“And if one of us comes upon the sphere?”

“He must come back to the white handkerchief, and stand by it and signal to the other.”

“And if neither?”

Cavor glanced up at the sun.  “We go on seeking until the night and cold overtake us.”

“Suppose the Selenites have found the sphere and hidden it?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Or if presently they come hunting us?”

He made no answer.

“You had better take a club,” I said.

He shook his head, and stared away from me across the waste.

But for a moment he did not start.  He looked round at me shyly, hesitated. 
“Au revoir,” he said.

I felt an odd stab of emotion.  A sense of how we had galled each other, and particularly how I must have galled him, came to me.  “Confound it,” thought I, “we might have done better!” I was on the point of asking him to shake hands—­for that, somehow, was how I felt just then—­when he put his feet together and leapt away from me towards the north.  He seemed to drift through the air as a dead leaf would do, fell lightly, and leapt again.  I stood for a moment watching him, then faced westward reluctantly, pulled myself together, and with something of the feeling of a man who leaps into icy water, selected a leaping point, and plunged forward to explore my solitary half of the moon world.  I dropped rather clumsily among rocks, stood up and looked about me, clambered on to a rocky slab, and leapt again....

When presently I looked for Cavor he was hidden from my eyes, but the handkerchief showed out bravely on its headland, white in the blaze of the sun.

I determined not to lose sight of that handkerchief whatever might betide.

Chapter 19

Mr. Bedford Alone

In a little while it seemed to me as though I had always been alone on the moon.  I hunted for a time with a certain intentness, but the heat was still very great, and the thinness of the air felt like a hoop about one’s chest.  I came presently into a hollow basin bristling with tall, brown, dry fronds about its edge, and I sat down under these to rest and cool.  I intended to rest for only a little while.  I put down my clubs beside me, and sat resting my chin on my hands.  I saw with a sort of colourless interest that the rocks of the basin, where here and there the crackling dry lichens had shrunk away to show them, were all veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter.  What did that matter now?  A sort of languor had possession of my limbs and mind, I did not believe for a moment that we should ever find the sphere in that vast desiccated wilderness.  I seemed to lack a motive for effort until the Selenites should come.  Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying that unreasonable imperative that urges a man before all things to preserve and defend his life, albeit he may preserve it only to die more painfully in a little while.