Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest.  I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls.  One elemental need at least our minds could understand in common.  They were bowls of some metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light; and each contained a number of whitish fragments.  All the cloudy pain and misery that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape of hunger.  I eyed these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in dreams, at that time it seemed a small matter that at the end of the arms that lowered one towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and thumb, like the end of an elephant’s trunk.  The stuff in the bowl was loose in texture, and whitish brown in colour—­rather like lumps of some cold souffle, and it smelt faintly like mushrooms.  From a partially divided carcass of a mooncalf that we presently saw, I am inclined to believe it must have been mooncalf flesh.

My hands were so tightly chained that I could barely contrive to reach the bowl; but when they saw the effort I made, two of them dexterously released one of the turns about my wrist.  Their tentacle hands were soft and cold to my skin.  I immediately seized a mouthful of the food.  It had the same laxness in texture that all organic structures seem to have upon the moon; it tasted rather like a gauffre or a damp meringue, but in no way was it disagreeable.  I took two other mouthfuls.  “I wanted—­foo’!” said I, tearing off a still larger piece....

For a time we ate with an utter absence of self-consciousness.  We ate and presently drank like tramps in a soup kitchen.  Never before nor since have I been hungry to the ravenous pitch, and save that I have had this very experience I could never have believed that, a quarter of a million of miles out of our proper world, in utter perplexity of soul, surrounded, watched, touched by beings more grotesque and inhuman than the worst creations of a nightmare, it would be possible for me to eat in utter forgetfulness of all these things.  They stood about us watching us, and ever and again making a slight elusive twittering that stood the suppose, in the stead of speech.  I did not even shiver at their touch.  And when the first zeal of my feeding was over, I could note that Cavor, too, had been eating with the same shameless abandon.

Chapter 14

Experiments in intercourse

When at last we had made an end of eating, the Selenites linked our hands closely together again, and then untwisted the chains about our feet and rebound them, so as to give us a limited freedom of movement.  Then they unfastened the chains about our waists.  To do all this they had to handle us freely, and ever and again one of their queer heads came down close to my face, or a soft tentacle-hand touched my head or neck.  I don’t remember that I was afraid then or repelled by their proximity.  I think that