The First Men in the Moon by H. Wells (smart ebook reader TXT) 📗

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 Jaeger 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 his 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 Dürer* 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.

XIII

Mr Cavor Makes Some Suggestions

For a time neither of us spoke. To focus together all the things we had brought upon ourselves, seemed beyond my mental powers.

‘They’ve got us,’ I said at last.

‘It was that fungus.’

‘Well — if I hadn’t taken it we should have fainted and starved.’

‘We might have found the sphere.’

I lost my temper at his persistence, and swore to myself. For a time we hated one another in silence. I drummed with my fingers on the floor between my knees, and gritted the links of my fetters together. Presently I was forced to talk again.

‘What do you make of it, anyhow?’ I asked humbly.

‘They are reasonable creatures — they can make things and do things — Those lights we saw . . .’

He stopped. It was clear he could make nothing of it.

When he spoke again it was to confess, ‘After all, they are more human than we had a right to expect. I suppose——’

He stopped irritatingly.

‘Yes?’

‘I suppose, anyhow — on any planet where there is an intelligent animal — it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands, and walk erect . . .’

Presently he broke away in another direction.

‘We are some way in,’ he said. ‘I mean — perhaps a couple of thousand feet or more.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality — it has altogether gone. And the feeling in one’s ears and throat.’

I had not noted that, but I did now.

‘The air is denser. We must be some depth — a mile even, we may be — inside the moon.’

‘We never thought of a world inside the moon.’

‘No.’

‘How could we?’

‘We might have done. Only —  One gets into habits of mind.’

He thought for a time.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘it seems such an obvious thing.

‘Of course! The moon must be enormously cavernous, with an atmosphere within, and at the centre of its caverns a sea.

‘One knew that the moon had a lower specific gravity than the earth, one knew that it had little air or water outside, one knew, too, that it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that it should be different in composition. The inference that it was hollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact. Kepler, of course——’

His voice had the interest now of a man who has discovered a pretty sequence of reasoning.

‘Yes,’