“Every leap, it seems to me ,” I said, “my shadow flew before me.”

We stared into one another’s eyes. The area of the crater had become enormously vast to our imaginations, the growing thickets already impenetrably dense.

“Good heavens! What fools we have been!”

“It’s evident that we must find it again,” said Cavor, “and that soon. The sun grows stronger. We should be fainting with the heat already if it wasn’t so dry. And⁠ ⁠… I’m hungry.”

I stared at him. I had not suspected this aspect of the matter before. But it came to me at once⁠—a positive craving. “Yes,” I said with emphasis. “I am hungry too.”

He stood up with a look of active resolution. “Certainly we must find the sphere.”

As calmly as possible we surveyed the interminable reefs and thickets that formed the floor of the crater, each of us weighing in silence the chances of our finding the sphere before we were overtaken by heat and hunger.

“It can’t be fifty yards from here,” said Cavor, with indecisive gestures. “The only thing is to beat round about until we come upon it.”

“That is all we can do,” I said, without any alacrity to begin our hunt. “I wish this confounded spike bush did not grow so fast!”

“That’s just it,” said Cavor. “But it was lying on a bank of snow.”