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of its guardian. These fetters! A high degree of intelligence..."
"I wish to heaven," cried I, "I'd thought even twice! Plunge after plunge.
First one fluky start and then another. It was my confidence in you! Why
didn't I stick to my play? That was what I was equal to. That was my
world and the life I was made for. I could have finished that play. I'm
certain ... it was a good play. I had the scenario as good as done.
Then.... Conceive it! leaping to the moon! Practically--I've thrown my
life away! That old woman in the inn near Canterbury had better sense."
I looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. The darkness had given place to
that bluish light again. The door was opening, and several noiseless
Selenites were coming into the chamber. I became quite still, staring at
their grotesque faces.
Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest. I
perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls. One elemental need
at least our minds could understand in common. They were bowls of some
metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light; and each
contained a number of whitish fragments. All the cloudy pain and misery
that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape of hunger. I eyed
these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in dreams, at that
time it seemed a small matter that at the end of the arms that lowered one
towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and thumb, like the end of
an elephant's trunk. The stuff in the bowl was loose in texture, and
whitish brown in colour--rather like lumps of some cold souffle, and it
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