Chapter 18 - In the Sunlight
Chapter 18 - In the Sunlight
PRESENTLY we saw that the cavern before us opened upon a hazy void. In
another moment we had emerged upon a sort of slanting gallery, that
projected into a vast circular space, a huge cylindrical pit running
vertically up and down. Round this pit the slanting gallery ran without
any parapet or protection for a turn and a half, and then plunged high
above into the rock again. Somehow it reminded me then one of those spiral
turns of the railway through the Saint Gothard. It was all tremendously
huge. I can scarcely hope to convey to you the Titanic proportion of all
that place, the Titanic effect of it. Our eyes followed up the vast
declivity of the pit wall, and overhead and far above we beheld a round
opening set with faint stars, and half of the lip about it well nigh
blinding with the white light of the sun. At that we cried aloud
simultaneously.
"Come on!" I said, leading the way.
"But there?" said Cavor, and very carefully stepped nearer the edge of the
gallery. I followed his example, and craned forward and looked down, but I
was dazzled by that gleam of light above, and I could see only a
bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purple floating
therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of this darkness came a
sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one puts one's ear
outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormous hollow, it may be,
four miles beneath our feet...
For a moment I listened, then tightened my grip on my crowbar, and led the
way up the gallery.
"This must be the shaft we looked down upon," said Cavor. "Under that
lid."
"And below there, is where we saw the lights."
"The lights!" said he. " Yes - the lights of the world that now we shall
never see."
"We'll come back," I said, for now we had escaped so much I was rashly
sanguine 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 would have made it
almost impossibly steep on earth, but which one strode up easily under
lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites during all that portion of our
flight, and directly they became aware of us they ran headlong. It was
clear that the knowledge of our strength and violence had reached them.
Our way to the exterior was unexpectedly plain. The spiral gallery
straightened into a steeply ascendent tunnel, its floor bearing abundant
traces of the mooncalves, and so straight and short in proportion to its
vast arch, that no part of it was absolutely dark. Almost immediately it
began to lighten, and then far off and high up, and quite blindingly
brilliant, appeared its opening on the exterior, a slope of Alpine
steepness surmounted by a crest of bayonet shrub, tall and broken down
now, and dry and dead, in spiky silhouette against the sun.
And it is strange that we men, to whom this very vegetation had seemed so
weird and horrible a little time ago, should now behold it with the
emotion a home-coming exile might feel at sight of his native land. We
welcomed 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 circle above us, and
larger, and all 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, arid the M 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 bad 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've 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 halfway from the zenith to the western edge of
things. "Four days!... Cavor, we musn'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 look 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 might do something yet."
"Never the thing we might have done. here below out 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
creatures 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 one descends.
Assuredly. Right down at the last the central sea that washes round the
core of the moon. Think of its inky waters under the spare lights - if,
indeed, their eyes need lights! Think of the cascading tributaries
pouring down their channels to feed it! Think of the tides upon its
surface, and the rush and swirl of its ebb and flow! perhaps they have
ships that go upon it, perhaps down there are mighty cities and swarming
ways, and wisdom and order passing the wit of man. And we may die here
upon it, and never see the masters who must be - ruling over these things!
We may freeze and die here, and the air will freeze and thaw upon us, and
then - ! Then they will come upon us, come on our stiff and silent
bodies, and find the sphere we cannot find, and they will understand at
last too late all the thought and effort that ended here in vain!"
His voice for all that speech sounded like the voice of someone heard in 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 might have
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 of renunciation
he turned towards me with proposals for the systematic hunting 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 hundred
necessary 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 stood
with his hands clasped behind his back, staring across the crater. At
last he signed and spoke. "It was I found the way here, but to find a way
isn't always to be master of a way. If I take my secret back to earth,
what will happen? I do not see how I can keep my secret for a year, for
even a part of a year. Sooner or later it must come out, even if other
men rediscover it. And then... Governments and powers will struggle to
get hither, they will fight against one another, and against these moon
people; it will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In
a little while, in a very little while, if I tell my secret, this planet
to its deepest galleries will be strewn with 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 the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what
have they made but a battle-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 far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long
forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him
find it out for himself 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 one
worry? There is little chance of our finding the sphere, and down below
things are brewing. It's simply the human habit of hoping till we 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 of our quality, and
our chances are about as good as a tiger's that has got loose and killed a
man in Hyde Park. The news of us must be running down from gallery to
gallery, down towards the central parts.... No sane beings will ever let
us take that sphere back to earth after so much 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 a handkerchief on
these tall spikes here and fasten it firmly, and from this 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 must move first with your shadow
on your right until it is at right angles with the direction of your
handkerchief, and then with your shadow on your left. And I will do the
same to the east. We will look into every gully, examine every skerry of
rocks; we will do all we can to find my sphere. If we see the 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 must kill a mooncalf if we can, and eat such
flesh as it has - raw - and so each 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 and signal
to the other."
"And if neither?"
Cavor glanced up at the sun. "We go on seeking until the night and cold
overtake 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. "Confound it,"
thought I, "we might have done better!" I was on the point of asking him
to shake hands - for that, somehow, was how I felt just then - when he put
his feet together and leapt away from me towards the north. He seemed to
drift through the air as a dead leaf would do, fell lightly, and leapt
again. I stood for a moment watching him, then faced westward reluctantly,
pulled myself together, and with something of the feeling of a man who
leaps into icy water, selected a leaping point, and plunged forward to
explore my solitary half of the moon world. I dropped 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 the
handkerchief showed out bravely on its headland, white in the blaze of the
sun.
I determined not to lose sight of that handkerchief whatever might betide.
