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-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1013 ***
-
-[Illustration]
-
-
-
-
-The First Men In The Moon
-
-by H. G. Wells
-
-
-Contents
-
- I. Mr. Bedford Meets Mr. Cavor at Lympne
- II. The First Making of Cavorite
- III. The Building of the sphere
- IV. Inside the Sphere
- V. The Journey to the Moon
- VI. The Landing on the Moon
- VII. Sunrise on the Moon
- VIII. A Lunar Morning
- IX. Prospecting Begins
- X. Lost Men in the Moon
- XI. The Mooncalf Pastures
- XII. The Selenite’s Face
- XIII. Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions
- XIV. Experiments in intercourse
- XV. The Giddy Bridge
- XVI. Points of View
- XVII. The Fight in the Cave of the Moon Butchers
- XVIII. In the Sunlight
- XIX. Mr. Bedford Alone
- XX. Mr. Bedford in Infinite Space
- XXI. Mr. Bedford at Littlestone
- XXII. The Astonishing Communication of Mr. Julius Wendigee
- XXIII. An Abstract of the Six Messages First Received from Mr. Cavor
- XXIV. The Natural History of the Selenites
- XXV. The Grand Lunar
- XXVI. The Last Message Cavor sent to the Earth
-
-
-
-
-I.
-Mr. Bedford Meets Mr. Cavor at Lympne
-
-
-As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the
-blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of
-astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr.
-Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. It might have
-been any one. I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself
-removed from the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences. I had
-gone to Lympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place in
-the world. “Here, at any rate,” said I, “I shall find peace and a
-chance to work!”
-
-And this book is the sequel. So utterly at variance is destiny with all
-the little plans of men. I may perhaps mention here that very recently
-I had come an ugly cropper in certain business enterprises. Sitting now
-surrounded by all the circumstances of wealth, there is a luxury in
-admitting my extremity. I can admit, even, that to a certain extent my
-disasters were conceivably of my own making. It may be there are
-directions in which I have some capacity, but the conduct of business
-operations is not among these. But in those days I was young, and my
-youth among other objectionable forms took that of a pride in my
-capacity for affairs. I am young still in years, but the things that
-have happened to me have rubbed something of the youth from my mind.
-Whether they have brought any wisdom to light below it is a more
-doubtful matter.
-
-It is scarcely necessary to go into the details of the speculations
-that landed me at Lympne, in Kent. Nowadays even about business
-transactions there is a strong spice of adventure. I took risks. In
-these things there is invariably a certain amount of give and take, and
-it fell to me finally to do the giving reluctantly enough. Even when I
-had got out of everything, one cantankerous creditor saw fit to be
-malignant. Perhaps you have met that flaming sense of outraged virtue,
-or perhaps you have only felt it. He ran me hard. It seemed to me, at
-last, that there was nothing for it but to write a play, unless I
-wanted to drudge for my living as a clerk. I have a certain
-imagination, and luxurious tastes, and I meant to make a vigorous fight
-for it before that fate overtook me. In addition to my belief in my
-powers as a business man, I had always in those days had an idea that I
-was equal to writing a very good play. It is not, I believe, a very
-uncommon persuasion. I knew there is nothing a man can do outside
-legitimate business transactions that has such opulent possibilities,
-and very probably that biased my opinion. I had, indeed, got into the
-habit of regarding this unwritten drama as a convenient little reserve
-put by for a rainy day. That rainy day had come, and I set to work.
-
-I soon discovered that writing a play was a longer business than I had
-supposed; at first I had reckoned ten days for it, and it was to have a
-_pied-à-terre_ while it was in hand that I came to Lympne. I reckoned
-myself lucky in getting that little bungalow. I got it on a three
-years’ agreement. I put in a few sticks of furniture, and while the
-play was in hand I did my own cooking. My cooking would have shocked
-Mrs. Bond. And yet, you know, it had flavour. I had a coffee-pot, a
-sauce-pan for eggs, and one for potatoes, and a frying-pan for sausages
-and bacon—such was the simple apparatus of my comfort. One cannot
-always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.
-For the rest I laid in an eighteen-gallon cask of beer on credit, and a
-trustful baker came each day. It was not, perhaps, in the style of
-Sybaris, but I have had worse times. I was a little sorry for the
-baker, who was a very decent man indeed, but even for him I hoped.
-
-Certainly if any one wants solitude, the place is Lympne. It is in the
-clay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea
-cliff and stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea. In very
-wet weather the place is almost inaccessible, and I have heard that at
-times the postman used to traverse the more succulent portions of his
-route with boards upon his feet. I never saw him doing so, but I can
-quite imagine it. Outside the doors of the few cottages and houses that
-make up the present village big birch besoms are stuck, to wipe off the
-worst of the clay, which will give some idea of the texture of the
-district. I doubt if the place would be there at all, if it were not a
-fading memory of things gone for ever. It was the big port of England
-in Roman times, Portus Lemanis, and now the sea is four miles away. All
-down the steep hill are boulders and masses of Roman brickwork, and
-from it old Watling Street, still paved in places, starts like an arrow
-to the north. I used to stand on the hill and think of it all, the
-galleys and legions, the captives and officials, the women and traders,
-the speculators like myself, all the swarm and tumult that came
-clanking in and out of the harbour. And now just a few lumps of rubble
-on a grassy slope, and a sheep or two—and I. And where the port had
-been were the levels of the marsh, sweeping round in a broad curve to
-distant Dungeness, and dotted here and there with tree clumps and the
-church towers of old mediæval towns that are following Lemanis now
-towards extinction.
-
-That outlook on the marsh was, indeed, one of the finest views I have
-ever seen. I suppose Dungeness was fifteen miles away; it lay like a
-raft on the sea, and farther westward were the hills by Hastings under
-the setting sun. Sometimes they hung close and clear, sometimes they
-were faded and low, and often the drift of the weather took them clean
-out of sight. And all the nearer parts of the marsh were laced and lit
-by ditches and canals.
-
-The window at which I worked looked over the skyline of this crest, and
-it was from this window that I first set eyes on Cavor. It was just as
-I was struggling with my scenario, holding down my mind to the sheer
-hard work of it, and naturally enough he arrested my attention.
-
-The sun had set, the sky was a vivid tranquillity of green and yellow,
-and against that he came out black—the oddest little figure.
-
-He was a short, round-bodied, thin-legged little man, with a jerky
-quality in his motions; he had seen fit to clothe his extraordinary
-mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat, and cycling knickerbockers and
-stockings. Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he
-never played cricket. It was a fortuitous concurrence of garments,
-arising I know not how. He gesticulated with his hands and arms, and
-jerked his head about and buzzed. He buzzed like something electric.
-You never heard such buzzing. And ever and again he cleared his throat
-with a most extraordinary noise.
-
-There had been rain, and that spasmodic walk of his was enhanced by the
-extreme slipperiness of the footpath. Exactly as he came against the
-sun he stopped, pulled out a watch, hesitated. Then with a sort of
-convulsive gesture he turned and retreated with every manifestation of
-haste, no longer gesticulating, but going with ample strides that
-showed the relatively large size of his feet—they were, I remember,
-grotesquely exaggerated in size by adhesive clay—to the best possible
-advantage.
-
-This occurred on the first day of my sojourn, when my play-writing
-energy was at its height and I regarded the incident simply as an
-annoying distraction—the waste of five minutes. I returned to my
-scenario. But when next evening the apparition was repeated with
-remarkable precision, and again the next evening, and indeed every
-evening when rain was not falling, concentration upon the scenario
-became a considerable effort. “Confound the man,” I said, “one would
-think he was learning to be a marionette!” and for several evenings I
-cursed him pretty heartily. Then my annoyance gave way to amazement and
-curiosity. Why on earth should a man do this thing? On the fourteenth
-evening I could stand it no longer, and so soon as he appeared I opened
-the french window, crossed the verandah, and directed myself to the
-point where he invariably stopped.
-
-He had his watch out as I came up to him. He had a chubby, rubicund
-face with reddish brown eyes—previously I had seen him only against the
-light. “One moment, sir,” said I as he turned. He stared. “One moment,”
-he said, “certainly. Or if you wish to speak to me for longer, and it
-is not asking too much—your moment is up—would it trouble you to
-accompany me?”
-
-“Not in the least,” said I, placing myself beside him.
-
-“My habits are regular. My time for intercourse—limited.”
-
-“This, I presume, is your time for exercise?”
-
-“It is. I come here to enjoy the sunset.”
-
-“You don’t.”
-
-“Sir?”
-
-“You never look at it.”
-
-“Never look at it?”
-
-“No. I’ve watched you thirteen nights, and not once have you looked at
-the sunset—not once.”
-
-He knitted his brows like one who encounters a problem.
-
-“Well, I enjoy the sunlight—the atmosphere—I go along this path,
-through that gate”—he jerked his head over his shoulder—“and round—”
-
-“You don’t. You never have been. It’s all nonsense. There isn’t a way.
-To-night for instance—”
-
-“Oh! to-night! Let me see. Ah! I just glanced at my watch, saw that I
-had already been out just three minutes over the precise half-hour,
-decided there was not time to go round, turned—”
-
-“You always do.”
-
-He looked at me—reflected. “Perhaps I do, now I come to think of it.
-But what was it you wanted to speak to me about?”
-
-“Why, this!”
-
-“This?”
-
-“Yes. Why do you do it? Every night you come making a noise—”
-
-“Making a noise?”
-
-“Like this.” I imitated his buzzing noise. He looked at me, and it was
-evident the buzzing awakened distaste. “Do I do _that?_” he asked.
-
-“Every blessed evening.”
-
-“I had no idea.”
-
-He stopped dead. He regarded me gravely. “Can it be,” he said, “that I
-have formed a Habit?”
-
-“Well, it looks like it. Doesn’t it?”
-
-He pulled down his lower lip between finger and thumb. He regarded a
-puddle at his feet.
-
-“My mind is much occupied,” he said. “And you want to know _why!_ Well,
-sir, I can assure you that not only do I not know why I do these
-things, but I did not even know I did them. Come to think, it is just
-as you say; I never _have_ been beyond that field.... And these things
-annoy you?”
-
-For some reason I was beginning to relent towards him. “Not _annoy_,” I
-said. “But—imagine yourself writing a play!”
-
-“I couldn’t.”
-
-“Well, anything that needs concentration.”
-
-“Ah!” he said, “of course,” and meditated. His expression became so
-eloquent of distress, that I relented still more. After all, there is a
-touch of aggression in demanding of a man you don’t know why he hums on
-a public footpath.
-
-“You see,” he said weakly, “it’s a habit.”
-
-“Oh, I recognise that.”
-
-“I must stop it.”
-
-“But not if it puts you out. After all, I had no business—it’s
-something of a liberty.”
-
-“Not at all, sir,” he said, “not at all. I am greatly indebted to you.
-I should guard myself against these things. In future I will. Could I
-trouble you—once again? That noise?”
-
-“Something like this,” I said. “Zuzzoo, zuzzoo. But really, you know—”
-
-“I am greatly obliged to you. In fact, I know I am getting absurdly
-absent-minded. You are quite justified, sir—perfectly justified.
-Indeed, I am indebted to you. The thing shall end. And now, sir, I have
-already brought you farther than I should have done.”
-
-“I do hope my impertinence—”
-
-“Not at all, sir, not at all.”
-
-We regarded each other for a moment. I raised my hat and wished him a
-good evening. He responded convulsively, and so we went our ways.
-
-At the stile I looked back at his receding figure. His bearing had
-changed remarkably, he seemed limp, shrunken. The contrast with his
-former gesticulating, zuzzoing self took me in some absurd way as
-pathetic. I watched him out of sight. Then wishing very heartily I had
-kept to my own business, I returned to my bungalow and my play.
-
-The next evening I saw nothing of him, nor the next. But he was very
-much in my mind, and it had occurred to me that as a sentimental comic
-character he might serve a useful purpose in the development of my
-plot. The third day he called upon me.
-
-For a time I was puzzled to think what had brought him. He made
-indifferent conversation in the most formal way, then abruptly he came
-to business. He wanted to buy me out of my bungalow.
-
-“You see,” he said, “I don’t blame you in the least, but you’ve
-destroyed a habit, and it disorganises my day. I’ve walked past here
-for years—years. No doubt I’ve hummed.... You’ve made all that
-impossible!”
-
-I suggested he might try some other direction.
-
-“No. There is no other direction. This is the only one. I’ve inquired.
-And now—every afternoon at four—I come to a dead wall.”
-
-“But, my dear sir, if the thing is so important to you—”
-
-“It’s vital. You see, I’m—I’m an investigator—I am engaged in a
-scientific research. I live—” he paused and seemed to think. “Just over
-there,” he said, and pointed suddenly dangerously near my eye. “The
-house with white chimneys you see just over the trees. And my
-circumstances are abnormal—abnormal. I am on the point of completing
-one of the most important—demonstrations—I can assure you one of _the
-most important_ demonstrations that have ever been made. It requires
-constant thought, constant mental ease and activity. And the afternoon
-was my brightest time!—effervescing with new ideas—new points of view.”
-
-“But why not come by still?”
-
-“It would be all different. I should be self-conscious. I should think
-of you at your play—watching me irritated—instead of thinking of my
-work. No! I must have the bungalow.”
-
-I meditated. Naturally, I wanted to think the matter over thoroughly
-before anything decisive was said. I was generally ready enough for
-business in those days, and selling always attracted me; but in the
-first place it was not my bungalow, and even if I sold it to him at a
-good price I might get inconvenienced in the delivery of goods if the
-current owner got wind of the transaction, and in the second I was,
-well—undischarged. It was clearly a business that required delicate
-handling. Moreover, the possibility of his being in pursuit of some
-valuable invention also interested me. It occurred to me that I would
-like to know more of this research, not with any dishonest intention,
-but simply with an idea that to know what it was would be a relief from
-play-writing. I threw out feelers.
-
-He was quite willing to supply information. Indeed, once he was fairly
-under way the conversation became a monologue. He talked like a man
-long pent up, who has had it over with himself again and again. He
-talked for nearly an hour, and I must confess I found it a pretty stiff
-bit of listening. But through it all there was the undertone of
-satisfaction one feels when one is neglecting work one has set oneself.
-During that first interview I gathered very little of the drift of his
-work. Half his words were technicalities entirely strange to me, and he
-illustrated one or two points with what he was pleased to call
-elementary mathematics, computing on an envelope with a copying-ink
-pencil, in a manner that made it hard even to seem to understand.
