I had come right through them in vast flying strides, they were all behind me, and running hither and thither to hide.

I felt an enormous astonishment at the evaporation of the great fight into which I had hurled myself, and not a little exultation.  It did not seem to me that I had discovered the Selenites were unexpectedly flimsy, but that I was unexpectedly strong.  I laughed stupidly.  This fantastic moon!

I glanced for a moment at the smashed and writhing bodies that were scattered over the cavern floor, with a vague idea of further violence, then hurried on after Cavor.

Chapter 18

In the Sunlight

Presently we saw that the cavern before us opened upon a hazy void.  In another moment we had emerged upon a sort of slanting gallery, that projected into a vast circular space, a huge cylindrical pit running vertically up and down.  Round this pit the slanting gallery ran without any parapet or protection for a turn and a half, and then plunged high above into the rock again.  Somehow it reminded me then one of those spiral turns of the railway through the Saint Gothard.  It was all tremendously huge.  I can scarcely hope to convey to you the Titanic proportion of all that place, the Titanic effect of it.  Our eyes followed up the vast declivity of the pit wall, and overhead and far above we beheld a round opening set with faint stars, and half of the lip about it well nigh blinding with the white light of the sun.  At that we cried aloud simultaneously.

“Come on!” I said, leading the way.

“But there?” said Cavor, and very carefully stepped nearer the edge of the gallery.  I followed his example, and craned forward and looked down, but I was dazzled by that gleam of light above, and I could see only a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purple floating therein.  Yet if I could not see, I could hear.  Out of this darkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one puts one’s ear outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormous hollow, it may be, four miles beneath our feet...

For a moment I listened, then tightened my grip on my crowbar, and led the way up the gallery.

“This must be the shaft we looked down upon,” said Cavor.  “Under that lid.”

“And below there, is where we saw the lights.”

“The lights!” said he.  “Yes—­the lights of the world that now we shall never see.”

“We’ll come back,” I said, for now we had escaped so much I was rashly sanguine that we should recover the sphere.

His answer I did not catch.

“Eh?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he answered, and we hurried on in silence.