angles
with the direction of your handkerchief, and then with your shadow on
your left. And I will do the same to the east. We will look into every
gully, examine every skerry of rocks; we will do all we can to find my
sphere. If we see the Selenites we will hide from them as well as we
can. For drink we must take snow, and if we feel the need of food, we
must kill a mooncalf if we can, and eat such flesh as it has—raw—and so
each will go his own way.”
“And if one of us comes upon the sphere?”
“He must come back to the white handkerchief, and stand by it and
signal to the other.”
“And if neither?”
Cavor glanced up at the sun. “We go on seeking until the night and cold
overtake us.”
“Suppose the Selenites have found the sphere and hidden it?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Or if presently they come hunting us?”
He made no answer.
“You had better take a club,” I said.
He shook his head, and stared away from me across the waste.
But for a moment he did not start. He looked round at me shyly,
hesitated. “_Au revoir_,” he said.
I felt an odd stab of emotion. A sense of how we had galled each other,
and particularly how I must have galled him, came to me. “Confound it,”
thought I, “we might have done better!” I was on the point of asking
him to shake hands—for that, somehow, was how I felt just then—when he
put his feet together and leapt away from me towards the north. He
seemed to drift through the air as a dead leaf would do, fell lightly,
and leapt again. I stood for a moment watching him, then faced westward
reluctantly, pulled myself together, and with something of the feeling
of a man who leaps into icy water, selected a leaping point, and
plunged forward to explore my solitary half of the moon world. I
dropped rather clumsily among rocks, stood up and looked about me,
clambered on to a rocky slab, and leapt again....
When presently I looked for Cavor he was hidden from my eyes, but the
handkerchief showed out bravely on its headland, white in the blaze of
the sun.
I determined not to lose sight of that handkerchief whatever might
betide.
XIX.
Mr. Bedford Alone
In a little while it seemed to me as though I had always been alone on
the moon. I hunted for a time with a certain intentness, but the heat
was still very great, and the thinness of the air felt like a hoop
about one’s chest. I came presently into a hollow basin bristling with
tall, brown, dry fronds about its edge, and I sat down under these to
rest and cool. I intended to rest for only a little while. I put down
my clubs beside me, and sat resting my chin on my hands. I saw with a
sort of colourless interest that the rocks of the basin, where here and
there the crackling dry lichens had shrunk away to show them, were all
veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded
and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter. What did that matter
now? A sort of languor had possession of my limbs and mind, I did not
believe for a moment that we should ever find the sphere in that vast
desiccated wilderness. I seemed to lack a motive for effort until the
Selenites should come. Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying
that unreasonable imperative that urges a man before all things to
preserve and defend his life, albeit he may preserve it only to die
more painfully in a little while.
Why had we come to the moon?
The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem. What is this
spirit in man that urges him for ever to depart from happiness and
security, to toil, to place himself in danger, to risk even a
reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon
as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to
go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Almost any
man, if you put the thing to him, not in words, but in the shape of
opportunities, will show that he knows as much. Against his interest,
against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable
things. Some force not himself impels him, and go he must. But why?
Why? Sitting there in the midst of that useless moon gold, amidst the
things of another world, I took count of all my life. Assuming I was to
die a castaway upon the moon, I failed altogether to see what purpose I
had served. I got no light on that point, but at any rate it was
clearer to me than it had ever been in my life before that I was not
serving my own purpose, that all my life I had in truth never served
the purposes of my private life. Whose purposes, what purposes, was I
serving? ... I ceased to speculate on why we had come to the moon, and
took a wider sweep. Why had I come to the earth? Why had I a private
life at all? ... I lost myself at last in bottomless speculations....
My thoughts became vague and cloudy, no longer leading in definite
directions. I had not felt heavy or weary—I cannot imagine one doing so
upon the moon—but I suppose I was greatly fatigued. At any rate I
slept.
Slumbering there rested me greatly, I think, and the sun was setting
and the violence of the heat abating, through all the time I slumbered.
When at last I was roused from my slumbers by a remote clamour, I felt
active and capable again. I rubbed my eyes and stretched my arms. I
rose to my feet—I was a little stiff—and at once prepared to resume my
search. I shouldered my golden clubs, one on each shoulder, and went on
out of the ravine of the gold-veined rocks.
The sun was certainly lower, much lower than it had been; the air was
very much cooler. I perceived I must have slept some time. It seemed to
me that a faint touch of misty blueness hung about the western cliff. I
leapt to a little boss of rock and surveyed the crater. I could see no
signs of mooncalves or Selenites, nor could I see Cavor, but I could
see my handkerchief far off, spread out on its thicket of thorns. I
looked about me, and then leapt forward to the next convenient
view-point.
I beat my way round in a semicircle, and back again in a still remoter
crescent. It was very fatiguing and hopeless. The air was really very
much cooler, and it seemed to me that the shadow under the westward
cliff was growing broad. Ever and again I stopped and reconnoitred, but
there was no sign of Cavor, no sign of Selenites; and it seemed to me
the mooncalves must have been driven into the interior again—I could
see none of them. I became more and more desirous of seeing Cavor. The
winged outline of the sun had sunk now, until it was scarcely the
distance of its diameter from the rim of the sky. I was oppressed by
the idea that the Selenites would presently close their lids and
valves, and shut us out under the inexorable onrush of the lunar night.
It seemed to me high time that he abandoned his search, and that we
took counsel together. I felt how urgent it was that we should decide
soon upon our course. We had failed to find the sphere, we no longer
had time to seek it, and once these valves were closed with us outside,
we were lost men. The great night of space would descend upon us—that
blackness of the void which is the only absolute death. All my being
shrank from that approach. We must get into the moon again, though we
were slain in doing it. I was haunted by a vision of our freezing to
death, of our hammering with our last strength on the valve of the
great pit.
I took no thought any more of the sphere. I thought only of finding
Cavor again. I was half inclined to go back into the moon without him,
rather than seek him until it was too late. I was already half-way back
towards our handkerchief, when suddenly—