PRESENTLY we saw that the cavern before us opened upon a hazy void. In another
moment we had emerged upon a sort of slanting gallery, that projected into a vast circular
space, a huge cylindrical pit running vertically up and down. Round this pit the slanting
gallery ran without any parapet or protection for a turn and a half, and then plunged high
above into the rock again. Somehow it reminded me then one of those spiral turns of the
railway through the Saint Gothard. It was all tremendously huge. I can scarcely hope to
convey to you the Titanic proportion of all that place, the Titanic effect of it. Our eyes
followed up the vast declivity of the pit wall, and overhead and far above we beheld a
round opening set with faint stars, and half of the lip about it well nigh blinding with the
white light of the sun. At that we cried aloud simultaneously.
"Come on!" I said, leading the way.
"But there?" said Cavor, and very carefully stepped nearer the edge of the gallery. I
followed his example, and craned forward and looked down, but I was dazzled by that
gleam of light above, and I could see only a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of
crimson and purple floating therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of this
darkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one puts one's ear
outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormous hollow, it may be, four miles beneath
our feet...
For a moment I listened, then tightened my grip on my crowbar, and led the way up the
gallery.
"This must be the shaft we looked down upon," said Cavor. "Under that lid."
"And below there, is where we saw the lights."
"The lights!" said he. " Yes - the lights of the world that now we shall never see."
"We'll come back," I said, for now we had escaped so much I was rashly sanguine that
we should recover the sphere.
His answer I did not catch.
"It doesn't matter," he answered, and we hurried on in silence.
I suppose that slanting lateral way was four or five miles long, allowing for its curvature,
and it ascended at a slope that would have made it almost impossibly steep on earth, but
which one strode up easily under lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites during all
that portion of our flight, and directly they became aware of us they ran headlong. It was
