第 十 章 · Lost Men in the Moon

. Lost Men in the Moon

His face caught something of my dismay. He stood up and stared about

him at the scrub that fenced us in and rose about us, straining upward

in a passion of growth. He put a dubious hand to his lips. He spoke

with a sudden lack of assurance. “I think,” he said slowly, “we left it

... 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 sought

in the twining, thickening jungle round about us.

All about us on the sunlit slopes frothed and swayed the darting

shrubs, the swelling cactus, the creeping lichens, and wherever the

shade remained the snow-drifts lingered. North, south, east, and west

spread an identical monotony of unfamiliar forms. And somewhere, buried

already among this tangled confusion, was our sphere, our home, our

only provision, our only hope of escape from this fantastic wilderness

of ephemeral growths into which we had come.

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

there.”

“No,” I said. “We have turned in a curve. See! here is the mark of my

heels. 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 become

enormously vast to our imaginations, the growing thickets already

impenetrably 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 if

it 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 with

emphasis. “I am hungry too.”

He stood up with a look of active resolution. “Certainly we must find

the sphere.”

As calmly as possible we surveyed the interminable reefs and thickets

that formed the floor of the crater, each of us weighing in silence the

chances of our finding the sphere before we were overtaken by heat and

hunger.

“It can’t be fifty yards from here,” said Cavor, with indecisive

gestures. “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 our

hunt. “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 shrub

that had been near the sphere. But everywhere was a confusing sameness,

everywhere the aspiring bushes, the distending fungi, the dwindling

snow banks, steadily and inevitably changed. The sun scorched and

stung, the faintness of an unaccountable hunger mingled with our

infinite perplexity. And even as we stood there, confused and lost

amidst unprecedented things, we became aware for the first time of a

sound upon the moon other than the air of the growing plants, the faint

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 hear

it with our feet as much as with our ears. Its dull resonance was

muffled by distance, thick with the quality of intervening substance.

No sound that I can imagine could have astonished us more, or have

changed more completely the quality of things about us. For this sound,

rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed to us as though it could be nothing

but the striking of some gigantic buried clock.

Boom.... Boom.... Boom.

Sound suggestive of still cloisters, of sleepless nights in crowded

cities, of vigils and the awaited hour, of all that is orderly and

methodical in life, booming out pregnant and mysterious in this

fantastic desert! To the eye everything was unchanged: the desolation

of bushes and cacti waving silently in the wind, stretched unbroken to

the distant cliffs, the still dark sky was empty overhead, and the hot

sun hung and burned. And through it all, a warning, a threat, throbbed

this 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 striking

ceased.

The silence, the rhythmic disappointment of the silence, came as a

fresh shock. For a moment one could doubt whether one had ever heard a

sound. Or whether it might not still be going on. Had I indeed heard a

sound?

I felt the pressure of Cavor’s hand upon my arm. He spoke in an

undertone, as though he feared to wake some sleeping thing. “Let us

keep together,” he whispered, “and look for the sphere. We must get

back to the sphere. This is beyond our understanding.”

“Which way shall we go?”

He hesitated. An intense persuasion of presences, of unseen things

about us and near us, dominated our minds. What could they be? Where

could they be? Was this arid desolation, alternately frozen and

scorched, only the outer rind and mask of some subterranean world? And

if so, what sort of world? What sort of inhabitants might it not

presently disgorge upon us?

And then, stabbing the aching stillness as vivid and sudden as an

unexpected thunderclap, came a clang and rattle as though great gates

of metal had suddenly been flung apart.

It arrested our steps. We stood gaping helplessly. Then Cavor stole

towards me.

“I do not understand!” he whispered close to my face. He waved his hand

vaguely 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 precautions

against noise. We went towards a thicket of scrub. A clangour like

hammers flung about a boiler hastened our steps. “We must crawl,”

whispered Cavor.

The lower leaves of the bayonet plants, already overshadowed by the

newer ones above, were beginning to wilt and shrivel so that we could

thrust our way in among the thickening stems without serious injury. A

stab in the face or arm we did not heed. At the heart of the thicket I

stopped, 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 crawl

through the lower jungle, making, so far as we could judge, a circuit,

halting now at every waving fungus, at every sound, intent only on the

sphere from which we had so foolishly emerged. Ever and again from out

of the earth beneath us came concussions, beatings, strange,

inexplicable, mechanical sounds; and once, and then again, we thought

we heard something, a faint rattle and tumult, borne to us through the

air. But fearful as we were we dared essay no vantage-point to survey

the crater. For long we saw nothing of the beings whose sounds were so

abundant and insistent. But for the faintness of our hunger and the

drying of our throats that crawling would have had the quality of a

very vivid dream. It was so absolutely unreal. The only element with

any touch of reality was these sounds.

Picture it to yourself! About us the dream-like jungle, with the silent

bayonet leaves darting overhead, and the silent, vivid, sun-splashed

lichens under our hands and knees, waving with the vigour of their

growth as a carpet waves when the wind gets beneath it. Ever and again

one of the bladder fungi, bulging and distending under the sun, loomed

upon 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 saturated in the

unmitigated glare of the sun, were seen against a sky that was bluish

black and spangled still, in spite of the sunlight, with a few

surviving stars. Strange! the very forms and texture of the stones were

strange. It was all strange, the feeling of one’s body was

unprecedented, every other movement ended in a surprise. The breath

sucked thin in one’s throat, the blood flowed through one’s ears in a

throbbing tide—thud, thud, thud, thud....

And ever and again came gusts of turmoil, hammering, the clanging and

throb of machinery, and presently—the bellowing of great beasts!