Cavor’s blue-lit face was full of an intelligent respect.  “I can’t dream!  Surely these beings—­ Men could not make a thing like that!  Look at those arms, are they on connecting rods?”

The thick-set Selenite had gone some paces unheeded.  He came back and stood between us and the great machine.  I avoided seeing him, because I guessed somehow that his idea was to beckon us onward.  He walked away in the direction he wished us to go, and turned and came back, and flicked our faces to attract our attention.

Cavor and I looked at one another.

“Cannot we show him we are interested in the machine?” I said.

“Yes,” said Cavor.  “We’ll try that.”  He turned to our guide and smiled, and pointed to the machine, and pointed again, and then to his head, and then to the machine.  By some defect of reasoning he seemed to imagine that broken English might help these gestures.  “Me look ’im,” he said, “me think ’im very much.  Yes.”

His behaviour seemed to check the Selenites in their desire for our progress for a moment.  They faced one another, their queer heads moved, the twittering voices came quick and liquid.  Then one of them, a lean, tall creature, with a sort of mantle added to the puttee in which the others were dressed, twisted his elephant trunk of a hand about Cavor’s waist, and pulled him gently to follow our guide, who again went on ahead.  Cavor resisted.  “We may just as well begin explaining ourselves now.  They may think we are new animals, a new sort of mooncalf perhaps!  It is most important that we should show an intelligent interest from the outset.”

He began to shake his head violently.  “No, no,” he said, “me not come on one minute.  Me look at ’im.”

“Isn’t there some geometrical point you might bring in apropos of that affair?” I suggested, as the Selenites conferred again.

“Possibly a parabolic—­” he began.

He yelled loudly, and leaped six feet or more!

One of the four armed moon-men had pricked him with a goad!

I turned on the goad-bearer behind me with a swift threatening gesture, and he started back.  This and Cavor’s sudden shout and leap clearly astonished all the Selenites.  They receded hastily, facing us.  For one of those moments that seem to last for ever, we stood in angry protest, with a scattered semicircle of these inhuman beings about us.

“He pricked me!” said Cavor, with a catching of the voice.

“I saw him,” I answered.

“Confound it!” I said to the Selenites; “we’re not going to stand that!  What on earth do you take us for?”

I glanced quickly right and left.  Far away across the blue wilderness of cavern I saw a number of other Selenites running towards us; broad and slender they were, and one with a larger head than the others.  The cavern spread wide and low, and receded in every direction into darkness.  Its roof, I remember, seemed to bulge down as if with the weight of the vast thickness of rocks that prisoned us.  There was no way out of it—­no way out of it.  Above, below, in every direction, was the unknown, and these inhuman creatures, with goads and gestures, confronting us, and we two unsupported men!