“Quite recently, too⁠—I think it was on the eleventh or twelfth visit I made to this apparatus⁠—I had a curious light upon the lives of these operatives. I was being guided through a shortcut hither, instead of going down the spiral and by the quays of the Central Sea. From the devious windings of a long, dark gallery we emerged into a vast, low cavern, pervaded by an earthy smell, and, as things go in this darkness, rather brightly lit. The light came from a tumultuous growth of livid fungoid shapes⁠—some indeed singularly like our terrestrial mushrooms, but standing as high or higher than a man.

“ ‘Mooneys eat these?’ said I to Phi-oo.

“ ‘Yes, food.’

“ ‘Goodness me!’ I cried; ‘what’s that?’

“My eye had just caught the figure of an exceptionally big and ungainly Selenite lying motionless among the stems, face downward. We stopped.

“ ‘Dead?’ I asked. (For as yet I have seen no dead in the moon, and I have grown curious.)