THE NINETEENTH CHAPTER
The Moon Man
That night was, I think, the most disturbed one that we spent in the whole course of our stay on the Moon. Not one of us slept soundly or continuously. For one thing, our growth had proceeded at an alarming and prodigious rate; and what bedding we had (we slept in that mild climate with the blankets under us instead of over us) had become absurdly short and insufficient for our new figures. Knees and elbows spilled over the sides and got dreadfully sore on the hard earth. But besides that discomfort, we were again conscious throughout the whole night of mysterious noises and presences. Every one of us seemed to be uneasy in his mind. I remember waking up one time and hearing the Doctor, Chee-Chee and Polynesia all talking in their sleep at the same time.
Hollow-eyed and unrested we finally, at daybreak, crawled out of our various roosts and turned silently to the business of getting breakfast. That veteran campaigner Polynesia was the first to pull herself together. She came back from examining the ground about the camp with a very serious look on her old face.
“Well,” said she, “if there’s any one in the Moon who hasn’t been messing round our bunks while we slept I’d like to know who it is.”
“Why?” asked the Doctor. “Anything unusual?”
“Come and see,” said the parrot and led the way out into the clearing that surrounded our bunks and baggage.
“With a very serious look on her old face”
Well, we were accustomed to finding tracks around our home, but this which Polynesia showed us was certainly something quite out of the ordinary. For a belt of a hundred yards or more about our headquarters the earth and sand and mud was a mass of foot-prints. Strange insect tracks, the marks of enormous birds, and—most evident of all—numberless prints of that gigantic human foot which we had seen before.
“Tut, tut!” said the Doctor peevishly. “They don’t do us any harm anyway. What does it matter if they come and look at us in our sleep? I’m not greatly interested, Polynesia. Let us take breakfast. A few extra tracks don’t make much difference.”