-“Yes,” I said, “yes. Go on!” Nevertheless I made out enough to convince
-me that he was no mere crank playing at discoveries. In spite of his
-crank-like appearance there was a force about him that made that
-impossible. Whatever it was, it was a thing with mechanical
-possibilities. He told me of a work-shed he had, and of three
-assistants—originally jobbing carpenters—whom he had trained. Now, from
-the work-shed to the patent office is clearly only one step. He invited
-me to see those things. I accepted readily, and took care, by a remark
-or so, to underline that. The proposed transfer of the bungalow
-remained very conveniently in suspense.
-
-At last he rose to depart, with an apology for the length of his call.
-Talking over his work was, he said, a pleasure enjoyed only too rarely.
-It was not often he found such an intelligent listener as myself, he
-mingled very little with professional scientific men.
-
-“So much pettiness,” he explained; “so much intrigue! And really, when
-one has an idea—a novel, fertilising idea—I don’t want to be
-uncharitable, but—”
-
-I am a man who believes in impulses. I made what was perhaps a rash
-proposition. But you must remember, that I had been alone, play-writing
-in Lympne, for fourteen days, and my compunction for his ruined walk
-still hung about me. “Why not,” said I, “make this your new habit? In
-the place of the one I spoilt? At least, until we can settle about the
-bungalow. What you want is to turn over your work in your mind. That
-you have always done during your afternoon walk. Unfortunately that’s
-over—you can’t get things back as they were. But why not come and talk
-about your work to me; use me as a sort of wall against which you may
-throw your thoughts and catch them again? It’s certain I don’t know
-enough to steal your ideas myself—and I know no scientific men—”
-
-I stopped. He was considering. Evidently the thing attracted him. “But
-I’m afraid I should bore you,” he said.
-
-“You think I’m too dull?”
-
-“Oh, no; but technicalities—”
-
-“Anyhow, you’ve interested me immensely this afternoon.”
-
-“Of course it _would_ be a great help to me. Nothing clears up one’s
-ideas so much as explaining them. Hitherto—”
-
-“My dear sir, say no more.”
-
-“But really can you spare the time?”
-
-“There is no rest like change of occupation,” I said, with profound
-conviction.
-
-The affair was over. On my verandah steps he turned. “I am already
-greatly indebted to you,” he said.
-
-I made an interrogative noise.
-
-“You have completely cured me of that ridiculous habit of humming,” he
-explained.
-
-I think I said I was glad to be of any service to him, and he turned
-away.
-
-Immediately the train of thought that our conversation had suggested
-must have resumed its sway. His arms began to wave in their former
-fashion. The faint echo of “zuzzoo” came back to me on the breeze....
-
-Well, after all, that was not my affair....
-
-He came the next day, and again the next day after that, and delivered
-two lectures on physics to our mutual satisfaction. He talked with an
-air of being extremely lucid about the “ether” and “tubes of force,”
-and “gravitational potential,” and things like that, and I sat in my
-other folding-chair and said, “Yes,” “Go on,” “I follow you,” to keep
-him going. It was tremendously difficult stuff, but I do not think he
-ever suspected how much I did not understand him. There were moments
-when I doubted whether I was well employed, but at any rate I was
-resting from that confounded play. Now and then things gleamed on me
-clearly for a space, only to vanish just when I thought I had hold of
-them. Sometimes my attention failed altogether, and I would give it up
-and sit and stare at him, wondering whether, after all, it would not be
-better to use him as a central figure in a good farce and let all this
-other stuff slide. And then, perhaps, I would catch on again for a bit.
-
-At the earliest opportunity I went to see his house. It was large and
-carelessly furnished; there were no servants other than his three
-assistants, and his dietary and private life were characterised by a
-philosophical simplicity. He was a water-drinker, a vegetarian, and all
-those logical disciplinary things. But the sight of his equipment
-settled many doubts. It looked like business from cellar to attic—an
-amazing little place to find in an out-of-the-way village. The
-ground-floor rooms contained benches and apparatus, the bakehouse and
-scullery boiler had developed into respectable furnaces, dynamos
-occupied the cellar, and there was a gasometer in the garden. He showed
-it to me with all the confiding zest of a man who has been living too
-much alone. His seclusion was overflowing now in an excess of
-confidence, and I had the good luck to be the recipient.
-
-The three assistants were creditable specimens of the class of
-“handy-men” from which they came. Conscientious if unintelligent,
-strong, civil, and willing. One, Spargus, who did the cooking and all
-the metal work, had been a sailor; a second, Gibbs, was a joiner; and
-the third was an ex-jobbing gardener, and now general assistant. They
-were the merest labourers. All the intelligent work was done by Cavor.
-Theirs was the darkest ignorance compared even with my muddled
-impression.
-
-And now, as to the nature of these inquiries. Here, unhappily, comes a
-grave difficulty. I am no scientific expert, and if I were to attempt
-to set forth in the highly scientific language of Mr. Cavor the aim to
-which his experiments tended, I am afraid I should confuse not only the
-reader but myself, and almost certainly I should make some blunder that
-would bring upon me the mockery of every up-to-date student of
-mathematical physics in the country. The best thing I can do therefore
-is, I think to give my impressions in my own inexact language, without
-any attempt to wear a garment of knowledge to which I have no claim.
-
-The object of Mr. Cavor’s search was a substance that should be
-“opaque”—he used some other word I have forgotten, but “opaque” conveys
-the idea—to “all forms of radiant energy.” “Radiant energy,” he made me
-understand, was anything like light or heat, or those Röntgen Rays
-there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the electric waves of
-Marconi, or gravitation. All these things, he said, _radiate_ out from
-centres, and act on bodies at a distance, whence comes the term
-“radiant energy.” Now almost all substances are opaque to some form or
-other of radiant energy. Glass, for example, is transparent to light,
-but much less so to heat, so that it is useful as a fire-screen; and
-alum is transparent to light, but blocks heat completely. A solution of
-iodine in carbon bisulphide, on the other hand, completely blocks
-light, but is quite transparent to heat. It will hide a fire from you,
-but permit all its warmth to reach you. Metals are not only opaque to
-light and heat, but also to electrical energy, which passes through
-both iodine solution and glass almost as though they were not
-interposed. And so on.
-
-Now all known substances are “transparent” to gravitation. You can use
-screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical
-influence of the sun, or the warmth of the earth from anything; you can
-screen things by sheets of metal from Marconi’s rays, but nothing will
-cut off the gravitational attraction of the sun or the gravitational
-attraction of the earth. Yet why there should be nothing is hard to
-say. Cavor did not see why such a substance should not exist, and
-certainly I could not tell him. I had never thought of such a
-possibility before. He showed me by calculations on paper, which Lord
-Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson, or any
-of those great scientific people might have understood, but which
-simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such a
-substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It was
-an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me at
-the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. “Yes,” I said to
-it all, “yes; go on!” Suffice it for this story that he believed he
-might be able to manufacture this possible substance opaque to
-gravitation out of a complicated alloy of metals and something new—a
-new element, I fancy—called, I believe, _helium_, which was sent to him
-from London in sealed stone jars. Doubt has been thrown upon this
-detail, but I am almost certain it was _helium_ he had sent him in
-sealed stone jars. It was certainly something very gaseous and thin. If
-only I had taken notes...
-
-But then, how was I to foresee the necessity of taking notes?
-
-Any one with the merest germ of an imagination will understand the
-extraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathise a
-little with the emotion I felt as this understanding emerged from the
-haze of abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself. Comic relief
-in a play indeed! It was some time before I would believe that I had
-interpreted him aright, and I was very careful not to ask questions
-that would have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstanding
-into which he dropped his daily exposition. But no one reading the
-story of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren
-narrative it will be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction
-that this astonishing substance was positively going to be made.
-
-I do not recall that I gave my play an hour’s consecutive work at any
-time after my visit to his house. My imagination had other things to
-do. There seemed no limit to the possibilities of the stuff; whichever
-way I tried I came on miracles and revolutions. For example, if one
-wanted to lift a weight, however enormous, one had only to get a sheet
-of this substance beneath it, and one might lift it with a straw. My
-first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns and
-ironclads, and all the material and methods of war, and from that to
-shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable form of human
-industry. The chance that had brought me into the very birth-chamber of
-this new time—it was an epoch, no less—was one of those chances that
-come once in a thousand years. The thing unrolled, it expanded and
-expanded. Among other things I saw in it my redemption as a business
-man. I saw a parent company, and daughter companies, applications to
-right of us, applications to left, rings and trusts, privileges, and
-concessions spreading and spreading, until one vast, stupendous
-Cavorite company ran and ruled the world.
-
-And I was in it!
-
-I took my line straight away. I knew I was staking everything, but I
-jumped there and then.
-
-“We’re on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented,” I
-said, and put the accent on “we.” “If you want to keep me out of this,
-you’ll have to do it with a gun. I’m coming down to be your fourth
-labourer to-morrow.”
-
-He seemed surprised at my enthusiasm, but not a bit suspicious or
-hostile. Rather, he was self-depreciatory. He looked at me doubtfully.
-“But do you really think—?” he said. “And your play! How about that
-play?”
-
-“It’s vanished!” I cried. “My dear sir, don’t you see what you’ve got?
-Don’t you see what you’re going to do?”
-
-That was merely a rhetorical turn, but positively, he didn’t. At first
-I could not believe it. He had not had the beginning of the inkling of
-an idea. This astonishing little man had been working on purely
-theoretical grounds the whole time! When he said it was “the most
-important” research the world had ever seen, he simply meant it squared
-up so many theories, settled so much that was in doubt; he had troubled
-no more about the application of the stuff he was going to turn out
-than if he had been a machine that makes guns. This was a possible
-substance, and he was going to make it! _V’la tout_, as the Frenchman
-says.
-
-Beyond that, he was childish! If he made it, it would go down to
-posterity as Cavorite or Cavorine, and he would be made an F.R.S., and
-his portrait given away as a scientific worthy with _Nature_, and
-things like that. And that was all he saw! He would have dropped this
-bombshell into the world as though he had discovered a new species of
-gnat, if it had not happened that I had come along. And there it would
-have lain and fizzled, like one or two other little things these
-scientific people have lit and dropped about us.
-
-When I realised this, it was I did the talking, and Cavor who said, “Go
-on!” I jumped up. I paced the room, gesticulating like a boy of twenty.
-I tried to make him understand his duties and responsibilities in the
-matter—_our_ duties and responsibilities in the matter. I assured him
-we might make wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we
-fancied, we might own and order the whole world. I told him of
-companies and patents, and the case for secret processes. All these
-things seemed to take him much as his mathematics had taken me. A look
-of perplexity came into his ruddy little face. He stammered something
-about indifference to wealth, but I brushed all that aside. He had got
-to be rich, and it was no good his stammering. I gave him to understand
-the sort of man I was, and that I had had very considerable business
-experience. I did not tell him I was an undischarged bankrupt at the
-time, because that was temporary, but I think I reconciled my evident
-poverty with my financial claims. And quite insensibly, in the way such
-projects grow, the understanding of a Cavorite monopoly grew up between
-us. He was to make the stuff, and I was to make the boom.
-
-I stuck like a leech to the “we”—“you” and “I” didn’t exist for me.
-
-His idea was that the profits I spoke of might go to endow research,
-but that, of course, was a matter we had to settle later. “That’s all
-right,” I shouted, “that’s all right.” The great point, as I insisted,
-was to get the thing done.
-
-“Here is a substance,” I cried, “no home, no factory, no fortress, no
-ship can dare to be without—more universally applicable even than a
-patent medicine. There isn’t a solitary aspect of it, not one of its
-ten thousand possible uses that will not make us rich, Cavor, beyond
-the dreams of avarice!”
-
-“No!” he said. “I begin to see. It’s extraordinary how one gets new
-points of view by talking over things!”
-
-“And as it happens you have just talked to the right man!”
-
-“I suppose no one,” he said, “is absolutely _averse_ to enormous
-wealth. Of course there is one thing—”
-
-He paused. I stood still.
-
-“It is just possible, you know, that we may not be able to make it
-after all! It may be one of those things that are a theoretical
-possibility, but a practical absurdity. Or when we make it, there may
-be some little hitch!”
-
-“We’ll tackle the hitch when it comes,” said I.
-
-
-
-
-II.
-The First Making of Cavorite
-
-
-But Cavor’s fears were groundless, so far as the actual making was
-concerned. On the 14th of October, 1899, this incredible substance was
-made!
-
-Oddly enough, it was made at last by accident, when Mr. Cavor least
-expected it. He had fused together a number of metals and certain other
-things—I wish I knew the particulars now!—and he intended to leave the
-mixture a week and then allow it to cool slowly. Unless he had
-miscalculated, the last stage in the combination would occur when the
-stuff sank to a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But it chanced
-that, unknown to Cavor, dissension had arisen about the furnace
-tending. Gibbs, who had previously seen to this, had suddenly attempted
-to shift it to the man who had been a gardener, on the score that coal
-was soil, being dug, and therefore could not possibly fall within the
-province of a joiner; the man who had been a jobbing gardener alleged,
-however, that coal was a metallic or ore-like substance, let alone that
-he was cook. But Spargus insisted on Gibbs doing the coaling, seeing
-that he was a joiner and that coal is notoriously fossil wood.
-Consequently Gibbs ceased to replenish the furnace, and no one else did
-so, and Cavor was too much immersed in certain interesting problems
-concerning a Cavorite flying machine (neglecting the resistance of the
-air and one or two other points) to perceive that anything was wrong.
-And the premature birth of his invention took place just as he was
-coming across the field to my bungalow for our afternoon talk and tea.
-
-I remember the occasion with extreme vividness. The water was boiling,
-and everything was prepared, and the sound of his “zuzzoo” had brought
-me out upon the verandah. His active little figure was black against
-the autumnal sunset, and to the right the chimneys of his house just
-rose above a gloriously tinted group of trees. Remoter rose the Wealden
-Hills, faint and blue, while to the left the hazy marsh spread out
-spacious and serene. And then—
-
-The chimneys jerked heavenward, smashing into a string of bricks as
-they rose, and the roof and a miscellany of furniture followed. Then
-overtaking them came a huge white flame. The trees about the building
-swayed and whirled and tore themselves to pieces, that sprang towards
-the flare. My ears were smitten with a clap of thunder that left me
-deaf on one side for life, and all about me windows smashed, unheeded.
-
-I took three steps from the verandah towards Cavor’s house, and even as
-I did so came the wind.
