The First Men in the Moon Page 11

  X LOST MEN IN THE MOON

  His face caught something of my dismay. He stood up and stared abouthim at the scrub that fenced us in and rose about us, straining upwardin a passion of growth. He put a dubious hand to his lips. He spokewith a sudden lack of assurance. “I think,” he said slowly, “we leftit ... 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 soughtin the twining, thickening jungle round about us.

  All about us on the sunlit slopes frothed and swayed the dartingshrubs, the swelling cactus, the creeping lichens, and wherever theshade remained the snowdrifts lingered. North, south, east, and westspread an identical monotony of unfamiliar forms. And somewhere, buriedalready among this tangled confusion, was our sphere, our home, ouronly provision, our only hope of escape from this fantastic wildernessof ephemeral growths into which we had come.

  “I think, after all,” he said, pointing suddenly, “it might be overthere.”

  “No,” I said. “We have turned in a curve. See! here is the mark of myheels. 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 becomeenormously vast to our imaginations, the growing thickets alreadyimpenetrably 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 ifit 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 withemphasis. “I am hungry too.”

  He stood up with a look of active resolution. “Certainly we must findthe sphere.”

  As calmly as possible we surveyed the interminable reefs and thicketsthat formed the floor of the crater, each of us weighing in silence thechances of our finding the sphere before we were overtaken by heat andhunger.

  “It can’t be fifty yards from here,” said Cavor, with indecisivegestures. “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 ourhunt. “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 shrubthat had been near the sphere. But everywhere was a confusing sameness,everywhere the aspiring bushes, the distending fungi, the dwindlingsnow banks, steadily and inevitably changed. The sun scorched andstung, the faintness of an unaccountable hunger mingled with ourinfinite perplexity. And even as we stood there, confused and lostamidst unprecedented things, we became aware for the first time of asound upon the moon other than the stir of the growing plants, thefaint 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 hearit with our feet as much as with our ears. Its dull resonance wasmuffled by distance, thick with the quality of intervening substance.No sound that I can imagine could have astonished us more, or havechanged more completely the quality of things about us. For this sound,rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed to us as though it could be nothingbut the striking of some gigantic buried clock.

  Boom ... Boom ... Boom ...

  Sound suggestive of still cloisters, of sleepless nights in crowdedcities, of vigils and the awaited hour, of all that is orderly andmethodical in life, booming out pregnant and mysterious in thisfantastic desert! To the eye everything was unchanged: the desolationof bushes and cacti waving silently in the wind, stretched unbroken tothe distant cliffs, the still dark sky was empty overhead, and the hotsun hung and burned. And through it all, a warning, a threat, throbbedthis 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 strikingceased.

  The silence, the rhythmic disappointment of the silence, came as afresh shock. For a moment one could doubt whether one had ever heard asound. Or whether it might not still be going on. Had I indeed heard asound?

  I felt the pressure of Cavor’s hand upon my arm. He spoke in anundertone, as though he feared to wake some sleeping thing. “Let uskeep together,” he whispered, “and look for the sphere. We must getback to the sphere. This is beyond our understanding.”

  “Which way shall we go?”

  He hesitated. An intense persuasion of presences, of unseen thingsabout us and near us, dominated our minds. What could they be? Wherecould they be? Was this arid desolation, alternately frozen andscorched, only the outer rind and mask of some subterranean world?And if so, what sort of world? What sort of inhabitants might it notpresently disgorge upon us?

  And then, stabbing the aching stillness as vivid and sudden as anunexpected thunderclap, came a clang and rattle as though great gatesof metal had suddenly been flung apart.

  It arrested our steps. We stood gaping helplessly. Then Cavor stoletowards me.

  “I do not understand!” he whispered close to my face. He waved his handvaguely skyward, the vague suggestion of still vaguer thoughts.

  “A hiding-place! If anything came....”

  I looked about us. I nodded my head in assent to him.

  We started off, moving stealthily with the most exaggerated precautionsagainst noise. We went towards a thicket of scrub. A clangour likehammers flung about a boiler hastened our steps. “We must crawl,”whispered Cavor.

  The lower leaves of the bayonet plants, already overshadowed by thenewer ones above, were beginning to wilt and shrivel so that we couldthrust our way in among the thickening stems without serious injury. Astab in the face or arm we did not heed. At the heart of the thicket Istopped, and stared panting into Cavor’s face.

  “Subterranean,” he whispered. “Below.”

  “They may come out.”

  “We must find the sphere!”

  “Yes,” I said; “but how?”

  “Crawl till we come to it.”

  “But if we don’t?”

  “Keep hidden. See what they are like.”

  “We will keep together,” said I.

  He thought. “Which way shall we go?”

  “We must take our chance.”

  We peered this way and that. Then very circumspectly, we began to crawlthrough the lower jungle, making, so far as we could judge, a circuit,halting now at every waving fungus, at every sound, intent only onthe sphere from which we had so foolishly emerged. Ever and againfrom out of the earth beneath us came concussions, beatings, strange,inexplicable, mechanical sounds; and once, and then again, we thoughtwe heard something, a faint rattle and tumult, borne to us through theair. But fearful as we were we dared essay no vantage-point to surveythe crater. For long we saw nothing of the beings whose sounds were soabundant and insistent. But for the faintness of our hunger and thedrying of our throats that crawling would have had the quality of avery vivid dream. It was so absolutely unreal. The only element withany touch of reality was these sounds.

  Figure it to yourself! About us the dreamlike jungle, with the silentbayonet leaves darting overhead, and the silent, vivid, sun-splashedlichens under our hands and knees, waving with the vigour of theirgrowth as a carpet waves when the wind gets beneath it. Ever and againone of the bladd
er fungi, bulging and distending under the sun, loomedupon us. Ever and again some novel shape in vivid colour obtruded.The very cells that built up these plants were as large as my thumb,like beads of coloured glass. And all these things were saturatedin the unmitigated glare of the sun, were seen against a sky thatwas bluish black and spangled still, in spite of the sunlight, witha few surviving stars. Strange! the very forms and texture of thestones were strange. It was all strange, the feeling of one’s body wasunprecedented, every other movement ended in a surprise. The breathsucked thin in one’s throat, the blood flowed through one’s ears in athrobbing tide--thud, thud, thud, thud....

  And ever and again came gusts of turmoil, hammering, the clanging andthrob of machinery, and presently--the bellowing of great beasts!