and so thrust against the bar. It bent so
suddenly that I almost slipped. I clambered about and bent the adjacent
bar in the opposite direction, and then took the luminous fungus from my
pocket and dropped it down the fissure.

"Don't do anything hastily," whispered Cavor, as I twisted myself up
through the opening I had enlarged. I had a glimpse of busy figures as I
came through the grating, and immediately bent down, so that the rim of
the depression in which the grating lay hid me from their eyes, and so lay
flat, signalling advice to Cavor as he also prepared to come through.
Presently we were side by side in the depression, peering over the edge at
the cavern and its occupants.

It was a much larger cavern than we had supposed from our first glimpse of
it, and we looked up from the lowest portion of its sloping floor. It
widened out as it receded from us, and its roof came down and hid the
remoter portion altogether. And lying in a line along its length,
vanishing at last far away in that tremendous perspective, were a number
of huge shapes, huge pallid hulls, upon which the Selenites were busy. At
first they seemed big white cylinders of vague import. Then I noted the
heads upon them lying towards us, eyeless and skinless like the heads of
sheep at a butcher's, and perceived they were the carcasses of mooncalves
being cut up, much as the crew of a whaler might cut up a moored whale.
They were cutting off the flesh in strips, and on some of the farther
trunks the white ribs were showing. It was the sound of their hatchets
that made that chid, chid, chid. Some way away a thing like a trolley
cable, drawn and loaded with chunks of lax meat, was running up the slope
of the cavern floor. This enormous long avenue of hulls that were destined
to be food gave us a sense of the vast populousness of the moon world
second only to the effect of our first glimpse down the shaft.

It seemed to me at first that the Selenites must be standing on
trestle-supported planks,[*] and then I saw that the planks and supports
and the hatchets were really of the same leaden hue as my fetters had
seemed before white light came to bear on them. A number of very
thick-looking crowbars lay about the floor, and had apparently assisted
to turn the dead mooncalf over on its side. They were perhaps six feet
long, with shaped handles, very tempting-looking weapons. The whole
place was lit by three transverse streams of the blue fluid.

[* Footno