-
-Instantly my coat tails were over my head, and I was progressing in
-great leaps and bounds, and quite against my will, towards him. In the
-same moment the discoverer was seized, whirled about, and flew through
-the screaming air. I saw one of my chimney pots hit the ground within
-six yards of me, leap a score of feet, and so hurry in great strides
-towards the focus of the disturbance. Cavor, kicking and flapping, came
-down again, rolled over and over on the ground for a space, struggled
-up and was lifted and borne forward at an enormous velocity, vanishing
-at last among the labouring, lashing trees that writhed about his
-house.
-
-A mass of smoke and ashes, and a square of bluish shining substance
-rushed up towards the zenith. A large fragment of fencing came sailing
-past me, dropped edgeways, hit the ground and fell flat, and then the
-worst was over. The aerial commotion fell swiftly until it was a mere
-strong gale, and I became once more aware that I had breath and feet.
-By leaning back against the wind I managed to stop, and could collect
-such wits as still remained to me.
-
-In that instant the whole face of the world had changed. The tranquil
-sunset had vanished, the sky was dark with scurrying clouds, everything
-was flattened and swaying with the gale. I glanced back to see if my
-bungalow was still in a general way standing, then staggered forwards
-towards the trees amongst which Cavor had vanished, and through whose
-tall and leaf-denuded branches shone the flames of his burning house.
-
-I entered the copse, dashing from one tree to another and clinging to
-them, and for a space I sought him in vain. Then amidst a heap of
-smashed branches and fencing that had banked itself against a portion
-of his garden wall I perceived something stir. I made a run for this,
-but before I reached it a brown object separated itself, rose on two
-muddy legs, and protruded two drooping, bleeding hands. Some tattered
-ends of garment fluttered out from its middle portion and streamed
-before the wind.
-
-For a moment I did not recognise this earthy lump, and then I saw that
-it was Cavor, caked in the mud in which he had rolled. He leant forward
-against the wind, rubbing the dirt from his eyes and mouth.
-
-He extended a muddy lump of hand, and staggered a pace towards me. His
-face worked with emotion, little lumps of mud kept falling from it. He
-looked as damaged and pitiful as any living creature I have ever seen,
-and his remark therefore amazed me exceedingly.
-
-“Gratulate me,” he gasped; “gratulate me!”
-
-“Congratulate you!” said I. “Good heavens! What for?”
-
-“I’ve done it.”
-
-“You _have_. What on earth caused that explosion?”
-
-A gust of wind blew his words away. I understood him to say that it
-wasn’t an explosion at all. The wind hurled me into collision with him,
-and we stood clinging to one another.
-
-“Try and get back—to my bungalow,” I bawled in his ear. He did not hear
-me, and shouted something about “three martyrs—science,” and also
-something about “not much good.” At the time he laboured under the
-impression that his three attendants had perished in the whirlwind.
-Happily this was incorrect. Directly he had left for my bungalow they
-had gone off to the public-house in Lympne to discuss the question of
-the furnaces over some trivial refreshment.
-
-I repeated my suggestion of getting back to my bungalow, and this time
-he understood. We clung arm-in-arm and started, and managed at last to
-reach the shelter of as much roof as was left to me. For a space we sat
-in arm-chairs and panted. All the windows were broken, and the lighter
-articles of furniture were in great disorder, but no irrevocable damage
-was done. Happily the kitchen door had stood the pressure upon it, so
-that all my crockery and cooking materials had survived. The oil stove
-was still burning, and I put on the water to boil again for tea. And
-that prepared, I could turn on Cavor for his explanation.
-
-“Quite correct,” he insisted; “quite correct. I’ve done it, and it’s
-all right.”
-
-“But,” I protested. “All right! Why, there can’t be a rick standing, or
-a fence or a thatched roof undamaged for twenty miles round....”
-
-“It’s all right—_really_. I didn’t, of course, foresee this little
-upset. My mind was preoccupied with another problem, and I’m apt to
-disregard these practical side issues. But it’s all right—”
-
-“My dear sir,” I cried, “don’t you see you’ve done thousands of pounds’
-worth of damage?”
-
-“There, I throw myself on your discretion. I’m not a practical man, of
-course, but don’t you think they will regard it as a cyclone?”
-
-“But the explosion—”
-
-“It was _not_ an explosion. It’s perfectly simple. Only, as I say, I’m
-apt to overlook these little things. It’s that zuzzoo business on a
-larger scale. Inadvertently I made this substance of mine, this
-Cavorite, in a thin, wide sheet....”
-
-He paused. “You are quite clear that the stuff is opaque to
-gravitation, that it cuts off things from gravitating towards each
-other?”
-
-“Yes,” said I. “Yes.”
-
-“Well, so soon as it reached a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit,
-and the process of its manufacture was complete, the air above it, the
-portions of roof and ceiling and floor above it ceased to have weight.
-I suppose you know—everybody knows nowadays—that, as a usual thing, the
-air _has_ weight, that it presses on everything at the surface of the
-earth, presses in all directions, with a pressure of fourteen and a
-half pounds to the square inch?”
-
-“I know that,” said I. “Go on.”
-
-“I know that too,” he remarked. “Only this shows you how useless
-knowledge is unless you apply it. You see, over our Cavorite this
-ceased to be the case, the air there ceased to exert any pressure, and
-the air round it and not over the Cavorite was exerting a pressure of
-fourteen pounds and a half to the square inch upon this suddenly
-weightless air. Ah! you begin to see! The air all about the Cavorite
-crushed in upon the air above it with irresistible force. The air above
-the Cavorite was forced upward violently, the air that rushed in to
-replace it immediately lost weight, ceased to exert any pressure,
-followed suit, blew the ceiling through and the roof off....
-
-“You perceive,” he said, “it formed a sort of atmospheric fountain, a
-kind of chimney in the atmosphere. And if the Cavorite itself hadn’t
-been loose and so got sucked up the chimney, does it occur to you what
-would have happened?”
-
-I thought. “I suppose,” I said, “the air would be rushing up and up
-over that infernal piece of stuff now.”
-
-“Precisely,” he said. “A huge fountain—”
-
-“Spouting into space! Good heavens! Why, it would have squirted all the
-atmosphere of the earth away! It would have robbed the world of air! It
-would have been the death of all mankind! That little lump of stuff!”
-
-“Not exactly into space,” said Cavor, “but as bad—practically. It would
-have whipped the air off the world as one peels a banana, and flung it
-thousands of miles. It would have dropped back again, of course—but on
-an asphyxiated world! From our point of view very little better than if
-it never came back!”
-
-I stared. As yet I was too amazed to realise how all my expectations
-had been upset. “What do you mean to do now?” I asked.
-
-“In the first place if I may borrow a garden trowel I will remove some
-of this earth with which I am encased, and then if I may avail myself
-of your domestic conveniences I will have a bath. This done, we will
-converse more at leisure. It will be wise, I think”—he laid a muddy
-hand on my arm—“if nothing were said of this affair beyond ourselves. I
-know I have caused great damage—probably even dwelling-houses may be
-ruined here and there upon the country-side. But on the other hand, I
-cannot possibly pay for the damage I have done, and if the real cause
-of this is published, it will lead only to heartburning and the
-obstruction of my work. One cannot foresee _everything_, you know, and
-I cannot consent for one moment to add the burthen of practical
-considerations to my theorising. Later on, when you have come in with
-your practical mind, and Cavorite is floated—floated _is_ the word,
-isn’t it?—and it has realised all you anticipate for it, we may set
-matters right with these persons. But not now—not now. If no other
-explanation is offered, people, in the present unsatisfactory state of
-meteorological science, will ascribe all this to a cyclone; there might
-be a public subscription, and as my house has collapsed and been burnt,
-I should in that case receive a considerable share in the compensation,
-which would be extremely helpful to the prosecution of our researches.
-But if it is known that _I_ caused this, there will be no public
-subscription, and everybody will be put out. Practically I should never
-get a chance of working in peace again. My three assistants may or may
-not have perished. That is a detail. If they have, it is no great loss;
-they were more zealous than able, and this premature event must be
-largely due to their joint neglect of the furnace. If they have not
-perished, I doubt if they have the intelligence to explain the affair.
-They will accept the cyclone story. And if during the temporary
-unfitness of my house for occupation, I may lodge in one of the
-untenanted rooms of this bungalow of yours—”
-
-He paused and regarded me.
-
-A man of such possibilities, I reflected, is no ordinary guest to
-entertain.
-
-“Perhaps,” said I, rising to my feet, “we had better begin by looking
-for a trowel,” and I led the way to the scattered vestiges of the
-greenhouse.
-
-And while he was having his bath I considered the entire question
-alone. It was clear there were drawbacks to Mr. Cavor’s society I had
-not foreseen. The absentmindedness that had just escaped depopulating
-the terrestrial globe, might at any moment result in some other grave
-inconvenience. On the other hand I was young, my affairs were in a
-mess, and I was in just the mood for reckless adventure—with a chance
-of something good at the end of it. I had quite settled in my mind that
-I was to have half at least in that aspect of the affair. Fortunately I
-held my bungalow, as I have already explained, on a three-year
-agreement, without being responsible for repairs; and my furniture,
-such as there was of it, had been hastily purchased, was unpaid for,
-insured, and altogether devoid of associations. In the end I decided to
-keep on with him, and see the business through.
-
-Certainly the aspect of things had changed very greatly. I no longer
-doubted at all the enormous possibilities of the substance, but I began
-to have doubts about the gun-carriage and the patent boots. We set to
-work at once to reconstruct his laboratory and proceed with our
-experiments. Cavor talked more on my level than he had ever done
-before, when it came to the question of how we should make the stuff
-next.
-
-“Of course we must make it again,” he said, with a sort of glee I had
-not expected in him, “of course we must make it again. We have caught a
-Tartar, perhaps, but we have left the theoretical behind us for good
-and all. If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours,
-we will. But—there _must_ be risks! There must be. In experimental work
-there always are. And here, as a practical man, _you_ must come in. For
-my own part it seems to me we might make it edgeways, perhaps, and very
-thin. Yet I don’t know. I have a certain dim perception of another
-method. I can hardly explain it yet. But curiously enough it came into
-my mind, while I was rolling over and over in the mud before the wind,
-and very doubtful how the whole adventure was to end, as being
-absolutely the thing I ought to have done.”
-
-Even with my aid we found some little difficulty, and meanwhile we kept
-at work restoring the laboratory. There was plenty to do before it
-became absolutely necessary to decide upon the precise form and method
-of our second attempt. Our only hitch was the strike of the three
-labourers, who objected to my activity as a foreman. But that matter we
-compromised after two days’ delay.
-
-
-
-
-III.
-The Building of the sphere
-
-
-I remember the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his idea
-of the sphere. He had had intimations of it before, but at the time it
-seemed to come to him in a rush. We were returning to the bungalow for
-tea, and on the way he fell humming. Suddenly he shouted, “That’s it!
-That finishes it! A sort of roller blind!”
-
-“Finishes what?” I asked.
-
-“Space—anywhere! The moon.”
-
-“What do you mean?”
-
-“Mean? Why—it must be a sphere! That’s what I mean!”
-
-I saw I was out of it, and for a time I let him talk in his own
-fashion. I hadn’t the ghost of an idea then of his drift. But after he
-had taken tea he made it clear to me.
-
-“It’s like this,” he said. “Last time I ran this stuff that cuts things
-off from gravitation into a flat tank with an overlap that held it
-down. And directly it had cooled and the manufacture was completed all
-that uproar happened, nothing above it weighed anything, the air went
-squirting up, the house squirted up, and if the stuff itself hadn’t
-squirted up too, I don’t know what would have happened! But suppose the
-substance is loose, and quite free to go up?”
-
-“It will go up at once!”
-
-“Exactly. With no more disturbance than firing a big gun.”
-
-“But what good will that do?”
-
-“I’m going up with it!”
-
-I put down my teacup and stared at him.
-
-“Imagine a sphere,” he explained, “large enough to hold two people and
-their luggage. It will be made of steel lined with thick glass; it will
-contain a proper store of solidified air, concentrated food, water
-distilling apparatus, and so forth. And enamelled, as it were, on the
-outer steel—”
-
-“Cavorite?”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“But how will you get inside?”
-
-“There was a similar problem about a dumpling.”
-
-“Yes, I know. But how?”
-
-“That’s perfectly easy. An air-tight manhole is all that is needed.
-That, of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have
-to be a valve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, without
-much loss of air.”
-
-“Like Jules Verne’s thing in _A Trip to the Moon_.”
-
-But Cavor was not a reader of fiction.
-
-“I begin to see,” I said slowly. “And you could get in and screw
-yourself up while the Cavorite was warm, and as soon as it cooled it
-would become impervious to gravitation, and off you would fly—”
-
-“At a tangent.”
-
-“You would go off in a straight line—” I stopped abruptly. “What is to
-prevent the thing travelling in a straight line into space for ever?” I
-asked. “You’re not safe to get anywhere, and if you do—how will you get
-back?”
-
-“I’ve just thought of that,” said Cavor. “That’s what I meant when I
-said the thing is finished. The inner glass sphere can be air-tight,
-and, except for the manhole, continuous, and the steel sphere can be
-made in sections, each section capable of rolling up after the fashion
-of a roller blind. These can easily be worked by springs, and released
-and checked by electricity conveyed by platinum wires fused through the
-glass. All that is merely a question of detail. So you see, that except
-for the thickness of the blind rollers, the Cavorite exterior of the
-sphere will consist of windows or blinds, whichever you like to call
-them. Well, when all these windows or blinds are shut, no light, no
-heat, no gravitation, no radiant energy of any sort will get at the
-inside of the sphere, it will fly on through space in a straight line,
-as you say. But open a window, imagine one of the windows open. Then at
-once any heavy body that chances to be in that direction will attract
-us—”
-
-I sat taking it in.
-
-“You see?” he said.
-
-“Oh, I _see_.”
-
-“Practically we shall be able to tack about in space just as we wish.
-Get attracted by this and that.”
-
-“Oh, yes. _That’s_ clear enough. Only—”
-
-“Well?”
-
-“I don’t quite see what we shall do it for! It’s really only jumping
-off the world and back again.”
-
-“Surely! For example, one might go to the moon.”
-
-“And when one got there? What would you find?”
-
-“We should see—Oh! consider the new knowledge.”
-
-“Is there air there?”
-
-“There may be.”
-
-“It’s a fine idea,” I said, “but it strikes me as a large order all the
-same. The moon! I’d much rather try some smaller things first.”
-
-“They’re out of the question, because of the air difficulty.”
-
-“Why not apply that idea of spring blinds—Cavorite blinds in strong
-steel cases—to lifting weights?”
