الفصل الفصل 12 · The Selenite’s Face

. The Selenite’s Face

I found myself sitting crouched together in a tumultuous darkness. For

a long time I could not understand where I was, nor how I had come to

this perplexity. I thought of the cupboard into which I had been thrust

at times when I was a child, and then of a very dark and noisy bedroom

in which I had slept during an illness. But these sounds about me were

not the noises I had known, and there was a thin flavour in the air

like the wind of a stable. Then I supposed we must still be at work

upon the sphere, and that somehow I had got into the cellar of Cavor’s

house. I remembered we had finished the sphere, and fancied I must

still be in it and travelling through space.

“Cavor,” I said, “cannot we have some light?”

There came no answer.

“Cavor!” I insisted.

I was answered by a groan. “My head!” I heard him say; “my head!”

I attempted to press my hands to my brow, which ached, and discovered

they were tied together. This startled me very much. I brought them up

to my mouth and felt the cold smoothness of metal. They were chained

together. I tried to separate my legs and made out they were similarly

fastened, and also that I was fastened to the ground by a much thicker

chain about the middle of my body.

I was more frightened than I had yet been by anything in all our

strange experiences. For a time I tugged silently at my bonds. “Cavor!”

I cried out sharply. “Why am I tied? Why have you tied me hand and

foot?”

“I haven’t tied you,” he answered. “It’s the Selenites.”

The Selenites! My mind hung on that for a space. Then my memories came

back to me: the snowy desolation, the thawing of the air, the growth of

the plants, our strange hopping and crawling among the rocks and

vegetation of the crater. All the distress of our frantic search for

the sphere returned to me.... Finally the opening of the great lid that

covered the pit!

Then as I strained to trace our later movements down to our present

plight, the pain in my head became intolerable. I came to an

insurmountable barrier, an obstinate blank.

“Cavor!”

“Yes?”

“Where are we?”

“How should I know?”

“Are we dead?”

“What nonsense!”

“They’ve got us, then!”

He made no answer but a grunt. The lingering traces of the poison

seemed to make him oddly irritable.

“What do you mean to do?”

“How should I know what to do?”

“Oh, very well!” said I, and became silent. Presently, I was roused

from a stupor. “O _Lord!_” I cried; “I wish you’d stop that buzzing!”

We lapsed into silence again, listening to the dull confusion of noises

like the muffled sounds of a street or factory that filled our ears. I

could make nothing of it, my mind pursued first one rhythm and then

another, and questioned it in vain. But after a long time I became

aware of a new and sharper element, not mingling with the rest but

standing out, as it were, against that cloudy background of sound. It

was a series of relatively very little definite sounds, tappings and

rubbings, like a loose spray of ivy against a window or a bird moving

about upon a box. We listened and peered about us, but the darkness was

a velvet pall. There followed a noise like the subtle movement of the

wards of a well-oiled lock. And then there appeared before me, hanging

as it seemed in an immensity of black, a thin bright line.

“Look!” whispered Cavor very softly.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

We stared.

The thin bright line became a band, and broader and paler. It took upon

itself the quality of a bluish light falling upon a white-washed wall.

It ceased to be parallel-sided; it developed a deep indentation on one

side. I turned to remark this to Cavor, and was amazed to see his ear

in a brilliant illumination—all the rest of him in shadow. I twisted my

head round as well as my bonds would permit. “Cavor,” I said, “it’s

behind!”

His ear vanished—gave place to an eye!

Suddenly the crack that had been admitting the light broadened out, and

revealed itself as the space of an opening door. Beyond was a sapphire

vista, and in the doorway stood a grotesque outline silhouetted against

the glare.

We both made convulsive efforts to turn, and failing, sat staring over

our shoulders at this. My first impression was of some clumsy quadruped

with lowered head. Then I perceived it was the slender pinched body and

short and extremely attenuated bandy legs of a Selenite, with his head

depressed between his shoulders. He was without the helmet and body

covering they wear upon the exterior.

He was a blank, black figure to us, but instinctively our imaginations

supplied features to his very human outline. I, at least, took it

instantly that he was somewhat hunchbacked, with a high forehead and

long features.

He came forward three steps and paused for a time. His movements seemed

absolutely noiseless. Then he came forward again. He walked like a

bird, his feet fell one in front of the other. He stepped out of the

ray of light that came through the doorway, and it seemed as though he

vanished altogether in the shadow.

For a moment my eyes sought him in the wrong place, and then I

perceived him standing facing us both in the full light. Only the human

features I had attributed to him were not there at all!

Of course I ought to have expected that, only I didn’t. It came to me

as an absolute, for a moment an overwhelming shock. It seemed as though

it wasn’t a face, as though it must needs be a mask, a horror, a

deformity, that would presently be disavowed or explained. There was no

nose, and the thing had dull bulging eyes at the side—in the silhouette

I had supposed they were ears. There were no ears.... I have tried to

draw one of these heads, but I cannot. There was a mouth, downwardly

curved, like a human mouth in a face that stares ferociously....

The neck on which the head was poised was jointed in three places,

almost like the short joints in the leg of a crab. The joints of the

limbs I could not see, because of the puttee-like straps in which they

were swathed, and which formed the only clothing the being wore.

There the thing was, looking at us!

At the time my mind was taken up by the mad impossibility of the

creature. I suppose he also was amazed, and with more reason, perhaps,

for amazement than we. Only, confound him! he did not show it. We did

at least know what had brought about this meeting of incompatible

creatures. But conceive how it would seem to decent Londoners, for

example, to come upon a couple of living things, as big as men and

absolutely unlike any other earthly animals, careering about among the

sheep in Hyde Park! It must have taken him like that.

Figure us! We were bound hand and foot, fagged and filthy; our beards

two inches long, our faces scratched and bloody. Cavor you must imagine

in his knickerbockers (torn in several places by the bayonet scrub) his

Jaegar shirt and old cricket cap, his wiry hair wildly disordered, a

tail to every quarter of the heavens. In that blue light his face did

not look red but very dark, his lips and the drying blood upon my hands

seemed black. If possible I was in a worse plight than he, on account

of the yellow fungus into which I had jumped. Our jackets were

unbuttoned, and our shoes had been taken off and lay at our feet. And

we were sitting with our backs to this queer bluish light, peering at

such a monster as Durer might have invented.

Cavor broke the silence; started to speak, went hoarse, and cleared his

throat. Outside began a terrific bellowing, as if a mooncalf were in

trouble. It ended in a shriek, and everything was still again.

Presently the Selenite turned about, flickered into the shadow, stood

for a moment retrospective at the door, and then closed it on us; and

once more we were in that murmurous mystery of darkness into which we

had awakened.