“I have been injured about the knee, I think my kneecap is hurt, and I
cannot run or crawl,” it began—pretty distinctly written.
Then less legibly: “They have been chasing me for some time, and it is
only a question of”—the word “time” seemed to have been written here
and erased in favour of something illegible—“before they get me. They
are beating all about me.”
Then the writing became convulsive. “I can hear them,” I guessed the
tracing meant, and then it was quite unreadable for a space. Then came
a little string of words that were quite distinct: “a different sort of
Selenite altogether, who appears to be directing the—” The writing
became a mere hasty confusion again.
“They have larger brain cases—much larger, and slenderer bodies, and
very short legs. They make gentle noises, and move with organized
deliberation...
“And though I am wounded and helpless here, their appearance still
gives me hope.” That was like Cavor. “They have not shot at me or
attempted... injury. I intend—”
Then came the sudden streak of the pencil across the paper, and on the
back and edges—blood!
And as I stood there stupid, and perplexed, with this dumbfounding
relic in my hand, something very soft and light and chill touched my
hand for a moment and ceased to be, and then a thing, a little white
speck, drifted athwart a shadow. It was a tiny snowflake, the first
snowflake, the herald of the night.
I looked up with a start, and the sky had darkened almost to blackness,
and was thick with a gathering multitude of coldly watchful stars. I
looked eastward, and the light of that shrivelled world was touched
with sombre bronze; westward, and the sun robbed now by a thickening
white mist of half its heat and splendour, was touching the crater rim,
was sinking out of sight, and all the shrubs and jagged and tumbled
rocks stood out against it in a bristling disorder of black shapes.
Into the great lake of darkness westward, a vast wreath of mist was
sinking. A cold wind set all the crater shivering. Suddenly, for a
moment, I was in a puff of falling snow, and all the world about me
grey and dim.
And then it was I heard, not loud and penetrating as at first, but
faint and dim like a dying voice, that tolling, that same tolling that
had welcomed the coming of the day: Boom!... Boom!... Boom!...
It echoed about the crater, it seemed to throb with the throbbing of
the greater stars, the blood-red crescent of the sun’s disc sank as it
tolled out: Boom!... Boom!... Boom!...
What had happened to Cavor? All through that tolling I stood there
stupidly, and at last the tolling ceased.
And suddenly the open mouth of the tunnel down below there, shut like
an eye and vanished out of sight.
Then indeed was I alone.
Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the
Eternal; that which was before the beginning, and that which triumphs
over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being
is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold,
the stillness, the silence—the infinite and final Night of space.
The sense of solitude and desolation became the sense of an
overwhelming presence that stooped towards me, that almost touched me.
“No,” I cried. “_No!_ Not yet! not yet! Wait! Wait! Oh, wait!” My voice
went up to a shriek. I flung the crumpled paper from me, scrambled back
to the crest to take my bearings, and then, with all the will that was
in me, leapt out towards the mark I had left, dim and distant now in
the very margin of the shadow.
Leap, leap, leap, and each leap was seven ages.
Before me the pale serpent-girdled section of the sun sank and sank,
and the advancing shadow swept to seize the sphere before I could reach
it. I was two miles away, a hundred leaps or more, and the air about me
was thinning out as it thins under an air-pump, and the cold was
gripping at my joints. But had I died, I should have died leaping.
Once, and then again my foot slipped on the gathering snow as I leapt
and shortened my leap; once I fell short into bushes that crashed and
smashed into dusty chips and nothingness, and once I stumbled as I
dropped and rolled head over heels into a gully, and rose bruised and
bleeding and confused as to my direction.
But such incidents were as nothing to the intervals, those awful pauses
when one drifted through the air towards that pouring tide of night. My
breathing made a piping noise, and it was as though knives were
whirling in my lungs. My heart seemed to beat against the top of my
brain. “Shall I reach it? O Heaven! Shall I reach it?”
My whole being became anguish.
“Lie down!” screamed my pain and despair; “lie down!”
The nearer I struggled, the more awfully remote it seemed. I was numb,
I stumbled, I bruised and cut myself and did not bleed.
It was in sight.