“It’s phosphorescence again!” I said.  “No need to hurry.  Sit down and make yourself at home.”  And as he spluttered over our disappointment, I began to lob more of these growths into the cleft.

“I thought it was daylight,” he said.

“Daylight!” cried I.  “Daybreak, sunset, clouds, and windy skies!  Shall we ever see such things again?”

As I spoke, a little picture of our world seemed to rise before me, bright and little and clear, like the background of some old Italian picture.  “The sky that changes, and the sea that changes, and the hills and the green trees and the towns and cities shining in the sun.  Think of a wet roof at sunset, Cavor!  Think of the windows of a westward house!” He made no answer.

“Here we are burrowing in this beastly world that isn’t a world, with its inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outside that torrid day and that death stillness of night.  And all these things that are chasing us now, beastly men of leather—­insect men, that come out of a nightmare!  After all, they’re right!  What business have we here smashing them and disturbing their world!  For all we know the whole planet is up and after us already.  In a minute we may hear them whimpering, and their gongs going.  What are we to do?  Where are we to go?  Here we are as comfortable as snakes from Jamrach’s loose in a Surbiton villa!”

“It was your fault,” said Cavor.

“My fault!” I shouted.  “Good Lord!”

“I had an idea!”

“Curse your ideas!”

“If we had refused to budge—­”

“Under those goads?”

“Yes.  They would have carried us!”

“Over that bridge?”

“Yes.  They must have carried us from outside.”

“I’d rather be carried by a fly across a ceiling.”

“Good Heavens!”

I resumed my destruction of the fungi.  Then suddenly I saw something that struck me even then.  “Cavor,” I said, “these chains are of gold!”

He was thinking intently, with his hands gripping his cheeks.  He turned his head slowly and stared at me, and when I had repeated my words, at the twisted chain about his right hand.  “So they are,” he said, “so they are.”  His face lost its transitory interest even as he looked.  He hesitated for a moment, then went on with his interrupted meditation.  I sat for a space puzzling over the fact that I had only just observed this, until I considered the blue light in which we had been, and which had taken all the colour out of the metal.  And from that discovery I also started upon a train of thought that carried me wide and far.  I forgot that I had just been asking what business we had in the moon.  Gold....

It was Cavor who spoke first.  “It seems to me that there are two courses open to us.”

“Well?”

“Either we can attempt to make our way—­fight our way if necessary—­out to the exterior again, and then hunt for our sphere until we find it, or the cold of the night comes to kill us, or else—­”