XVIII IN THE SUNLIGHT
Presently we saw that the cavern before us opened on a hazy void. Inanother moment we had emerged upon a sort of slanting gallery, thatprojected into a vast circular space, a huge cylindrical pit runningvertically up and down. Round this pit the slanting gallery ran withoutany parapet or protection for a turn and a half, and then plungedhigh above into the rock again. Somehow it reminded me then of oneof those spiral turns of the railway through the Saint Gothard. Itwas all tremendously huge. I can scarcely hope to convey to you theTitanic proportion of all that place, the Titanic effect of it. Oureyes followed up the vast declivity of the pit wall, and overhead andfar above we beheld a round opening set with faint stars, and half ofthe lip about it well-nigh blinding with the white light of the sun. Atthat we cried aloud simultaneously.
“Come on!” I said, leading the way.
“But there?” said Cavor, and very carefully stepped nearer the edgeof the gallery. I followed his example, and craned forward and lookeddown, but I was dazzled by that gleam of light above, and I could seeonly a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purplefloating therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of thisdarkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if oneputs one’s ear outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormoushollow, it may be, four miles beneath our feet....
For a moment I listened, then tightened my grip on my crowbar, and ledthe way up the gallery.
“This must be the shaft we looked down upon,” said Cavor. “Under thatlid.”
“And below there, is where we saw the lights.”
“The lights!” said he. “Yes--the lights of the world that now we shallnever see.”
“We’ll come back,” I said, for now we had escaped so much I was rashlysanguine that we should recover the sphere.
His answer I did not catch.
“Eh?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered, and we hurried on in silence.
I suppose that slanting lateral way was four or five miles long,allowing for its curvature, and it ascended at a slope that wouldhave made it almost impossibly steep on earth, but which one strodeup easily under lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites duringall that portion of our flight, and directly they became aware of usthey ran headlong. It was clear that the knowledge of our strength andviolence had reached them. Our way to the exterior was unexpectedlyplain. The spiral gallery straightened into a steeply ascendent tunnel,its floor bearing abundant traces of the mooncalves, and so straightand short in proportion to its vast arch, that no part of it wasabsolutely dark. Almost immediately it began to lighten, and then faroff and high up, and quite blindingly brilliant, appeared its openingon the exterior, a slope of Alpine steepness surmounted by a crest ofbayonet shrub, tall and broken down now, and dry and dead, in spikysilhouette against the sun.
And it is strange that we men, to whom this very vegetation had seemedso weird and horrible a little time ago, should now behold it with theemotion a home-coming exile might feel at sight of his native land. Wewelcomed even the rareness of the air that made us pant as we ran,and which rendered speaking no longer the easy thing that it had been,but an effort to make oneself heard. Larger grew the sunlit circleabove us, and larger, and all the nearer tunnel sank into a rim ofindistinguishable black. We saw the dead bayonet shrub no longer withany touch of green in it, but brown and dry and thick, and the shadowof its upper branches high out of sight made a densely interlacedpattern upon the tumbled rocks. And at the immediate mouth of thetunnel 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 andpressed upon us. We traversed the exposed area painfully, and clamberedup a slope among the scrub stems, and sat down at last panting in ahigh place beneath the shadow of a mass of twisted lava. Even in theshade 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 havecome to our own province again, beneath the stars. All the fear andstress of our flight through the dim passages and fissures belowhad fallen from us. That last fight had filled us with an enormousconfidence in ourselves so far as the Selenites were concerned. Welooked back almost incredulously at the black opening from which wehad just emerged. Down there it was, in a blue glow that now in ourmemories seemed the next thing to absolute darkness, we had met withthings like mad mockeries of men, helmet-headed creatures, and hadwalked in fear before them, and had submitted to them until we couldsubmit no longer. And, behold, they had smashed like wax and scatteredlike chaff, and fled and vanished like the creatures of a dream!
I rubbed my eyes, doubting whether we had not slept and dreamt thesethings by reason of the fungus we had eaten, and suddenly discoveredthe blood upon my face, and then that my shirt was sticking painfullyto 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 watchingeye.
“Cavor!” I said; “what are they going to do now? And what are we goingto do?”
He shook his head, with his eyes fixed upon the tunnel. “How can onetell what they will do?”
“It depends on what they think of us, and I don’t see how we can beginto guess that. And it depends upon what they have in reserve. It’s asyou say, Cavor, we have touched the merest outside of this world. Theymay have all sorts of things inside here. Even with those shootingthings 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. Wemight go down there again and make a fight for it.”
I stared about me with speculative eyes. The character of the sceneryhad altered altogether by reason of the enormous growth and subsequentdrying of the scrub. The crest on which we sat was high, and commandeda wide prospect of the crater landscape, and we saw it now all sereand dry in the late autumn of the lunar afternoon. Rising one behindthe other were long slopes and fields of trampled brown where themooncalves had pastured, and far away in the full blaze of the suna drove of them basked slumberously, scattered shapes, each with ablot of shadow against it like sheep on the side of a down. But nevera sign of a Selenite was to be seen. Whether they had fled on ouremergence from the interior passages, or whether they were accustomedto retire after driving out the mooncalves, I cannot guess. At the timeI believed the former was the case.
“If we were to set fire to all this stuff,” I said, “we might find thesphere among the ashes.”
Cavor did not seem to hear me. He was peering under his hand at thestars, that still, in spite of the intense sunlight, were abundantlyvisible in the sky. “How long do you think we have been here?” he askedat last.
“Been where?”
“On the moon.”
“Two earthly days, perhaps.”