-
-“It wouldn’t work,” he insisted. “After all, to go into outer space is
-not so much worse, if at all, than a polar expedition. Men go on polar
-expeditions.”
-
-“Not business men. And besides, they get paid for polar expeditions.
-And if anything goes wrong there are relief parties. But this—it’s just
-firing ourselves off the world for nothing.”
-
-“Call it prospecting.”
-
-“You’ll have to call it that.... One might make a book of it perhaps,”
-I said.
-
-“I have no doubt there will be minerals,” said Cavor.
-
-“For example?”
-
-“Oh! sulphur, ores, gold perhaps, possibly new elements.”
-
-“Cost of carriage,” I said. “You know you’re _not_ a practical man. The
-moon’s a quarter of a million miles away.”
-
-“It seems to me it wouldn’t cost much to cart any weight anywhere if
-you packed it in a Cavorite case.”
-
-I had not thought of that. “Delivered free on head of purchaser, eh?”
-
-“It isn’t as though we were confined to the moon.”
-
-“You mean?”
-
-“There’s Mars—clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating sense
-of lightness. It might be pleasant to go there.”
-
-“Is there air on Mars?”
-
-“Oh, yes!”
-
-“Seems as though you might run it as a sanatorium. By the way, how far
-is Mars?”
-
-“Two hundred million miles at present,” said Cavor airily; “and you go
-close by the sun.”
-
-My imagination was picking itself up again. “After all,” I said,
-“there’s something in these things. There’s travel—”
-
-An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly I saw,
-as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite liners
-and spheres _de luxe_. “Rights of pre-emption,” came floating into my
-head—planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old Spanish
-monopoly in American gold. It wasn’t as though it was just this planet
-or that—it was all of them. I stared at Cavor’s rubicund face, and
-suddenly my imagination was leaping and dancing. I stood up, I walked
-up and down; my tongue was unloosened.
-
-“I’m beginning to take it in,” I said; “I’m beginning to take it in.”
-The transition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any
-time at all. “But this is tremendous!” I cried. “This is Imperial! I
-haven’t been dreaming of this sort of thing.”
-
-Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement
-had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. We
-behaved like men inspired. We _were_ men inspired.
-
-“We’ll settle all that!” he said in answer to some incidental
-difficulty that had pulled me up. “We’ll soon settle that! We’ll start
-the drawings for mouldings this very night.”
-
-“We’ll start them now,” I responded, and we hurried off to the
-laboratory to begin upon this work forthwith.
-
-I was like a child in Wonderland all that night. The dawn found us both
-still at work—we kept our electric light going heedless of the day. I
-remember now exactly how these drawings looked. I shaded and tinted
-while Cavor drew—smudged and haste-marked they were in every line, but
-wonderfully correct. We got out the orders for the steel blinds and
-frames we needed from that night’s work, and the glass sphere was
-designed within a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and our
-old routine altogether. We worked, and we slept and ate when we could
-work no longer for hunger and fatigue. Our enthusiasm infected even our
-three men, though they had no idea what the sphere was for. Through
-those days the man Gibbs gave up walking, and went everywhere, even
-across the room, at a sort of fussy run.
-
-And it grew—the sphere. December passed, January—I spent a day with a
-broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to
-laboratory—February, March. By the end of March the completion was in
-sight. In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case; we
-had our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the crane
-we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell. All the bars and blinds
-of the steel shell—it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral,
-with a roller blind to each facet—had arrived by February, and the
-lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made by March,
-the metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its
-manufacture, and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars
-and blinds. It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines of
-Cavor’s first inspiration in working out the scheme. When the bolting
-together of the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the rough
-roof of the temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and build
-a furnace about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which the
-paste is heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium, would be
-accomplished when it was already on the sphere.
-
-And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were to
-take—compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders
-containing reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid
-and waste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium
-peroxide, water condensers, and so forth. I remember the little heap
-they made in the corner—tins, and rolls, and boxes—convincingly
-matter-of-fact.
-
-It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking. But one day,
-when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me. I had been
-bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by these
-possessions dead beat. Everything seemed dull and incredible.
-
-“But look here, Cavor,” I said. “After all! What’s it all for?”
-
-He smiled. “The thing now is to go.”
-
-“The moon,” I reflected. “But what do you expect? I thought the moon
-was a dead world.”
-
-He shrugged his shoulders.
-
-“We’re going to see.”
-
-“_Are_ we?” I said, and stared before me.
-
-“You are tired,” he remarked. “You’d better take a walk this
-afternoon.”
-
-“No,” I said obstinately; “I’m going to finish this brickwork.”
-
-And I did, and insured myself a night of insomnia. I don’t think I have
-ever had such a night. I had some bad times before my business
-collapse, but the very worst of those was sweet slumber compared to
-this infinity of aching wakefulness. I was suddenly in the most
-enormous funk at the thing we were going to do.
-
-I do not remember before that night thinking at all of the risks we
-were running. Now they came like that array of spectres that once
-beleaguered Prague, and camped around me. The strangeness of what we
-were about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like a
-man awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundings.
-I lay, eyes wide open, and the sphere seemed to get more flimsy and
-feeble, and Cavor more unreal and fantastic, and the whole enterprise
-madder and madder every moment.
-
-I got out of bed and wandered about. I sat at the window and stared at
-the immensity of space. Between the stars was the void, the
-unfathomable darkness! I tried to recall the fragmentary knowledge of
-astronomy I had gained in my irregular reading, but it was all too
-vague to furnish any idea of the things we might expect. At last I got
-back to bed and snatched some moments of sleep—moments of nightmare
-rather—in which I fell and fell and fell for evermore into the abyss of
-the sky.
-
-I astonished Cavor at breakfast. I told him shortly, “I’m not coming
-with you in the sphere.”
-
-I met all his protests with a sullen persistence. “The thing’s too
-mad,” I said, “and I won’t come. The thing’s too mad.”
-
-I would not go with him to the laboratory. I fretted about my bungalow
-for a time, and then took hat and stick and set out alone, I knew not
-whither. It chanced to be a glorious morning: a warm wind and deep blue
-sky, the first green of spring abroad, and multitudes of birds singing.
-I lunched on beef and beer in a little public-house near Elham, and
-startled the landlord by remarking _apropos_ of the weather, “A man who
-leaves the world when days of this sort are about is a fool!”
-
-“That’s what I says when I heerd on it!” said the landlord, and I found
-that for one poor soul at least this world had proved excessive, and
-there had been a throat-cutting. I went on with a new twist to my
-thoughts.
-
-In the afternoon I had a pleasant sleep in a sunny place, and went on
-my way refreshed.
-
-I came to a comfortable-looking inn near Canterbury. It was bright with
-creepers, and the landlady was a clean old woman and took my eye. I
-found I had just enough money to pay for my lodging with her. I decided
-to stop the night there. She was a talkative body, and among many other
-particulars I learnt she had never been to London. “Canterbury’s as far
-as ever I been,” she said. “I’m not one of your gad-about sort.”
-
-“How would you like a trip to the moon?” I cried.
-
-“I never did hold with them ballooneys,” she said evidently under the
-impression that this was a common excursion enough. “I wouldn’t go up
-in one—not for ever so.”
-
-This struck me as being funny. After I had supped I sat on a bench by
-the door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brickmaking,
-and motor cars, and the cricket of last year. And in the sky a faint
-new crescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over the
-sun.
-
-The next day I returned to Cavor. “I am coming,” I said. “I’ve been a
-little out of order, that’s all.”
-
-That was the only time I felt any serious doubt our enterprise. Nerves
-purely! After that I worked a little more carefully, and took a trudge
-for an hour every day. And at last, save for the heating in the
-furnace, our labours were at an end.
-
-
-
-
-IV.
-Inside the Sphere
-
-
-“Go on,” said Cavor, as I sat across the edge of the manhole, and
-looked down into the black interior of the sphere. We two were alone.
-It was evening, the sun had set, and the stillness of the twilight was
-upon everything.
-
-I drew my other leg inside and slid down the smooth glass to the bottom
-of the sphere, then turned to take the cans of food and other
-impedimenta from Cavor. The interior was warm, the thermometer stood at
-eighty, and as we should lose little or none of this by radiation, we
-were dressed in shoes and thin flannels. We had, however, a bundle of
-thick woollen clothing and several thick blankets to guard against
-mischance.
-
-By Cavor’s direction I placed the packages, the cylinders of oxygen,
-and so forth, loosely about my feet, and soon we had everything in. He
-walked about the roofless shed for a time seeking anything we had
-overlooked, and then crawled in after me. I noted something in his
-hand.
-
-“What have you got there?” I asked.
-
-“Haven’t you brought anything to read?”
-
-“Good Lord! No.”
-
-“I forgot to tell you. There are uncertainties— The voyage may last— We
-may be weeks!”
-
-“But—”
-
-“We shall be floating in this sphere with absolutely no occupation.”
-
-“I wish I’d known—”
-
-He peered out of the manhole. “Look!” he said. “There’s something
-there!”
-
-“Is there time?”
-
-“We shall be an hour.”
-
-I looked out. It was an old number of _Tit-Bits_ that one of the men
-must have brought. Farther away in the corner I saw a torn _Lloyd’s
-News_. I scrambled back into the sphere with these things. “What have
-you got?” I said.
-
-I took the book from his hand and read, “The Works of William
-Shakespeare”.
-
-He coloured slightly. “My education has been so purely scientific—” he
-said apologetically.
-
-“Never read him?”
-
-“Never.”
-
-“He knew a little, you know—in an irregular sort of way.”
-
-“Precisely what I am told,” said Cavor.
-
-I assisted him to screw in the glass cover of the manhole, and then he
-pressed a stud to close the corresponding blind in the outer case. The
-little oblong of twilight vanished. We were in darkness. For a time
-neither of us spoke. Although our case would not be impervious to
-sound, everything was very still. I perceived there was nothing to grip
-when the shock of our start should come, and I realised that I should
-be uncomfortable for want of a chair.
-
-“Why have we no chairs?” I asked.
-
-“I’ve settled all that,” said Cavor. “We won’t need them.”
-
-“Why not?”
-
-“You will see,” he said, in the tone of a man who refuses to talk.
-
-I became silent. Suddenly it had come to me clear and vivid that I was
-a fool to be inside that sphere. Even now, I asked myself, is to too
-late to withdraw? The world outside the sphere, I knew, would be cold
-and inhospitable enough for me—for weeks I had been living on subsidies
-from Cavor—but after all, would it be as cold as the infinite zero, as
-inhospitable as empty space? If it had not been for the appearance of
-cowardice, I believe that even then I should have made him let me out.
-But I hesitated on that score, and hesitated, and grew fretful and
-angry, and the time passed.
-
-There came a little jerk, a noise like champagne being uncorked in
-another room, and a faint whistling sound. For just one instant I had a
-sense of enormous tension, a transient conviction that my feet were
-pressing downward with a force of countless tons. It lasted for an
-infinitesimal time.
-
-But it stirred me to action. “Cavor!” I said into the darkness, “my
-nerve’s in rags. I don’t think—”
-
-I stopped. He made no answer.
-
-“Confound it!” I cried; “I’m a fool! What business have I here? I’m not
-coming, Cavor. The thing’s too risky. I’m getting out.”
-
-“You can’t,” he said.
-
-“Can’t! We’ll soon see about that!”
-
-He made no answer for ten seconds. “It’s too late for us to quarrel
-now, Bedford,” he said. “That little jerk was the start. Already we are
-flying as swiftly as a bullet up into the gulf of space.”
-
-“I—” I said, and then it didn’t seem to matter what happened. For a
-time I was, as it were, stunned; I had nothing to say. It was just as
-if I had never heard of this idea of leaving the world before. Then I
-perceived an unaccountable change in my bodily sensations. It was a
-feeling of lightness, of unreality. Coupled with that was a queer
-sensation in the head, an apoplectic effect almost, and a thumping of
-blood vessels at the ears. Neither of these feelings diminished as time
-went on, but at last I got so used to them that I experienced no
-inconvenience.
-
-I heard a click, and a little glow lamp came into being.
-
-I saw Cavor’s face, as white as I felt my own to be. We regarded one
-another in silence. The transparent blackness of the glass behind him
-made him seem as though he floated in a void.
-
-“Well, we’re committed,” I said at last.
-
-“Yes,” he said, “we’re committed.”
-
-“Don’t move,” he exclaimed, at some suggestion of a gesture. “Let your
-muscles keep quite lax—as if you were in bed. We are in a little
-universe of our own. Look at those things!”
-
-He pointed to the loose cases and bundles that had been lying on the
-blankets in the bottom of the sphere. I was astonished to see that they
-were floating now nearly a foot from the spherical wall. Then I saw
-from his shadow that Cavor was no longer leaning against the glass. I
-thrust out my hand behind me, and found that I too was suspended in
-space, clear of the glass.
-
-I did not cry out nor gesticulate, but fear came upon me. It was like
-being held and lifted by something—you know not what. The mere touch of
-my hand against the glass moved me rapidly. I understood what had
-happened, but that did not prevent my being afraid. We were cut off
-from all exterior gravitation, only the attraction of objects within
-our sphere had effect. Consequently everything that was not fixed to
-the glass was falling—slowly because of the slightness of our
-masses—towards the centre of gravity of our little world, which seemed
-to be somewhere about the middle of the sphere, but rather nearer to
-myself than Cavor, on account of my greater weight.
-
-“We must turn round,” said Cavor, “and float back to back, with the
-things between us.”
-
-It was the strangest sensation conceivable, floating thus loosely in
-space, at first indeed horribly strange, and when the horror passed,
-not disagreeable at all, exceeding restful; indeed, the nearest thing
-in earthly experience to it that I know is lying on a very thick, soft
-feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I
-had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at
-starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were
-disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like
-the beginning of a dream.
-
-
-
-
-V.
-The Journey to the Moon
-
-
-Presently Cavor extinguished the light. He said we had not overmuch
-energy stored, and that what we had we must economise for reading. For
-a time, whether it was long or short I do not know, there was nothing
-but blank darkness.
-
-A question floated up out of the void. “How are we pointing?” I said.
-“What is our direction?”
-
-“We are flying away from the earth at a tangent, and as the moon is
-near her third quarter we are going somewhere towards her. I will open
-a blind—”
-
-Came a click, and then a window in the outer case yawned open. The sky
-outside was as black as the darkness within the sphere, but the shape
-of the open window was marked by an infinite number of stars.
