I rubbed my eyes, doubting whether we had not slept and dreamt these things by reason of the fungus we had eaten, and suddenly discovered the blood upon my face, and then that my shirt was sticking painfully to my shoulder and arm.

“Confound it!” I said, gauging my injuries with an investigatory hand, and suddenly that distant tunnel mouth became, as it were, a watching eye.

“Cavor!” I said; “what are they going to do now?  And what are we going to do?”

He shook his head, with his eyes fixed upon the tunnel.  “How can one tell what they will do?”

“It depends on what they think of us, and I don’t see how we can begin to guess that.  And it depends upon what they have in reserve.  It’s as you say, Cavor, we have touched the merest outside of this world.  They may have all sorts of things inside here.  Even with those shooting things they might make it bad for us....

“Yet after all,” I said, “even if we don’t find the sphere at once, there is a chance for us.  We might hold out.  Even through the night.  We might go down there again and make a fight for it.”

I stared about me with speculative eyes.  The character of the scenery had altered altogether by reason of the enormous growth and subsequent drying of the scrub.  The crest on which we sat was high, and commanded a wide prospect of the crater landscape, and we saw it now all sere and dry in the late autumn of the lunar afternoon.  Rising one behind the other were long slopes and fields of trampled brown where the mooncalves had pastured, and far away in the full blaze of the sun a drove of them basked slumberously, scattered shapes, each with a blot of shadow against it like sheep on the side of a down.  But never a sign of a Selenite was to be seen.  Whether they had fled on our emergence from the interior passages, or whether they were accustomed to retire after driving out the mooncalves, I cannot guess.  At the time I believed the former was the case.

“If we were to set fire to all this stuff,” I said, “we might find the sphere among the ashes.”

Cavor did not seem to hear me.  He was peering under his hand at the stars, that still, in spite of the intense sunlight, were abundantly visible in the sky.  “How long do you think we’ve have been here?” he asked at last.

“Been where?”

“On the moon.”

“Two earthly days, perhaps.”

“More nearly ten.  Do you know, the sun is past its zenith, and sinking in the west.  In four days’ time or less it will be night.”

“But—­we’ve only eaten once!”

“I know that.  And—­ But there are the stars!”

“But why should time seem different because we are on a smaller planet?”

“I don’t know.  There it is!”

“How does one tell time?”

“Hunger—­fatigue—­all those things are different.  Everything is different—­everything.  To me it seems that since first we came out of the sphere has been only a question of hours—­long hours—­at most.”