As calmly as possible we surveyed the interminable reefs and thickets that formed the floor of the crater, each of us weighing in silence the chances of our finding the sphere before we were overtaken by heat and hunger.

“It can’t be fifty yards from here,” said Cavor, with indecisive gestures.  “The only thing is to beat round about until we come upon it.”

“That is all we can do,” I said, without any alacrity to begin our hunt.  “I wish this confounded spike bush did not grow so fast!”

“That’s just it,” said Cavor.  “But it was lying on a bank of snow.”

I stared about me in the vain hope of recognising some knoll or shrub that had been near the sphere.  But everywhere was a confusing sameness, everywhere the aspiring bushes, the distending fungi, the dwindling snow banks, steadily and inevitably changed.  The sun scorched and stung, the faintness of an unaccountable hunger mingled with our infinite perplexity.  And even as we stood there, confused and lost amidst unprecedented things, we became aware for the first time of a sound upon the moon other than the air of the growing plants, the faint sighing of the wind, or those that we ourselves had made.

Boom....  Boom....  Boom.

It came from beneath our feet, a sound in the earth.  We seemed to hear it with our feet as much as with our ears.  Its dull resonance was muffled by distance, thick with the quality of intervening substance.  No sound that I can imagine could have astonished us more, or have changed more completely the quality of things about us.  For this sound, rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed to us as though it could be nothing but the striking of some gigantic buried clock.

Boom....  Boom....  Boom.

Sound suggestive of still cloisters, of sleepless nights in crowded cities, of vigils and the awaited hour, of all that is orderly and methodical in life, booming out pregnant and mysterious in this fantastic desert!  To the eye everything was unchanged:  the desolation of bushes and cacti waving silently in the wind, stretched unbroken to the distant cliffs, the still dark sky was empty overhead, and the hot sun hung and burned.  And through it all, a warning, a threat, throbbed this enigma of sound.

Boom....  Boom....  Boom....

We questioned one another in faint and faded voices.

“A clock?”

“Like a clock!”

“What is it?”

“What can it be?”

“Count,” was Cavor’s belated suggestion, and at that word the striking ceased.

The silence, the rhythmic disappointment of the silence, came as a fresh shock.  For a moment one could doubt whether one had ever heard a sound.  Or whether it might not still be going on.  Had I indeed heard a sound?

I felt the pressure of Cavor’s hand upon my arm.  He spoke in an undertone, as though he feared to wake some sleeping thing.  “Let us keep together,” he whispered, “and look for the sphere.  We must get back to the sphere.  This is beyond our understanding.”