-
-Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine
-its appearance when the vague, half luminous veil of our air has been
-withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors
-that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise
-the meaning of the hosts of heaven!
-
-Stranger things we were presently to see, but that airless, star-dusted
-sky! Of all things, I think that will be one of the last I shall
-forget.
-
-The little window vanished with a click, another beside it snapped open
-and instantly closed, and then a third, and for a moment I had to close
-my eyes because of the blinding splendour of the waning moon.
-
-For a space I had to stare at Cavor and the white-lit things about me
-to season my eyes to light again, before I could turn them towards that
-pallid glare.
-
-Four windows were open in order that the gravitation of the moon might
-act upon all the substances in our sphere. I found I was no longer
-floating freely in space, but that my feet were resting on the glass in
-the direction of the moon. The blankets and cases of provisions were
-also creeping slowly down the glass, and presently came to rest so as
-to block out a portion of the view. It seemed to me, of course, that I
-looked “down” when I looked at the moon. On earth “down” means
-earthward, the way things fall, and “up” the reverse direction. Now the
-pull of gravitation was towards the moon, and for all I knew to the
-contrary our earth was overhead. And, of course, when all the Cavorite
-blinds were closed, “down” was towards the centre of our sphere, and
-“up” towards its outer wall.
-
-It was curiously unlike earthly experience, too, to have the light
-coming _up_ to one. On earth light falls from above, or comes slanting
-down sideways, but here it came from beneath our feet, and to see our
-shadows we had to look up.
-
-At first it gave me a sort of vertigo to stand only on thick glass and
-look down upon the moon through hundreds of thousands of miles of
-vacant space; but this sickness passed very speedily. And then—the
-splendour of the sight!
-
-The reader may imagine it best if he will lie on the ground some warm
-summer’s night and look between his upraised feet at the moon, but for
-some reason, probably because the absence of air made it so much more
-luminous, the moon seemed already considerably larger than it does from
-earth. The minutest details of its surface were acutely clear. And
-since we did not see it through air, its outline was bright and sharp,
-there was no glow or halo about it, and the star-dust that covered the
-sky came right to its very margin, and marked the outline of its
-unilluminated part. And as I stood and stared at the moon between my
-feet, that perception of the impossible that had been with me off and
-on ever since our start, returned again with tenfold conviction.
-
-“Cavor,” I said, “this takes me queerly. Those companies we were going
-to run, and all that about minerals?”
-
-“Well?”
-
-“I don’t see ‘em here.”
-
-“No,” said Cavor; “but you’ll get over all that.”
-
-“I suppose I’m made to turn right side up again. Still, _this_— For a
-moment I could half believe there never was a world.”
-
-“That copy of _Lloyd’s News_ might help you.”
-
-I stared at the paper for a moment, then held it above the level of my
-face, and found I could read it quite easily. I struck a column of mean
-little advertisements. “A gentleman of private means is willing to lend
-money,” I read. I knew that gentleman. Then somebody eccentric wanted
-to sell a Cutaway bicycle, “quite new and cost £15,” for five pounds;
-and a lady in distress wished to dispose of some fish knives and forks,
-“a wedding present,” at a great sacrifice. No doubt some simple soul
-was sagely examining these knives and forks, and another triumphantly
-riding off on that bicycle, and a third trustfully consulting that
-benevolent gentleman of means even as I read. I laughed, and let the
-paper drift from my hand.
-
-“Are we visible from the earth?” I asked.
-
-“Why?”
-
-“I knew some one who was rather interested in astronomy. It occurred to
-me that it would be rather odd if—my friend—chanced to be looking
-through some telescope.”
-
-“It would need the most powerful telescope on earth even now to see us
-as the minutest speck.”
-
-For a time I stared in silence at the moon.
-
-“It’s a world,” I said; “one feels that infinitely more than one ever
-did on earth. People perhaps—”
-
-“People!” he exclaimed. “_No!_ Banish all that! Think yourself a sort
-of ultra-arctic voyager exploring the desolate places of space. Look at
-it!”
-
-He waved his hand at the shining whiteness below. “It’s dead—dead! Vast
-extinct volcanoes, lava wildernesses, tumbled wastes of snow, or frozen
-carbonic acid, or frozen air, and everywhere landslip seams and cracks
-and gulfs. Nothing happens. Men have watched this planet systematically
-with telescopes for over two hundred years. How much change do you
-think they have seen?”
-
-“None.”
-
-“They have traced two indisputable landslips, a doubtful crack, and one
-slight periodic change of colour, and that’s all.”
-
-“I didn’t know they’d traced even that.”
-
-“Oh, yes. But as for people—!”
-
-“By the way,” I asked, “how small a thing will the biggest telescopes
-show upon the moon?”
-
-“One could see a fair-sized church. One could certainly see any towns
-or buildings, or anything like the handiwork of men. There might
-perhaps be insects, something in the way of ants, for example, so that
-they could hide in deep burrows from the lunar light, or some new sort
-of creatures having no earthly parallel. That is the most probable
-thing, if we are to find life there at all. Think of the difference in
-conditions! Life must fit itself to a day as long as fourteen earthly
-days, a cloudless sun-blaze of fourteen days, and then a night of equal
-length, growing ever colder and colder under these cold, sharp stars.
-In that night there must be cold, the ultimate cold, absolute zero,
-273° C. below the earthly freezing point. Whatever life there is must
-hibernate through _that_, and rise again each day.”
-
-He mused. “One can imagine something worm-like,” he said, “taking its
-air solid as an earth-worm swallows earth, or thick-skinned monsters—”
-
-“By the bye,” I said, “why didn’t we bring a gun?”
-
-He did not answer that question. “No,” he concluded, “we just have to
-go. We shall see when we get there.”
-
-I remembered something. “Of course, there’s my minerals, anyhow,” I
-said; “whatever the conditions may be.”
-
-Presently he told me he wished to alter our course a little by letting
-the earth tug at us for a moment. He was going to open one earthward
-blind for thirty seconds. He warned me that it would make my head swim,
-and advised me to extend my hands against the glass to break my fall. I
-did as he directed, and thrust my feet against the bales of food cases
-and air cylinders to prevent their falling upon me. Then with a click
-the window flew open. I fell clumsily upon hands and face, and saw for
-a moment between my black extended fingers our mother earth—a planet in
-a downward sky.
-
-We were still very near—Cavor told me the distance was perhaps eight
-hundred miles and the huge terrestrial disc filled all heaven. But
-already it was plain to see that the world was a globe. The land below
-us was in twilight and vague, but westward the vast grey stretches of
-the Atlantic shone like molten silver under the receding day. I think I
-recognised the cloud-dimmed coast-lines of France and Spain and the
-south of England, and then, with a click, the shutter closed again, and
-I found myself in a state of extraordinary confusion sliding slowly
-over the smooth glass.
-
-When at last things settled themselves in my mind again, it seemed
-quite beyond question that the moon was “down” and under my feet, and
-that the earth was somewhere away on the level of the horizon—the earth
-that had been “down” to me and my kindred since the beginning of
-things.
-
-So slight were the exertions required of us, so easy did the practical
-annihilation of our weight make all we had to do, that the necessity
-for taking refreshment did not occur to us for nearly six hours (by
-Cavor’s chronometer) after our start. I was amazed at that lapse of
-time. Even then I was satisfied with very little. Cavor examined the
-apparatus for absorbing carbonic acid and water, and pronounced it to
-be in satisfactory order, our consumption of oxygen having been
-extraordinarily slight. And our talk being exhausted for the time, and
-there being nothing further for us to do, we gave way to a curious
-drowsiness that had come upon us, and spreading our blankets on the
-bottom of the sphere in such a manner as to shut out most of the
-moonlight, wished each other good-night, and almost immediately fell
-asleep.
-
-And so, sleeping, and sometimes talking and reading a little, and at
-times eating, although without any keenness of appetite,[1] but for the
-most part in a sort of quiescence that was neither waking nor slumber,
-we fell through a space of time that had neither night nor day in it,
-silently, softly, and swiftly down towards the moon.
-
- [1] It is a curious thing, that while we were in the sphere we felt
- not the slightest desire for food, nor did we feel the want of it when
- we abstained. At first we forced our appetites, but afterwards we
- fasted completely. Altogether we did not consume one-hundredth part of
- the compressed provisions we had brought with us. The amount of
- carbonic acid we breathed was also unnaturally low, but why this was,
- I am quite unable to explain.
-
-
-
-
-VI.
-The Landing on the Moon
-
-
-I remember how one day Cavor suddenly opened six of our shutters and
-blinded me so that I cried aloud at him. The whole area was moon, a
-stupendous scimitar of white dawn with its edge hacked out by notches
-of darkness, the crescent shore of an ebbing tide of darkness, out of
-which peaks and pinnacles came glittering into the blaze of the sun. I
-take it the reader has seen pictures or photographs of the moon and
-that I need not describe the broader features of that landscape, those
-spacious ring-like ranges vaster than any terrestrial mountains, their
-summits shining in the day, their shadows harsh and deep, the grey
-disordered plains, the ridges, hills, and craterlets, all passing at
-last from a blazing illumination into a common mystery of black.
-Athwart this world we were flying scarcely a hundred miles above its
-crests and pinnacles. And now we could see, what no eye on earth will
-ever see, that under the blaze of the day the harsh outlines of the
-rocks and ravines of the plains and crater floor grew grey and
-indistinct under a thickening haze, that the white of their lit
-surfaces broke into lumps and patches, and broke again and shrank and
-vanished, and that here and there strange tints of brown and olive grew
-and spread.
-
-But little time we had for watching then. For now we had come to the
-real danger of our journey. We had to drop ever closer to the moon as
-we spun about it, to slacken our pace and watch our chance, until at
-last we could dare to drop upon its surface.
-
-For Cavor that was a time of intense exertion; for me it was an anxious
-inactivity. I seemed perpetually to be getting out of his way. He leapt
-about the sphere from point to point with an agility that would have
-been impossible on earth. He was perpetually opening and closing the
-Cavorite windows, making calculations, consulting his chronometer by
-means of the glow lamp during those last eventful hours. For a long
-time we had all our windows closed and hung silently in darkness
-hurling through space.
-
-Then he was feeling for the shutter studs, and suddenly four windows
-were open. I staggered and covered my eyes, drenched and scorched and
-blinded by the unaccustomed splendour of the sun beneath my feet. Then
-again the shutters snapped, leaving my brain spinning in a darkness
-that pressed against the eyes. And after that I floated in another
-vast, black silence.
-
-Then Cavor switched on the electric light, and told me he proposed to
-bind all our luggage together with the blankets about it, against the
-concussion of our descent. We did this with our windows closed, because
-in that way our goods arranged themselves naturally at the centre of
-the sphere. That too was a strange business; we two men floating loose
-in that spherical space, and packing and pulling ropes. Imagine it if
-you can! No up nor down, and every effort resulting in unexpected
-movements. Now I would be pressed against the glass with the full force
-of Cavor’s thrust, now I would be kicking helplessly in a void. Now the
-star of the electric light would be overhead, now under foot. Now
-Cavor’s feet would float up before my eyes, and now we would be
-crossways to each other. But at last our goods were safely bound
-together in a big soft bale, all except two blankets with head holes
-that we were to wrap about ourselves.
-
-Then for a flash Cavor opened a window moonward, and we saw that we
-were dropping towards a huge central crater with a number of minor
-craters grouped in a sort of cross about it. And then again Cavor flung
-our little sphere open to the scorching, blinding sun. I think he was
-using the sun’s attraction as a brake. “Cover yourself with a blanket,”
-he cried, thrusting himself from me, and for a moment I did not
-understand.
-
-Then I hauled the blanket from beneath my feet and got it about me and
-over my head and eyes. Abruptly he closed the shutters again, snapped
-one open again and closed it, then suddenly began snapping them all
-open, each safely into its steel roller. There came a jar, and then we
-were rolling over and over, bumping against the glass and against the
-big bale of our luggage, and clutching at each other, and outside some
-white substance splashed as if we were rolling down a slope of snow....
-
-Over, clutch, bump, clutch, bump, over....
-
-Came a thud, and I was half buried under the bale of our possessions,
-and for a space everything was still. Then I could hear Cavor puffing
-and grunting, and the snapping of a shutter in its sash. I made an
-effort, thrust back our blanket-wrapped luggage, and emerged from
-beneath it. Our open windows were just visible as a deeper black set
-with stars.
-
-We were still alive, and we were lying in the darkness of the shadow of
-the wall of the great crater into which we had fallen.
-
-We sat getting our breath again, and feeling the bruises on our limbs.
-I don’t think either of us had had a very clear expectation of such
-rough handling as we had received. I struggled painfully to my feet.
-“And now,” said I, “to look at the landscape of the moon! But—! It’s
-tremendously dark, Cavor!”
-
-The glass was dewy, and as I spoke I wiped at it with my blanket.
-“We’re half an hour or so beyond the day,” he said. “We must wait.”
-
-It was impossible to distinguish anything. We might have been in a
-sphere of steel for all that we could see. My rubbing with the blanket
-simply smeared the glass, and as fast as I wiped it, it became opaque
-again with freshly condensed moisture mixed with an increasing quantity
-of blanket hairs. Of course I ought not to have used the blanket. In my
-efforts to clear the glass I slipped upon the damp surface, and hurt my
-shin against one of the oxygen cylinders that protruded from our bale.
-
-The thing was exasperating—it was absurd. Here we were just arrived
-upon the moon, amidst we knew not what wonders, and all we could see
-was the grey and streaming wall of the bubble in which we had come.
-
-“Confound it!” I said, “but at this rate we might have stopped at
-home;” and I squatted on the bale and shivered, and drew my blanket
-closer about me.
-
-Abruptly the moisture turned to spangles and fronds of frost. “Can you
-reach the electric heater,” said Cavor. “Yes—that black knob. Or we
-shall freeze.”
-
-I did not wait to be told twice. “And now,” said I, “what are we to
-do?”
-
-“Wait,” he said.
-
-“Wait?”
-
-“Of course. We shall have to wait until our air gets warm again, and
-then this glass will clear. We can’t do anything till then. It’s night
-here yet; we must wait for the day to overtake us. Meanwhile, don’t you
-feel hungry?”
-
-For a space I did not answer him, but sat fretting. I turned
-reluctantly from the smeared puzzle of the glass and stared at his
-face. “Yes,” I said, “I am hungry. I feel somehow enormously
-disappointed. I had expected—I don’t know what I had expected, but not
-this.”
