XII THE SELENITE’S FACE
I found myself sitting crouched together in a tumultuous darkness. Fora long time I could not understand where I was, nor how I had come tothis perplexity. I thought of the cupboard into which I had been thrustat times when I was a child, and then of a very dark and noisy bedroomin which I had slept during an illness. But these sounds about me werenot the noises I had known, and there was a thin flavour in the airlike the wind of a stable. Then I supposed we must still be at workupon the sphere, and that somehow I had got into the cellar of Cavor’shouse. I remembered we had finished the sphere, and fancied I muststill 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 discoveredthey were tied together. This startled me very much. I brought them upto my mouth and felt the cold smoothness of metal. They were chainedtogether. I tried to separate my legs, and made out they were similarlyfastened, and also that I was fastened to the ground by a much thickerchain about the middle of my body.
I was more frightened than I had yet been by anything in all ourstrange 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 andfoot?”
“I haven’t tied you,” he answered. “It’s the Selenites.”
The Selenites! My mind hung on that for a space. Then my memories cameback to me: the snowy desolation, the thawing of the air, the growthof the plants, our strange hopping and crawling among the rocks andvegetation of the crater. All the distress of our frantic search forthe sphere returned to me.... Finally the opening of the great lid thatcovered the pit!
Then as I strained to trace our later movements down to our presentplight, the pain in my head became intolerable. I came to aninsurmountable 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 poisonseemed 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 froma stupor. “O _Lord_!” I cried; “I wish you’d stop that buzzing!”
We lapsed into silence again, listening to the dull confusion of noiseslike 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 thenanother, and questioned it in vain. But after a long time I becameaware of a new and sharper element, not mingling with the rest butstanding out, as it were, against that cloudy background of sound. Itwas a series of relatively very little definite sounds, tappings andrubbings, like a loose spray of ivy against a window or a bird movingabout upon a box. We listened and peered about us, but the darkness wasa velvet pall. There followed a noise like the subtle movement of thewards of a well-oiled lock. And then there appeared before me, hangingas 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 uponitself the quality of a bluish light falling upon a whitewashed wall.It ceased to be parallel-sided; it developed a deep indentation on oneside. I turned to remark this to Cavor, and was amazed to see his earin a brilliant illumination--all the rest of him in shadow. I twistedmy head round as well as my bonds would permit. “Cavor,” I said, “it’sbehind!”
His ear vanished--gave place to an eye!
Suddenly the crack that had been admitting the light broadened out, andrevealed itself as the space of an opening door. Beyond was a sapphirevista, and in the doorway stood a grotesque outline silhouettedagainst the glare.
We both made convulsive efforts to turn, and failing, sat staring overour shoulders at this. My first impression was of some clumsy quadrupedwith lowered head. Then I perceived it was the slender pinched body andshort and extremely attenuated bandy legs of a Selenite, with his headdepressed between his shoulders. He was without the helmet and bodycovering they wear upon the exterior.
He was a blank, black figure to us, but instinctively our imaginationssupplied features to his very human outline. I, at least, took itinstantly that he was somewhat hunchbacked, with a high forehead andlong features.
He came forward three steps and paused for a time. His movements seemedabsolutely noiseless. Then he came forward again. He walked like abird, his feet fell one in front of the other. He stepped out of theray of light that came through the doorway, and it seemed as though hevanished altogether in the shadow.
For a moment my eyes sought him in the wrong place, and then Iperceived him standing facing us both in the full light. Only the humanfeatures I had attributed to him were not there at all!
Of course I ought to have expected that, only I didn’t. It came tome as an absolute, for a moment an overwhelming, shock. It seemed asthough it wasn’t a face, as though it must needs be a mask, a horror,a deformity, that would presently be disavowed or explained. Therewas no nose, and the thing had dull bulging eyes at the side--in thesilhouette I had supposed they were ears. There were no ears.... Ihave tried to draw one of these heads, but I cannot. There was amouth, downwardly curved, like a human mouth in a face that staresferociously....
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 thelimbs I could not see, because of the puttee-like straps in which theywere swathed, and which formed the only clothing the being wore.
There the thing was, looking at us!
“There the thing was, looking at us”]
At the time my mind was taken up by the mad impossibility of thecreature. I suppose he also was amazed, and with more reason, perhaps,for amazement than we. Only, confound him! he did not show it. We didat least know what had brought about this meeting of incompatiblecreatures. But conceive how it would seem to decent Londoners, forexample, to come upon a couple of living things, as big as men andabsolutely unlike any other earthly animals, careering about among thesheep in Hyde Park! It must have taken him like that.
Figure us! We were bound hand and foot, fagged and filthy; our beardstwo inches long, our faces scratched and bloody. Cavor you must imaginein his knickerbockers (torn in several places by the bayonet scrub),his Jaeger shirt and old cricket cap, his wiry hair wildly disordered,a tail to every quarter of the heavens. In that blue light his facedid not look red but very dark, his lips and the drying blood upon myhands seemed black. If possible I was in a worse plight than he, onaccount of the yellow fungus into which I had jumped. Our jackets wereunbuttoned, and our shoes had been taken off and lay at our feet. Andwe were sitting with our backs to this queer bluish light, peering atsuch a monster as Dürer might have invented.
Cavor broke the silence; started to speak, went hoarse, and cleared histhroat. Outside began a terrific bellowing, as if a mooncalf were introuble. It ended in a shriek, and everything was still again.
Presently the Selenite turned about, flickered into the shadow, stoodfor a moment retrospective at the door, and then closed it on us; andonce more we were in that murmurous mystery of darkness into which wehad awakened.