The First Men in the Moon H. Wells (howl and other poems txt) 📖

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 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 half-way 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 may 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