But then came vertigo and nausea that abruptly changed the quality of my courage.  I gave the lid of the manhole half a turn and made a hasty explanation to Cavor; but now he was the more sanguine.  He answered me in a voice that seemed extraordinarily small and remote, because of the thinness of the air that carried the sound.  He recommended a nip of brandy, and set me the example, and presently I felt better.  I turned the manhole stopper back again.  The throbbing in my ears grew louder, and then I remarked that the piping note of the outrush had ceased.  For a time I could not be sure that it had ceased.

“Well?” said Cavor, in the ghost of a voice.

“Well?” said I.

“Shall we go on?”

I thought.  “Is this all?”

“If you can stand it.”

By way of answer I went on unscrewing.  I lifted the circular operculum from its place and laid it carefully on the bale.  A flake or so of snow whirled and vanished as that thin and unfamiliar air took possession of our sphere.  I knelt, and then seated myself at the edge of the manhole, peering over it.  Beneath, within a yard of my face, lay the untrodden snow of the moon.

There came a little pause.  Our eyes met.

“It doesn’t distress your lungs too much?” said Cavor.

“No,” I said.  “I can stand this.”

He stretched out his hand for his blanket, thrust his head through its central hole, and wrapped it about him.  He sat down on the edge of the manhole, he let his feet drop until they were within six inches of the lunar ground.  He hesitated for a moment, then thrust himself forward, dropped these intervening inches, and stood upon the untrodden soil of the moon.

As he stepped forward he was refracted grotesquely by the edge of the glass.  He stood for a moment looking this way and that.  Then he drew himself together and leapt.

The glass distorted everything, but it seemed to me even then to be an extremely big leap.  He had at one bound become remote.  He seemed twenty or thirty feet off.  He was standing high upon a rocky mass and gesticulating back to me.  Perhaps he was shouting—­but the sound did not reach me.  But how the deuce had he done this?  I felt like a man who has just seen a new conjuring trick.

In a puzzled state of mind I too dropped through the manhole.  I stood up.  Just in front of me the snowdrift had fallen away and made a sort of ditch.  I made a step and jumped.

I found myself flying through the air, saw the rock on which he stood coming to meet me, clutched it and clung in a state of infinite amazement.

I gasped a painful laugh.  I was tremendously confused.  Cavor bent down and shouted in piping tones for me to be careful.

I had forgotten that on the moon, with only an eighth part of the earth’s mass and a quarter of its diameter, my weight was barely a sixth what it was on earth.  But now that fact insisted on being remembered.