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

Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken here and there by pools of water, and ending a mile away perhaps in a low shore of scrub. To the north-east some isolated watering-place was visible, a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest things that I could see on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky. What strange men can have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I do not know. There they are, like pieces of Brighton* lost in the waste.

For a long time I sat there, yawning and rubbing my face. At last I struggled to rise. It made me feel that I was lifting a weight. i stood up.

I stared at the distant houses. For the first time since our starvation in the crater I thought of earthly food. ‘Bacon,’ I whispered, ‘eggs. Good toast and good coffee. . . . And how the devil am I going to get all this stuff to Lympne?’ I wondered where I was. It was an east shore anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.

I heard footsteps scrunching in the sand, and a little round-faced, friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped about his shoulders, and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up the beach. I knew instantly that I must be in England. He was staring almost intently at the sphere and me. He advanced staring. I daresay I looked a ferocious savage enough — dirty, unkempt, to an indescribable degree; but it did not occur to me at the time. He stopped at a distance of twenty yards. ‘Hul-lo, my man!’ he said doubtfully.

‘Hullo yourself!’ said I.

He advanced, reassured by that. ‘What on earth is that thing?’ he asked.

‘Can you tell me where I am?’ I asked.

‘That’s Littlestone,’* he said, pointing to the houses; ‘and that’s Dungeness! Have you just landed? What’s that thing you’ve got? Some sort of machine?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you floated ashore? Have you been wrecked or something? What is it?’

i meditated swiftly. I made an estimate of the little man’s appearance as he drew nearer. ‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘you’ve had a time of it! i thought you — Well — Where were you cast away? Is that thing a sort of floating thing for saving life?’

I decided to take that line for the present. i made a few vague affirmatives. ‘I want help,’ I said hoarsely. ‘I want to get some stuff up the beach — stuff i can’t very well leave about.’ I became aware of three other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and straw hats, coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathing section of this Littlestone!

‘Help!’ said the young man; ‘rather!’ He became vaguely active. ‘What particularly do you want done?’ He turned round and gesticulated. The three young men accelerated their pace. In a minute they were about me, plying me with questions i was indisposed to answer. ‘I’ll tell all that later,’ i said. ‘I’m dead beat. i’m a rag.’

‘Come up to the hotel,’ said the foremost little man. ‘We’ll look after that thing there.’

I hesitated. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘In that sphere there’s two big bars of gold.’

They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a new inquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently they had the Selenites’ crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was like kittens round a beetle. They didn’t know what to do with the stuff. The fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars, and then dropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.

‘It’s lead, or gold!’ said one.

‘Oh, it’s gold!’ said another.

‘Gold, right enough,’ said the third.

Then they all stared at me, and then they all stared at the ship lying at anchor.

‘I say!’ cried the little man. ‘But where did you get that?’

I was too tired to keep up a lie. ‘I got it in the moon.’

I saw them stare at one another.

‘Look here!’ said I, ‘I’m not going to argue now. Help me carry these lumps of gold up to the hotel — I guess, with rests, two of you can manage one, and I’ll trail this chain thing — and I’ll tell you more when I’ve had some food.’

‘And how about that thing?’

‘It won’t hurt there,’ I said. ‘Anyhow — confound it! — it must stop there now. If the tide comes up, it will float all right.’

And in a state of enormous wonderment, these young men most obediently hoisted my treasures on their shoulders, and with limbs that felt like lead I headed a sort of procession towards that distant fragment of ‘sea-front.’ Half-way there we were reinforced by two awe-stricken little girls with spades, and later a lean little boy, with a penetrating sniff, appeared. He was, I remember, wheeling a bicycle, and he accompanied us at a distance of about a hundred yards on our right flank, and then, I suppose, gave us up as uninteresting, mounted his bicycle, and rode off over the level sands in the direction of the sphere.

I glanced back after him.

‘He won’t touch it,’ said the stout young man reassuringly, and I was only too willing to be reassured.

At first something of the grey of the morning was in my mind, but presently the sun disengaged itself from the level clouds of the horizon and lit the world, and turned the leaden sea to glittering waters. My spirits rose. A sense of the vast importance of the things I had done and had yet to do came with the sunlight into my mind. I laughed aloud as the foremost man staggered under my gold. When indeed I took my place in the world, how amazed the world would be!

If it had not been for my inordinate fatigue, the landlord of the Littlestone hotel would have been amusing, as he hesitated between my gold and my respectable company on the one hand, and my filthy appearance on the other. But at last I