“We could bring back lamps to carry and climbing irons, and a hundred necessary things.”

“Yes,” he said.

“We can take back an earnest of success in this gold.”

He looked at my golden crowbars, and said nothing for a space.  He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, staring across the crater.  At last he signed and spoke.  “It was I found the way here, but to find a way isn’t always to be master of a way.  If I take my secret back to earth, what will happen?  I do not see how I can keep my secret for a year, for even a part of a year.  Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it.  And then ...  Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, and against these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war.  In a little while, in a very little while, if I tell my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead.  Other things are doubtful, but that is certain.  It is not as though man had any use for the moon.  What good would the moon be to men?  Even of their own planet what have they made but a battle-ground and theatre of infinite folly?  Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do.  No!  Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use.  It is time she held her hand.  Let him find it out for himself again—­in a thousand years’ time.”

“There are methods of secrecy,” I said.

He looked up at me and smiled.  “After all,” he said, “why should one worry?  There is little chance of our finding the sphere, and down below things are brewing.  It’s simply the human habit of hoping till we die that makes us think of return.  Our troubles are only beginning.  We have shown these moon folk violence, we have given them a taste of our quality, and our chances are about as good as a tiger’s that has got loose and killed a man in Hyde Park.  The news of us must be running down from gallery to gallery, down towards the central parts....  No sane beings will ever let us take that sphere back to earth after so much as they have seen of us.”

“We aren’t improving our chances,” said I, “by sitting here.”

We stood up side by side.

“After all,” he said, “we must separate.  We must stick up a handkerchief on these tall spikes here and fasten it firmly, and from this as a centre we must work over the crater.  You must go westward, moving out in semicircles to and fro towards the setting sun.  You must move first with your shadow on your right until it is at right angles with the direction of your handkerchief, and then with your shadow on your left.  And I will do the same to the east.  We will look into every gully, examine every skerry of rocks; we will do all we can to find my sphere.  If we see the Selenites we will hide from them as well as we can.  For drink we must take snow, and if we feel the need of food, we must kill a mooncalf if we can, and eat such flesh as it has—­raw—­and so each will go his own way.”