That's about as far as we got before the sun went down with startling suddenness and darkness settled over our Limbo. The darkness was impenetrable. It lasted perhaps an hour. Then a sort of haze seemed to withdraw in all directions, inwardly and outwardly—and the wondrous tropical sky, studded with stars that hung down almost within reach of human hands, bathed our upturned faces.
In silence we all watched. There was an unusual coolness in the air, too, for several minutes, Cuba, at that time of the year, was almost never cool, even late at night; but some of the men were shivering. Sweat had not dried on all of us, and sweat is bad when you are motionless, at night. I was about to order the men to exercise a little, when I realized something that Hoose put into words first:
"Now," he said, "they're feeding us warmth, just as they feed and water us! And we've been here for hours and don't have any idea, even, who or what they are!"
Nobody else said anything. All the rest of us were studying the sky.
"I don't see the Big Dipper!" said Sergeant Eckstrom.
"Nor the North Star!" somebody added.
"Nor Venus, nor Lyra!" said someone else. "I've been studying our books on constellations, and I don't recognize a one! Where are we? We're not even in Cuba! Not even in the Northern Hemisphere! Not even—"
"Not even on the Earth—?" said Hoose.
It was just here that the whispering began in our walkie-talkies; whispering like nothing we had ever heard. We could make out nothing that sounded at all like human words. The sounds were mechanical, yet not-mechanical. I've called them whispers only because that comes closest to describing the eerie sounds which every last one of us was now hearing in his walkie-talkie.
"It's vibration on our wavelength," said one of the gobs. "But that's the best I can say of it."