-
-I summoned my philosophy, and rearranging my blanket about me sat down
-on the bale again and began my first meal on the moon. I don’t think I
-finished it—I forget. Presently, first in patches, then running rapidly
-together into wider spaces, came the clearing of the glass, came the
-drawing of the misty veil that hid the moon world from our eyes.
-
-We peered out upon the landscape of the moon.
-
-
-
-
-VII.
-Sunrise on the Moon
-
-
-As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. We
-were in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor of
-the giant crater. Its cliff-like walls closed us in on every side. From
-the westward the light of the unseen sun fell upon them, reaching to
-the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment of drab
-and greyish rock, lined here and there with banks and crevices of snow.
-This was perhaps a dozen miles away, but at first no intervening
-atmosphere diminished in the slightest the minutely detailed brilliancy
-with which these things glared at us. They stood out clear and dazzling
-against a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthly
-eyes rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousness
-of the sky.
-
-The eastward cliff was at first merely a starless selvedge to the
-starry dome. No rosy flush, no creeping pallor, announced the
-commencing day. Only the Corona, the Zodiacal light, a huge
-cone-shaped, luminous haze, pointing up towards the splendour of the
-morning star, warned us of the imminent nearness of the sun.
-
-Whatever light was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs. It
-showed a huge undulating plain, cold and grey, a grey that deepened
-eastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow.
-Innumerable rounded grey summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy
-substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity,
-gave us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall. These
-hummocks looked like snow. At the time I thought they were snow. But
-they were not—they were mounds and masses of frozen air.
-
-So it was at first; and then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came the
-lunar day.
-
-The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at
-its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots
-towards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the
-touch of the dawn a reek of grey vapour poured upward from the crater
-floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of grey, thicker and
-broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming
-like a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs
-were no more than refracted glare beyond.
-
-“It is air,” said Cavor. “It must be air—or it would not rise like
-this—at the mere touch of a sun-beam. And at this pace....”
-
-He peered upwards. “Look!” he said.
-
-“What?” I asked.
-
-“In the sky. Already. On the blackness—a little touch of blue. See! The
-stars seem larger. And the little ones and all those dim nebulosities
-we saw in empty space—they are hidden!”
-
-Swiftly, steadily, the day approached us. Grey summit after grey summit
-was overtaken by the blaze, and turned to a smoking white intensity. At
-last there was nothing to the west of us but a bank of surging fog, the
-tumultuous advance and ascent of cloudy haze. The distant cliff had
-receded farther and farther, had loomed and changed through the whirl,
-and foundered and vanished at last in its confusion.
-
-Nearer came that steaming advance, nearer and nearer, coming as fast as
-the shadow of a cloud before the south-west wind. About us rose a thin
-anticipatory haze.
-
-Cavor gripped my arm. “What?” I said.
-
-“Look! The sunrise! The sun!”
-
-He turned me about and pointed to the brow of the eastward cliff,
-looming above the haze about us, scarce lighter than the darkness of
-the sky. But now its line was marked by strange reddish shapes, tongues
-of vermilion flame that writhed and danced. I fancied it must be
-spirals of vapour that had caught the light and made this crest of
-fiery tongues against the sky, but indeed it was the solar prominences
-I saw, a crown of fire about the sun that is forever hidden from
-earthly eyes by our atmospheric veil.
-
-And then—the sun!
-
-Steadily, inevitably came a brilliant line, came a thin edge of
-intolerable effulgence that took a circular shape, became a bow, became
-a blazing sceptre, and hurled a shaft of heat at us as though it was a
-spear.
-
-It seemed verily to stab my eyes! I cried aloud and turned about
-blinded, groping for my blanket beneath the bale.
-
-And with that incandescence came a sound, the first sound that had
-reached us from without since we left the earth, a hissing and
-rustling, the stormy trailing of the aerial garment of the advancing
-day. And with the coming of the sound and the light the sphere lurched,
-and blinded and dazzled we staggered helplessly against each other. It
-lurched again, and the hissing grew louder. I had shut my eyes
-perforce, I was making clumsy efforts to cover my head with my blanket,
-and this second lurch sent me helplessly off my feet. I fell against
-the bale, and opening my eyes had a momentary glimpse of the air just
-outside our glass. It was running—it was boiling—like snow into which a
-white-hot rod is thrust. What had been solid air had suddenly at the
-touch of the sun become a paste, a mud, a slushy liquefaction, that
-hissed and bubbled into gas.
-
-There came a still more violent whirl of the sphere and we had clutched
-one another. In another moment we were spun about again. Round we went
-and over, and then I was on all fours. The lunar dawn had hold of us.
-It meant to show us little men what the moon could do with us.
-
-I caught a second glimpse of things without, puffs of vapour, half
-liquid slush, excavated, sliding, falling, sliding. We dropped into
-darkness. I went down with Cavor’s knees in my chest. Then he seemed to
-fly away from me, and for a moment I lay with all the breath out of my
-body staring upward. A toppling crag of the melting stuff had splashed
-over us, buried us, and now it thinned and boiled off us. I saw the
-bubbles dancing on the glass above. I heard Cavor exclaiming feebly.
-
-Then some huge landslip in the thawing air had caught us, and
-spluttering expostulation, we began to roll down a slope, rolling
-faster and faster, leaping crevasses and rebounding from banks, faster
-and faster, westward into the white-hot boiling tumult of the lunar
-day.
-
-Clutching at one another we spun about, pitched this way and that, our
-bale of packages leaping at us, pounding at us. We collided, we
-gripped, we were torn asunder—our heads met, and the whole universe
-burst into fiery darts and stars! On the earth we should have smashed
-one another a dozen times, but on the moon, luckily for us, our weight
-was only one-sixth of what it is terrestrially, and we fell very
-mercifully. I recall a sensation of utter sickness, a feeling as if my
-brain were upside down within my skull, and then—
-
-Something was at work upon my face, some thin feelers worried my ears.
-Then I discovered the brilliance of the landscape around was mitigated
-by blue spectacles. Cavor bent over me, and I saw his face upside down,
-his eyes also protected by tinted goggles. His breath came irregularly,
-and his lip was bleeding from a bruise. “Better?” he said, wiping the
-blood with the back of his hand.
-
-Everything seemed swaying for a space, but that was simply my
-giddiness. I perceived that he had closed some of the shutters in the
-outer sphere to save me—from the direct blaze of the sun. I was aware
-that everything about us was very brilliant.
-
-“Lord!” I gasped. “But this—”
-
-I craned my neck to see. I perceived there was a blinding glare
-outside, an utter change from the gloomy darkness of our first
-impressions. “Have I been insensible long?” I asked.
-
-“I don’t know—the chronometer is broken. Some little time.... My dear
-chap! I have been afraid...”
-
-I lay for a space taking this in. I saw his face still bore evidences
-of emotion. For a while I said nothing. I passed an inquisitive hand
-over my contusions, and surveyed his face for similar damages. The back
-of my right hand had suffered most, and was skinless and raw. My
-forehead was bruised and had bled. He handed me a little measure with
-some of the restorative—I forget the name of it—he had brought with us.
-After a time I felt a little better. I began to stretch my limbs
-carefully. Soon I could talk.
-
-“It wouldn’t have done,” I said, as though there had been no interval.
-
-“No! it _wouldn’t_.”
-
-He thought, his hands hanging over his knees. He peered through the
-glass and then stared at me. “Good Lord!” he said. “_No!_”
-
-“What has happened?” I asked after a pause. “Have we jumped to the
-tropics?”
-
-“It was as I expected. This air has evaporated—if it is air. At any
-rate, it has evaporated, and the surface of the moon is showing. We are
-lying on a bank of earthy rock. Here and there bare soil is exposed. A
-queer sort of soil!”
-
-It occurred to him that it was unnecessary to explain. He assisted me
-into a sitting position, and I could see with my own eyes.
-
-
-
-
-VIII.
-A Lunar Morning
-
-
-The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of scenery had
-altogether disappeared. The glare of the sun had taken upon itself a
-faint tinge of amber; the shadows upon the cliff of the crater wall
-were deeply purple. To the eastward a dark bank of fog still crouched
-and sheltered from the sunrise, but to the westward the sky was blue
-and clear. I began to realise the length of my insensibility.
-
-We were no longer in a void. An atmosphere had arisen about us. The
-outline of things had gained in character, had grown acute and varied;
-save for a shadowed space of white substance here and there, white
-substance that was no longer air but snow, the arctic appearance had
-gone altogether. Everywhere broad rusty brown spaces of bare and
-tumbled earth spread to the blaze of the sun. Here and there at the
-edge of the snowdrifts were transient little pools and eddies of water,
-the only things stirring in that expanse of barrenness. The sunlight
-inundated the upper two blinds of our sphere and turned our climate to
-high summer, but our feet were still in shadow, and the sphere was
-lying upon a drift of snow.
-
-And scattered here and there upon the slope, and emphasised by little
-white threads of unthawed snow upon their shady sides, were shapes like
-sticks, dry twisted sticks of the same rusty hue as the rock upon which
-they lay. That caught one’s thoughts sharply. Sticks! On a lifeless
-world? Then as my eye grew more accustomed to the texture of their
-substance, I perceived that almost all this surface had a fibrous
-texture, like the carpet of brown needles one finds beneath the shade
-of pine trees.
-
-“Cavor!” I said.
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“It may be a dead world now—but once—”
-
-Something arrested my attention. I had discovered among these needles a
-number of little round objects. And it seemed to me that one of these
-had moved. “Cavor,” I whispered.
-
-“What?”
-
-But I did not answer at once. I stared incredulous. For an instant I
-could not believe my eyes. I gave an inarticulate cry. I gripped his
-arm. I pointed. “Look!” I cried, finding my tongue. “There! Yes! And
-there!”
-
-His eyes followed my pointing finger. “Eh?” he said.
-
-How can I describe the thing I saw? It is so petty a thing to state,
-and yet it seemed so wonderful, so pregnant with emotion. I have said
-that amidst the stick-like litter were these rounded bodies, these
-little oval bodies that might have passed as very small pebbles. And
-now first one and then another had stirred, had rolled over and
-cracked, and down the crack of each of them showed a minute line of
-yellowish green, thrusting outward to meet the hot encouragement of the
-newly-risen sun. For a moment that was all, and then there stirred, and
-burst a third!
-
-“It is a seed,” said Cavor. And then I heard him whisper very softly,
-“_Life!_”
-
-“Life!” And immediately it poured upon us that our vast journey had not
-been made in vain, that we had come to no arid waste of minerals, but
-to a world that lived and moved! We watched intensely. I remember I
-kept rubbing the glass before me with my sleeve, jealous of the
-faintest suspicion of mist.
-
-The picture was clear and vivid only in the middle of the field. All
-about that centre the dead fibres and seeds were magnified and
-distorted by the curvature of the glass. But we could see enough! One
-after another all down the sunlit slope these miraculous little brown
-bodies burst and gaped apart, like seed-pods, like the husks of fruits;
-opened eager mouths that drank in the heat and light pouring in a
-cascade from the newly-risen sun.
-
-Every moment more of these seed coats ruptured, and even as they did so
-the swelling pioneers overflowed their rent-distended seed-cases, and
-passed into the second stage of growth. With a steady assurance, a
-swift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward to
-the earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. In a little
-while the whole slope was dotted with minute plantlets standing at
-attention in the blaze of the sun.
-
-They did not stand for long. The bundle-like buds swelled and strained
-and opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips,
-spreading a whorl of tiny, spiky, brownish leaves, that lengthened
-rapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement was slower
-than any animal’s, swifter than any plant’s I have ever seen before.
-How can I suggest it to you—the way that growth went on? The leaf tips
-grew so that they moved onward even while we looked at them. The brown
-seed-case shrivelled and was absorbed with an equal rapidity. Have you
-ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand and watched
-the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon plants grew
-like that.
-
-In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of these
-plants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a second
-whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a
-lifeless stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-green
-herbage of bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their
-growing.
-
-I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the
-eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed
-and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this
-fringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a
-cactus, and swelling visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills with
-air.
-
-Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distended form
-was rising over the scrub. But here the light fell upon its sleek
-sides, and I could see that its colour was a vivid orange hue. It rose
-as one watched it; if one looked away from it for a minute and then
-back, its outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congested branches
-until in a little time it rose a coralline shape of many feet in
-height. Compared with such a growth the terrestrial puff-ball, which
-will sometimes swell a foot in diameter in a single night, would be a
-hopeless laggard. But then the puff-ball grows against a gravitational
-pull six times that of the moon. Beyond, out of gullies and flats that
-had been hidden from us, but not from the quickening sun, over reefs
-and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spiky and fleshy
-vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously to take
-advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit and seed
-again and die. It was like a miracle, that growth. So, one must
-imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the
-desolation of the new-made earth.
-
-Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, the
-stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of
-vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes. Conceive it
-all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem
-watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, wherever there
-was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow. And to have the picture of
-our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we saw it all
-through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are distorted by a
-lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very bright there,
-and towards the edges magnified and unreal.
-
-
-
-
-IX.
-Prospecting Begins
-
-
-We ceased to gaze. We turned to each other, the same thought, the same
-question in our eyes. For these plants to grow, there must be some air,
-however attenuated, air that we also should be able to breathe.
-
-“The manhole?” I said.
-
-“Yes!” said Cavor, “if it is air we see!”
-
-“In a little while,” I said, “these plants will be as high as we are.
-Suppose—suppose after all— Is it certain? How do you know that stuff
-_is_ air? It may be nitrogen—it may be carbonic acid even!”
-
-“That’s easy,” he said, and set about proving it. He produced a big
-piece of crumpled paper from the bale, lit it, and thrust it hastily
-through the man-hole valve. I bent forward and peered down through the
-thick glass for its appearance outside, that little flame on whose
-evidence depended so much!
-
-I saw the paper drop out and lie lightly upon the snow. The pink flame
-of its burning vanished. For an instant it seemed to be extinguished.
-And then I saw a little blue tongue upon the edge of it that trembled,
-and crept, and spread!
-
-Quietly the whole sheet, save where it lay in immediate contact with
-the snow, charred and shrivelled and sent up a quivering thread of
-smoke. There was no doubt left to me; the atmosphere of the moon was
-either pure oxygen or air, and capable therefore—unless its tenuity was
-excessive—of supporting our alien life. We might emerge—and live!
