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bars and crawl through."
We wasted a little time in vague discussion. Then I took one of the bars
in both hands, and got my feet up against the rock until they were almost
on a level with my head, 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
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