had hold of us. It meant
to show us little men what the moon could do with us.

I caught a second glimpse of things without, puffs of vapour, half liquid
slush, excavated, sliding, falling, sliding. We dropped into darkness. I
went down with Cavor's knees in my chest. Then he seemed to fly away from
me, and for a moment I lay with all the breath out of my body staring
upward. A toppling crag of the melting stuff had splashed over us, buried
us, and now it thinned and boiled off us. I saw the bubbles dancing on the
glass above. I heard Cavor exclaiming feebly.

Then some huge landslip in the thawing air had caught us, and spluttering
expostulation, we began to roll down a slope, rolling faster and faster,
leaping crevasses and rebounding from banks, faster and faster, westward
into the white-hot boiling tumult of the lunar day.

Clutching at one another we spun about, pitched this way and that, our
bale of packages leaping at us, pounding at us. We collided, we gripped,
we were torn asunder--our heads met, and the whole universe burst into
fiery darts and stars! On the earth we should have smashed one another a
dozen times, but on the moon, luckily for us, our weight was only
one-sixth of what it is terrestrially, and we fell very mercifully. I
recall a sensation of utter sickness, a feeling as if my brain were upside
down within my skull, and then--

Something was at work upon my face, some thin feelers worried my ears.
Then I discovered the brilliance of the landscape around was mitigated by
blue spectacles. Cavor bent over me, and I saw his face upside down, his
eyes also protected by tinted goggles. His breath came irregularly, and
his lip was bleeding from a bruise. "Better?" he said, wiping the blood
with the back of his hand.

Everything seemed swaying for a space, but that was simply my giddiness. I
perceived that he had closed some of the shutters in the outer sphere to
save me--from the direct blaze of the sun. I was aware that everything
about us was very brilliant.

"Lord!" I gasped. "But this--"

I craned my neck to see. I perceived there was a blinding glare outside,
an utter change from the gloomy darkness of our first impressions. "Have I
been insensible long?" I asked.

"I don't know--the chronometer is broken. Some little time.... My dear
chap! I have been afraid..."

I lay for a space taking this in. I saw his face still bore evidences of
emotion. For a while I said nothing. I passed an inqu