-
-I sat down with my legs on either side of the manhole and prepared to
-unscrew it, but Cavor stopped me. “There is first a little precaution,”
-he said. He pointed out that although it was certainly an oxygenated
-atmosphere outside, it might still be so rarefied as to cause us grave
-injury. He reminded me of mountain sickness, and of the bleeding that
-often afflicts aeronauts who have ascended too swiftly, and he spent
-some time in the preparation of a sickly-tasting drink which he
-insisted on my sharing. It made me feel a little numb, but otherwise
-had no effect on me. Then he permitted me to begin unscrewing.
-
-Presently the glass stopper of the manhole was so far undone that the
-denser air within our sphere began to escape along the thread of the
-screw, singing as a kettle sings before it boils. Thereupon he made me
-desist. It speedily became evident that the pressure outside was very
-much less than it was within. How much less it was we had no means of
-telling.
-
-I sat grasping the stopper with both hands, ready to close it again if,
-in spite of our intense hope, the lunar atmosphere should after all
-prove too rarefied for us, and Cavor sat with a cylinder of compressed
-oxygen at hand to restore our pressure. We looked at one another in
-silence, and then at the fantastic vegetation that swayed and grew
-visibly and noiselessly without. And ever that shrill piping continued.
-
-My blood-vessels began to throb in my ears, and the sound of Cavor’s
-movements diminished. I noted how still everything had become, because
-of the thinning of the air.
-
-As our air sizzled out from the screw the moisture of it condensed in
-little puffs.
-
-Presently I experienced a peculiar shortness of breath that lasted
-indeed during the whole of the time of our exposure to the moon’s
-exterior atmosphere, and a rather unpleasant sensation about the ears
-and finger-nails and the back of the throat grew upon my attention, and
-presently passed off again.
-
-But then came vertigo and nausea that abruptly changed the quality of
-my courage. I gave the lid of the manhole half a turn and made a hasty
-explanation to Cavor; but now he was the more sanguine. He answered me
-in a voice that seemed extraordinarily small and remote, because of the
-thinness of the air that carried the sound. He recommended a nip of
-brandy, and set me the example, and presently I felt better. I turned
-the manhole stopper back again. The throbbing in my ears grew louder,
-and then I remarked that the piping note of the outrush had ceased. For
-a time I could not be sure that it had ceased.
-
-“Well?” said Cavor, in the ghost of a voice.
-
-“Well?” said I.
-
-“Shall we go on?”
-
-I thought. “Is this all?”
-
-“If you can stand it.”
-
-By way of answer I went on unscrewing. I lifted the circular operculum
-from its place and laid it carefully on the bale. A flake or so of snow
-whirled and vanished as that thin and unfamiliar air took possession of
-our sphere. I knelt, and then seated myself at the edge of the manhole,
-peering over it. Beneath, within a yard of my face, lay the untrodden
-snow of the moon.
-
-There came a little pause. Our eyes met.
-
-“It doesn’t distress your lungs too much?” said Cavor.
-
-“No,” I said. “I can stand this.”
-
-He stretched out his hand for his blanket, thrust his head through its
-central hole, and wrapped it about him. He sat down on the edge of the
-manhole, he let his feet drop until they were within six inches of the
-lunar ground. He hesitated for a moment, then thrust himself forward,
-dropped these intervening inches, and stood upon the untrodden soil of
-the moon.
-
-As he stepped forward he was refracted grotesquely by the edge of the
-glass. He stood for a moment looking this way and that. Then he drew
-himself together and leapt.
-
-The glass distorted everything, but it seemed to me even then to be an
-extremely big leap. He had at one bound become remote. He seemed twenty
-or thirty feet off. He was standing high upon a rocky mass and
-gesticulating back to me. Perhaps he was shouting—but the sound did not
-reach me. But how the deuce had he done this? I felt like a man who has
-just seen a new conjuring trick.
-
-In a puzzled state of mind I too dropped through the manhole. I stood
-up. Just in front of me the snowdrift had fallen away and made a sort
-of ditch. I made a step and jumped.
-
-I found myself flying through the air, saw the rock on which he stood
-coming to meet me, clutched it and clung in a state of infinite
-amazement.
-
-I gasped a painful laugh. I was tremendously confused. Cavor bent down
-and shouted in piping tones for me to be careful.
-
-I had forgotten that on the moon, with only an eighth part of the
-earth’s mass and a quarter of its diameter, my weight was barely a
-sixth what it was on earth. But now that fact insisted on being
-remembered.
-
-“We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now,” he said.
-
-With a guarded effort I raised myself to the top, and moving as
-cautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blaze
-of the sun. The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirty
-feet away.
-
-As far as the eye could see over the enormous disorder of rocks that
-formed the crater floor, the same bristling scrub that surrounded us
-was starting into life, diversified here and there by bulging masses of
-a cactus form, and scarlet and purple lichens that grew so fast they
-seemed to crawl over the rocks. The whole area of the crater seemed to
-me then to be one similar wilderness up to the very foot of the
-surrounding cliff.
-
-This cliff was apparently bare of vegetation save at its base, and with
-buttresses and terraces and platforms that did not very greatly attract
-our attention at the time. It was many miles away from us in every
-direction; we seemed to be almost at the centre of the crater, and we
-saw it through a certain haziness that drove before the wind. For there
-was even a wind now in the thin air, a swift yet weak wind that chilled
-exceedingly but exerted little pressure. It was blowing round the
-crater, as it seemed, to the hot illuminated side from the foggy
-darkness under the sunward wall. It was difficult to look into this
-eastward fog; we had to peer with half-closed eyes beneath the shade of
-our hands, because of the fierce intensity of the motionless sun.
-
-“It seems to be deserted,” said Cavor, “absolutely desolate.”
-
-I looked about me again. I retained even then a clinging hope of some
-quasi-human evidence, some pinnacle of building, some house or engine,
-but everywhere one looked spread the tumbled rocks in peaks and crests,
-and the darting scrub and those bulging cacti that swelled and swelled,
-a flat negation as it seemed of all such hope.
-
-“It looks as though these plants had it to themselves,” I said. “I see
-no trace of any other creature.”
-
-“No insects—no birds, no! Not a trace, not a scrap nor particle of
-animal life. If there was—what would they do in the night? ... No;
-there’s just these plants alone.”
-
-I shaded my eyes with my hand. “It’s like the landscape of a dream.
-These things are less like earthly land plants than the things one
-imagines among the rocks at the bottom of the sea. Look at that yonder!
-One might imagine it a lizard changed into a plant. And the glare!”
-
-“This is only the fresh morning,” said Cavor.
-
-He sighed and looked about him. “This is no world for men,” he said.
-“And yet in a way—it appeals.”
-
-He became silent for a time, then commenced his meditative humming.
-
-I started at a gentle touch, and found a thin sheet of livid lichen
-lapping over my shoe. I kicked at it and it fell to powder, and each
-speck began to grow.
-
-I heard Cavor exclaim sharply, and perceived that one of the fixed
-bayonets of the scrub had pricked him. He hesitated, his eyes sought
-among the rocks about us. A sudden blaze of pink had crept up a ragged
-pillar of crag. It was a most extraordinary pink, a livid magenta.
-
-“Look!” said I, turning, and behold Cavor had vanished.
-
-For an instant I stood transfixed. Then I made a hasty step to look
-over the verge of the rock. But in my surprise at his disappearance I
-forgot once more that we were on the moon. The thrust of my foot that I
-made in striding would have carried me a yard on earth; on the moon it
-carried me six—a good five yards over the edge. For the moment the
-thing had something of the effect of those nightmares when one falls
-and falls. For while one falls sixteen feet in the first second of a
-fall on earth, on the moon one falls two, and with only a sixth of
-one’s weight. I fell, or rather I jumped down, about ten yards I
-suppose. It seemed to take quite a long time, five or six seconds, I
-should think. I floated through the air and fell like a feather,
-knee-deep in a snow-drift in the bottom of a gully of blue-grey,
-white-veined rock.
-
-I looked about me. “Cavor!” I cried; but no Cavor was visible.
-
-“Cavor!” I cried louder, and the rocks echoed me.
-
-I turned fiercely to the rocks and clambered to the summit of them.
-“Cavor!” I cried. My voice sounded like the voice of a lost lamb.
-
-The sphere, too, was not in sight, and for a moment a horrible feeling
-of desolation pinched my heart.
-
-Then I saw him. He was laughing and gesticulating to attract my
-attention. He was on a bare patch of rock twenty or thirty yards away.
-I could not hear his voice, but “jump” said his gestures. I hesitated,
-the distance seemed enormous. Yet I reflected that surely I must be
-able to clear a greater distance than Cavor.
-
-I made a step back, gathered myself together, and leapt with all my
-might. I seemed to shoot right up in the air as though I should never
-come down.
-
-It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare, to go
-flying off in this fashion. I realised my leap had been altogether too
-violent. I flew clean over Cavor’s head and beheld a spiky confusion in
-a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp of alarm. I put out my
-hands and straightened my legs.
-
-I hit a huge fungoid bulk that burst all about me, scattering a mass of
-orange spores in every direction, and covering me with orange powder. I
-rolled over spluttering, and came to rest convulsed with breathless
-laughter.
-
-I became aware of Cavor’s little round face peering over a bristling
-hedge. He shouted some faded inquiry. “Eh?” I tried to shout, but could
-not do so for want of breath. He made his way towards me, coming
-gingerly among the bushes.
-
-“We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “This moon has no discipline.
-She’ll let us smash ourselves.”
-
-He helped me to my feet. “You exerted yourself too much,” he said,
-dabbing at the yellow stuff with his hand to remove it from my
-garments.
-
-I stood passive and panting, allowing him to beat off the jelly from my
-knees and elbows and lecture me upon my misfortunes. “We don’t quite
-allow for the gravitation. Our muscles are scarcely educated yet. We
-must practise a little, when you have got your breath.”
-
-I pulled two or three little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a time
-on a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feeling
-of personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learner
-of cycling on earth.
-
-It suddenly occurred to Cavor that the cold air in the gully, after the
-brightness of the sun, might give me a fever. So we clambered back into
-the sunlight. We found that beyond a few abrasions I had received no
-serious injuries from my tumble, and at Cavor’s suggestion we were
-presently looking round for some safe and easy landing-place for my
-next leap. We chose a rocky slab some ten yards off, separated from us
-by a little thicket of olive-green spikes.
-
-“Imagine it there!” said Cavor, who was assuming the airs of a trainer,
-and he pointed to a spot about four feet from my toes. This leap I
-managed without difficulty, and I must confess I found a certain
-satisfaction in Cavor’s falling short by a foot or so and tasting the
-spikes of the scrub. “One has to be careful, you see,” he said, pulling
-out his thorns, and with that he ceased to be my mentor and became my
-fellow-learner in the art of lunar locomotion.
-
-We chose a still easier jump and did it without difficulty, and then
-leapt back again, and to and fro several times, accustoming our muscles
-to the new standard. I could never have believed had I not experienced
-it, how rapid that adaptation would be. In a very little time indeed,
-certainly after fewer than thirty leaps, we could judge the effort
-necessary for a distance with almost terrestrial assurance.
-
-And all this time the lunar plants were growing around us, higher and
-denser and more entangled, every moment thicker and taller, spiked
-plants, green cactus masses, fungi, fleshy and lichenous things,
-strangest radiate and sinuous shapes. But we were so intent upon our
-leaping, that for a time we gave no heed to their unfaltering
-expansion.
-
-An extraordinary elation had taken possession of us. Partly, I think,
-it was our sense of release from the confinement of the sphere. Mainly,
-however, the thin sweetness of the air, which I am certain contained a
-much larger proportion of oxygen than our terrestrial atmosphere. In
-spite of the strange quality of all about us, I felt as adventurous and
-experimental as a cockney would do placed for the first time among
-mountains and I do not think it occurred to either of us, face to face
-though we were with the unknown, to be very greatly afraid.
-
-We were bitten by a spirit of enterprise. We selected a lichenous kopje
-perhaps fifteen yards away, and landed neatly on its summit one after
-the other. “Good!” we cried to each other; “good!” and Cavor made three
-steps and went off to a tempting slope of snow a good twenty yards and
-more beyond. I stood for a moment struck by the grotesque effect of his
-soaring figure—his dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little round
-body, his arms and his knicker-bockered legs tucked up tightly—against
-the weird spaciousness of the lunar scene. A gust of laughter seized
-me, and then I stepped off to follow. Plump! I dropped beside him.
-
-We made a few gargantuan strides, leapt three or four times more, and
-sat down at last in a lichenous hollow. Our lungs were painful. We sat
-holding our sides and recovering our breath, looking appreciation to
-one another. Cavor panted something about “amazing sensations.” And
-then came a thought into my head. For the moment it did not seem a
-particularly appalling thought, simply a natural question arising out
-of the situation.
-
-“By the way,” I said, “where exactly is the sphere?”
-
-Cavor looked at me. “Eh?”
-
-The full meaning of what we were saying struck me sharply.
-
-“Cavor!” I cried, laying a hand on his arm, “where is the sphere?”
-
-
-
-
-X.
-Lost Men in the Moon
-
-
-His face caught something of my dismay. He stood up and stared about
-him at the scrub that fenced us in and rose about us, straining upward
-in a passion of growth. He put a dubious hand to his lips. He spoke
-with a sudden lack of assurance. “I think,” he said slowly, “we left it
-... somewhere ... about _there_.”
-
-He pointed a hesitating finger that wavered in an arc.
-
-“I’m not sure.” His look of consternation deepened. “Anyhow,” he said,
-with his eyes on me, “it can’t be far.”
-
-We had both stood up. We made unmeaning ejaculations, our eyes sought
-in the twining, thickening jungle round about us.
-
-All about us on the sunlit slopes frothed and swayed the darting
-shrubs, the swelling cactus, the creeping lichens, and wherever the
-shade remained the snow-drifts lingered. North, south, east, and west
-spread an identical monotony of unfamiliar forms. And somewhere, buried
-already among this tangled confusion, was our sphere, our home, our
-only provision, our only hope of escape from this fantastic wilderness
-of ephemeral growths into which we had come.
-
-“I think after all,” he said, pointing suddenly, “it might be over
-there.”
-
-“No,” I said. “We have turned in a curve. See! here is the mark of my
-heels. It’s clear the thing must be more to the eastward, much more.
-No—the sphere must be over there.”
-
-“I _think_,” said Cavor, “I kept the sun upon my right all the time.”
-
-“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.”
-
-I stared about me in the vain hope of recognising some knoll or shrub
-that had been near the sphere. But everywhere was a confusing sameness,
-everywhere the aspiring bushes, the distending fungi, the dwindling
-snow banks, steadily and inevitably changed. The sun scorched and
-stung, the faintness of an unaccountable hunger mingled with our
-infinite perplexity. And even as we stood there, confused and lost
-amidst unprecedented things, we became aware for the first time of a
-sound upon the moon other than the air of the growing plants, the faint
-sighing of the wind, or those that we ourselves had made.
