I tried to thrust my head through the manhole, and the sphere rolled over.  It was as though something had lugged my head down directly it emerged.  I ducked back sharply, or I should have been pinned face under water.  After some wriggling and shoving I managed to crawl out upon sand, over which the retreating waves still came and went.

I did not attempt to stand up.  It seemed to me that my body must be suddenly changed to lead.  Mother Earth had her grip on me now—­no Cavorite intervening.  I sat down heedless of the water that came over my feet.

It was dawn, a gray dawn, rather overcast but showing here and there a long patch of greenish gray.  Some way out a ship was lying at anchor, a pale silhouette of a ship with one yellow light.  The water came rippling in in long shallow waves.  Away to the right curved the land, a shingle bank with little hovels, and at last a lighthouse, a sailing mark and a point.  Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken here and there by pools of water, and ending a mile away perhaps in a low shore of scrub.  To the north-east some isolated watering-place was visible, a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest things that I could see on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky.  What strange men can have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I do not know.  There they are, like pieces of Brighton lost in the waste.

For a long time I sat there, yawning and rubbing my face.  At last I struggled to rise.  It made me feel that I was lifting a weight.  I stood up.

I stared at the distant houses.  For the first time since our starvation in the crater I thought of earthly food.  “Bacon,” I whispered, “eggs.  Good toast and good coffee....  And how the devil am I going to all this stuff to Lympne?” I wondered where I was.  It was an east shore anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.

I heard footsteps crunching in the sand, and a little round-faced, friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped about his shoulders, and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up the beach.  I knew instantly that I must be in England.  He was staring most intently at the sphere and me.  He advanced staring.  I dare say I looked a ferocious savage enough—­dirty, unkempt, to an indescribable degree; but it did not occur to me at the time.  He stopped at a distance of twenty yards.  “Hul-lo, my man!” he said doubtfully.

“Hullo yourself!” said I.

He advanced, reassured by that.  “What on earth is that thing?” he asked.

“Can you tell me where I am?” I asked.

“That’s Littlestone,” he said, pointing to the houses; “and that’s Dungeness!  Have you just landed?  What’s that thing you’ve got?  Some sort of machine?”

“Yes.”

“Have you floated ashore?  Have you been wrecked or something?  What is it?”

I meditated swiftly.  I made an estimate of the little man’s appearance as he drew nearer.  “By Jove!” he said, “you’ve had a time of it!  I thought you—­ Well—­ Where were you cast away?  Is that thing a sort of floating thing for saving life?”