THE light grew stronger as we advanced. In a little time it was nearly as strong as the
phosphorescence on Cavor's legs. Our tunnel was expanding into a cavern, and this new
light was at the farther end of it. I perceived something that set my hopes leaping and
bounding.
"Cavor," I said, "it comes from above! I am certain it comes from above!"
He made no answer, but hurried on.
Indisputably it was a gray light, a silvery light.
In another moment we were beneath it. It filtered down through a chink in the walls of
the cavern, and as I stared up, drip, came a drop of water upon my face. I started and
stood aside - drip, fell another drop quite audibly on the rocky floor.
"Cavor," I said, "if one of us lifts the other, he can reach that crack!"
"I'll lift you," he said, and incontinently hoisted me as though I was a baby.
I thrust an arm into the crack, and just at my finger tips found a little ledge by which I
could hold. I could see the white light was very much brighter now. I pulled myself up by
two fingers with scarcely an effort, though on earth I weigh twelve stone, reached to a
still higher corner of rock, and so got my feet on the narrow ledge. I stood up and
searched up the rocks with my fingers; the cleft broadened out upwardly. "It's climbable,"
I said to Cavor. "Can you jump up to my hand if I hold it down to you?"
I wedged myself between the sides of the cleft, rested knee and foot on the ledge, and
extended a hand. I could not see Cavor, but I could hear the rustle of his movements as he
crouched to spring. Then whack and he was hanging to my arm - and no heavier than a
kitten! I lugged him up until he had a hand on my ledge, and could release me.
"Confound it!" I said, "any one could be a mountaineer on the moon;" and so set myself
in earnest to the climbing. For a few minutes I clambered steadily, and then I looked up
again. The cleft opened out steadily, and the light was brighter. Only -
It was not daylight after all.
In another moment I could see what it was, and at the sight I could have beaten my head
against the rocks with disappointment. For I beheld simply an irregularly sloping open
space, and all over its slanting floor stood a forest of little club-shaped fungi, each
shining gloriously with that pinkish silvery light. For a moment I stared at their soft
radiance, then sprang forward and upward among them. I plucked up half a dozen and
