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 Jaegar 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 my 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 Durer 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.

Chapter 13

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 depths—­a mile even, we may be—­inside the moon.”

“We never thought of a world inside the moon.”