“More nearly ten. Do you know, the sun is past its zenith, and sinkingin 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 isdifferent--everything. To me it seems that since first we came out ofthe 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 amoment, and then saw that it was half-way from the zenith to thewestern edge of things. “Four days!... Cavor, we mustn’t sit here anddream. How do you think we may begin?”
I stood up. “We must get a fixed point we can recognise--we might hoista flag, or a handkerchief, or something--and quarter the ground, andwork 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 thetunnel, and astonished me by a sudden gesture of impatience. “Oh! butwe have done foolishly! To have come to this pass! Think how it mighthave 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, andthe lid and the shaft! They were just remote outlying things, and thosecreatures we have seen and fought with no more than ignorant peasants,dwellers in the outskirts, yokels and labourers half akin to brutes.Down below! Caverns beneath caverns, tunnels, structures, ways....It must open out, and be greater and wider and more populous as onedescends. Assuredly. Right down at last to the central sea that washesround the core of the moon. Think of its inky waters under the sparelights--if, indeed, their eyes _need_ lights! Think of the cascadingtributaries pouring down their channels to feed it! Think of the tidesupon its surface, and the rush and swirl of its ebb and flow! Perhapsthey have ships that go upon it, perhaps down there are mighty citiesand swarming ways, and wisdom and order passing the wit of man. And wemay die here upon it, and never see the masters who _must_ be--rulingover these things! We may freeze and die here, and the air will freezeand thaw upon us, and then--! Then they will come upon us, come on ourstiff and silent bodies, and find the sphere we cannot find, and theywill understand at last too late all the thought and effort that endedhere in vain!”
His voice for all that speech sounded like the voice of some one heardin a telephone, weak and far away.
“But the darkness,” I said.
“One might get over that.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. How am I to know? One might carry a torch, one mighthave a lamp--The others--might understand.”
He stood for a moment with his hands held down and a rueful face,staring out over the waste that defied him. Then with a gesture ofrenunciation he turned towards me with proposals for the systematichunting of the sphere.
“We can return,” I said.
He looked about him. “First of all we shall have to get to earth.”
“We could bring back lamps to carry and climbing irons, and a hundrednecessary things.”
“Yes,” he said.
“We can take back an earnest of success in this gold.”
He looked at my golden crowbars, and said nothing for a space. He stoodwith his hands clasped behind his back, staring across the crater. Atlast he sighed and spoke. “It was _I_ found the way here, but to finda way isn’t always to be master of a way. If I take my secret back toearth, what will happen? I do not see how I can keep my secret for ayear, for even a part of a year. Sooner or later it must come out,even if other men rediscover it. And then.... Governments and powerswill struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, andagainst these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiplythe occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while, if Itell my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewnwith human dead. Other things are doubtful, but that is certain....It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would themoon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but abattle-ground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is,and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there farmore than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weaponsfor fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out forhimself again--in a thousand years’ time.”
“There are methods of secrecy,” I said.
He looked up at me and smiled. “After all,” he said, “why should oneworry? There is little chance of our finding the sphere, and downbelow things are brewing. It’s simply the human habit of hoping tillwe die that makes us think of return. Our troubles are only beginning.We have shown these moon folk violence, we have given them a taste ofour quality, and our chances are about as good as a tiger’s that hasgot loose and killed a man in Hyde Park. The news of us must be runningdown from gallery to gallery, down towards the central parts.... Nosane beings will ever let us take that sphere back to earth after somuch as they have seen of us.”
“We aren’t improving our chances,” said I, “by sitting here.”
We stood up side by side.
“After all,” he said, “we must separate. We must stick up ahandkerchief on these tall spikes here and fasten it firmly, and fromthis as a centre we must work over the crater. You must go westward,moving out in semicircles to and fro towards the setting sun. You mustmove first with your shadow on your right until it is at right angleswith the direction of your handkerchief, and then with your shadow onyour left. And I will do the same to the east. We will look into everygully, examine every skerry of rocks; we will do all we can to find mysphere. If we see Selenites we will hide from them as well as we can.For drink we must take snow, and if we feel the need of food, we mustkill a mooncalf if we can, and eat such flesh as it has--raw--and soeach will go his own way.”
“And if one of us comes upon the sphere?”
“He must come back to the white handkerchief, and stand by it andsignal to the other.”
“And if neither----?”
Cavor glanced up at the sun. “We go on seeking until the night and coldovertake us.”
“Suppose the Selenites have found the sphere and hidden it?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Or if presently they come hunting us?”
He made no answer.
“You had better take a club,” I said.
He shook his head, and stared away from me across the waste.
But for a moment he did not start. He looked round at me shyly,hesitated. “_Au revoir_,” he said.
I felt an odd stab of emotion. A sense of how we had galled each other,and particularly how I must have galled him, came to me. “Confoundit,” thought I, “we might have done better!” I was on the point ofasking him to shake hands--for that, somehow, was how I felt justthen--when he put his feet together and leapt away from me towards thenorth. He seemed to drift through the air as a dead leaf would do, felllightly, and leapt again. I stood for a moment watching him, then facedwestward reluctantly, pulled myself together, and with something of thefeeling of a man who leaps into icy water, selected a leaping point,and plunged forward to explore my solitary half of the moon world. Idropped rather clumsily among rocks, stood up and looked about me,clambered on to a rocky slab, and leapt again....
When presently I looked for Cavor he was hidden from my eyes, but thehandkerchief showed out bravely on its headland, white in the blaze ofthe sun.
I determined not to lose sight of that handkerchief whatever mightbetide.