-
-Boom.... Boom.... Boom.
-
-It came from beneath our feet, a sound in the earth. We seemed to hear
-it with our feet as much as with our ears. Its dull resonance was
-muffled by distance, thick with the quality of intervening substance.
-No sound that I can imagine could have astonished us more, or have
-changed more completely the quality of things about us. For this sound,
-rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed to us as though it could be nothing
-but the striking of some gigantic buried clock.
-
-Boom.... Boom.... Boom.
-
-Sound suggestive of still cloisters, of sleepless nights in crowded
-cities, of vigils and the awaited hour, of all that is orderly and
-methodical in life, booming out pregnant and mysterious in this
-fantastic desert! To the eye everything was unchanged: the desolation
-of bushes and cacti waving silently in the wind, stretched unbroken to
-the distant cliffs, the still dark sky was empty overhead, and the hot
-sun hung and burned. And through it all, a warning, a threat, throbbed
-this enigma of sound.
-
-Boom.... Boom.... Boom....
-
-We questioned one another in faint and faded voices.
-
-“A clock?”
-
-“Like a clock!”
-
-“What is it?”
-
-“What can it be?”
-
-“Count,” was Cavor’s belated suggestion, and at that word the striking
-ceased.
-
-The silence, the rhythmic disappointment of the silence, came as a
-fresh shock. For a moment one could doubt whether one had ever heard a
-sound. Or whether it might not still be going on. Had I indeed heard a
-sound?
-
-I felt the pressure of Cavor’s hand upon my arm. He spoke in an
-undertone, as though he feared to wake some sleeping thing. “Let us
-keep together,” he whispered, “and look for the sphere. We must get
-back to the sphere. This is beyond our understanding.”
-
-“Which way shall we go?”
-
-He hesitated. An intense persuasion of presences, of unseen things
-about us and near us, dominated our minds. What could they be? Where
-could they be? Was this arid desolation, alternately frozen and
-scorched, only the outer rind and mask of some subterranean world? And
-if so, what sort of world? What sort of inhabitants might it not
-presently disgorge upon us?
-
-And then, stabbing the aching stillness as vivid and sudden as an
-unexpected thunderclap, came a clang and rattle as though great gates
-of metal had suddenly been flung apart.
-
-It arrested our steps. We stood gaping helplessly. Then Cavor stole
-towards me.
-
-“I do not understand!” he whispered close to my face. He waved his hand
-vaguely skyward, the vague suggestion of still vaguer thoughts.
-
-“A hiding-place! If anything came...”
-
-I looked about us. I nodded my head in assent to him.
-
-We started off, moving stealthily with the most exaggerated precautions
-against noise. We went towards a thicket of scrub. A clangour like
-hammers flung about a boiler hastened our steps. “We must crawl,”
-whispered Cavor.
-
-The lower leaves of the bayonet plants, already overshadowed by the
-newer ones above, were beginning to wilt and shrivel so that we could
-thrust our way in among the thickening stems without serious injury. A
-stab in the face or arm we did not heed. At the heart of the thicket I
-stopped, and stared panting into Cavor’s face.
-
-“Subterranean,” he whispered. “Below.”
-
-“They may come out.”
-
-“We must find the sphere!”
-
-“Yes,” I said; “but how?”
-
-“Crawl till we come to it.”
-
-“But if we don’t?”
-
-“Keep hidden. See what they are like.”
-
-“We will keep together,” said I.
-
-He thought. “Which way shall we go?”
-
-“We must take our chance.”
-
-We peered this way and that. Then very circumspectly, we began to crawl
-through the lower jungle, making, so far as we could judge, a circuit,
-halting now at every waving fungus, at every sound, intent only on the
-sphere from which we had so foolishly emerged. Ever and again from out
-of the earth beneath us came concussions, beatings, strange,
-inexplicable, mechanical sounds; and once, and then again, we thought
-we heard something, a faint rattle and tumult, borne to us through the
-air. But fearful as we were we dared essay no vantage-point to survey
-the crater. For long we saw nothing of the beings whose sounds were so
-abundant and insistent. But for the faintness of our hunger and the
-drying of our throats that crawling would have had the quality of a
-very vivid dream. It was so absolutely unreal. The only element with
-any touch of reality was these sounds.
-
-Picture it to yourself! About us the dream-like jungle, with the silent
-bayonet leaves darting overhead, and the silent, vivid, sun-splashed
-lichens under our hands and knees, waving with the vigour of their
-growth as a carpet waves when the wind gets beneath it. Ever and again
-one of the bladder fungi, bulging and distending under the sun, loomed
-upon us. Ever and again some novel shape in vivid colour obtruded. The
-very cells that built up these plants were as large as my thumb, like
-beads of coloured glass. And all these things were saturated in the
-unmitigated glare of the sun, were seen against a sky that was bluish
-black and spangled still, in spite of the sunlight, with a few
-surviving stars. Strange! the very forms and texture of the stones were
-strange. It was all strange, the feeling of one’s body was
-unprecedented, every other movement ended in a surprise. The breath
-sucked thin in one’s throat, the blood flowed through one’s ears in a
-throbbing tide—thud, thud, thud, thud....
-
-And ever and again came gusts of turmoil, hammering, the clanging and
-throb of machinery, and presently—the bellowing of great beasts!
-
-
-
-
-XI.
-The Mooncalf Pastures
-
-
-So we two poor terrestrial castaways, lost in that wild-growing moon
-jungle, crawled in terror before the sounds that had come upon us. We
-crawled, as it seemed, a long time before we saw either Selenite or
-mooncalf, though we heard the bellowing and gruntulous noises of these
-latter continually drawing nearer to us. We crawled through stony
-ravines, over snow slopes, amidst fungi that ripped like thin bladders
-at our thrust, emitting a watery humour, over a perfect pavement of
-things like puff-balls, and beneath interminable thickets of scrub. And
-ever more helplessly our eyes sought for our abandoned sphere. The
-noise of the mooncalves would at times be a vast flat calf-like sound,
-at times it rose to an amazed and wrathy bellowing, and again it would
-become a clogged bestial sound, as though these unseen creatures had
-sought to eat and bellow at the same time.
-
-Our first view was but an inadequate transitory glimpse, yet none the
-less disturbing because it was incomplete. Cavor was crawling in front
-at the time, and he first was aware of their proximity. He stopped
-dead, arresting me with a single gesture.
-
-A crackling and smashing of the scrub appeared to be advancing directly
-upon us, and then, as we squatted close and endeavoured to judge of the
-nearness and direction of this noise, there came a terrific bellow
-behind us, so close and vehement that the tops of the bayonet scrub
-bent before it, and one felt the breath of it hot and moist. And,
-turning about, we saw indistinctly through a crowd of swaying stems the
-mooncalf’s shining sides, and the long line of its back loomed out
-against the sky.
-
-Of course it is hard for me now to say how much I saw at that time,
-because my impressions were corrected by subsequent observation. First
-of all impressions was its enormous size; the girth of its body was
-some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two hundred. Its sides rose and
-fell with its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic, flabby
-body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated white,
-dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw
-nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the
-almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering
-omnivorous mouth, its little nostrils, and tight shut eyes. (For the
-mooncalf invariably shuts its eyes in the presence of the sun.) We had
-a glimpse of a vast red pit as it opened its mouth to bleat and bellow
-again; we had a breath from the pit, and then the monster heeled over
-like a ship, dragged forward along the ground, creasing all its
-leathery skin, rolled again, and so wallowed past us, smashing a path
-amidst the scrub, and was speedily hidden from our eyes by the dense
-interlacings beyond. Another appeared more distantly, and then another,
-and then, as though he was guiding these animated lumps of provender to
-their pasture, a Selenite came momentarily into ken. My grip upon
-Cavor’s foot became convulsive at the sight of him, and we remained
-motionless and peering long after he had passed out of our range.
-
-By contrast with the mooncalves he seemed a trivial being, a mere ant,
-scarcely five feet high. He was wearing garments of some leathery
-substance, so that no portion of his actual body appeared, but of this,
-of course, we were entirely ignorant. He presented himself, therefore,
-as a compact, bristling creature, having much of the quality of a
-complicated insect, with whip-like tentacles and a clanging arm
-projecting from his shining cylindrical body case. The form of his head
-was hidden by his enormous many-spiked helmet—we discovered afterwards
-that he used the spikes for prodding refractory mooncalves—and a pair
-of goggles of darkened glass, set very much at the side, gave a
-bird-like quality to the metallic apparatus that covered his face. His
-arms did not project beyond his body case, and he carried himself upon
-short legs that, wrapped though they were in warm coverings, seemed to
-our terrestrial eyes inordinately flimsy. They had very short thighs,
-very long shanks, and little feet.
-
-In spite of his heavy-looking clothing, he was progressing with what
-would be, from the terrestrial point of view, very considerable
-strides, and his clanging arm was busy. The quality of his motion
-during the instant of his passing suggested haste and a certain anger,
-and soon after we had lost sight of him we heard the bellow of a
-mooncalf change abruptly into a short, sharp squeal followed by the
-scuffle of its acceleration. And gradually that bellowing receded, and
-then came to an end, as if the pastures sought had been attained.
-
-We listened. For a space the moon world was still. But it was some time
-before we resumed our crawling search for the vanished sphere.
-
-When next we saw mooncalves they were some little distance away from us
-in a place of tumbled rocks. The less vertical surfaces of the rocks
-were thick with a speckled green plant growing in dense mossy clumps,
-upon which these creatures were browsing. We stopped at the edge of the
-reeds amidst which we were crawling at the sight of them, peering out
-at then and looking round for a second glimpse of a Selenite. They lay
-against their food like stupendous slugs, huge, greasy hulls, eating
-greedily and noisily, with a sort of sobbing avidity. They seemed
-monsters of mere fatness, clumsy and overwhelmed to a degree that would
-make a Smithfield ox seem a model of agility. Their busy, writhing,
-chewing mouths, and eyes closed, together with the appetising sound of
-their munching, made up an effect of animal enjoyment that was
-singularly stimulating to our empty frames.
-
-“Hogs!” said Cavor, with unusual passion. “Disgusting hogs!” and after
-one glare of angry envy crawled off through the bushes to our right. I
-stayed long enough to see that the speckled plant was quite hopeless
-for human nourishment, then crawled after him, nibbling a quill of it
-between my teeth.
-
-Presently we were arrested again by the proximity of a Selenite, and
-this time we were able to observe him more exactly. Now we could see
-that the Selenite covering was indeed clothing, and not a sort of
-crustacean integument. He was quite similar in his costume to the
-former one we had glimpsed, except that ends of something like wadding
-were protruding from his neck, and he stood on a promontory of rock and
-moved his head this way and that, as though he was surveying the
-crater. We lay quite still, fearing to attract his attention if we
-moved, and after a time he turned about and disappeared.
-
-We came upon another drove of mooncalves bellowing up a ravine, and
-then we passed over a place of sounds, sounds of beating machinery as
-if some huge hall of industry came near the surface there. And while
-these sounds were still about us we came to the edge of a great open
-space, perhaps two hundred yards in diameter, and perfectly level. Save
-for a few lichens that advanced from its margin this space was bare,
-and presented a powdery surface of a dusty yellow colour. We were
-afraid to strike out across this space, but as it presented less
-obstruction to our crawling than the scrub, we went down upon it and
-began very circumspectly to skirt its edge.
-
-For a little while the noises from below ceased and everything, save
-for the faint stir of the growing vegetation, was very still. Then
-abruptly there began an uproar, louder, more vehement, and nearer than
-any we had so far heard. Of a certainty it came from below.
-Instinctively we crouched as flat as we could, ready for a prompt
-plunge into the thicket beside us. Each knock and throb seemed to
-vibrate through our bodies. Louder grew this throbbing and beating, and
-that irregular vibration increased until the whole moon world seemed to
-be jerking and pulsing.
-
-“Cover,” whispered Cavor, and I turned towards the bushes.
-
-At that instant came a thud like the thud of a gun, and then a thing
-happened—it still haunts me in my dreams. I had turned my head to look
-at Cavor’s face, and thrust out my hand in front of me as I did so. And
-my hand met nothing! I plunged suddenly into a bottomless hole!
-
-My chest hit something hard, and I found myself with my chin on the
-edge of an unfathomable abyss that had suddenly opened beneath me, my
-hand extended stiffly into the void. The whole of that flat circular
-area was no more than a gigantic lid, that was now sliding sideways
-from off the pit it had covered into a slot prepared for it.
-
-Had it not been for Cavor I think I should have remained rigid, hanging
-over this margin and staring into the enormous gulf below, until at
-last the edges of the slot scraped me off and hurled me into its
-depths. But Cavor had not received the shock that had paralysed me. He
-had been a little distance from the edge when the lid had first opened,
-and perceiving the peril that held me helpless, gripped my legs and
-pulled me backward. I came into a sitting position, crawled away from
-the edge for a space on all fours, then staggered up and ran after him
-across the thundering, quivering sheet of metal. It seemed to be
-swinging open with a steadily accelerated velocity, and the bushes in
-front of me shifted sideways as I ran.
-
-I was none too soon. Cavor’s back vanished amidst the bristling
-thicket, and as I scrambled up after him, the monstrous valve came into
-its position with a clang. For a long time we lay panting, not daring
-to approach the pit.
-
-But at last very cautiously and bit by bit we crept into a position
-from which we could peer down. The bushes about us creaked and waved
-with the force of a breeze that was blowing down the shaft. We could
-see nothing at first except smooth vertical walls descending at last
-into an impenetrable black. And then very gradually we became aware of
-a number of very faint and little lights going to and fro.
-
-For a time that stupendous gulf of mystery held us so that we forgot
-even our sphere. In time, as we grew more accustomed to the darkness,
-we could make out very small, dim, elusive shapes moving about among
-those needle-point illuminations. We peered amazed and incredulous,
-understanding so little that we could find no words to say. We could
-distinguish nothing that would give us a clue to the meaning of the
-faint shapes we saw.
-
-“What can it be?” I asked; “what can it be?”
-
-“The engineering!... They must live in these caverns during the night,
-and come out during the day.”
-
-“Cavor!” I said. “Can they be—_that_—it was something like—men?”
-
-“_That_ was not a man.”
-
-“We dare risk nothing!”
-
-“We dare do nothing until we find the sphere!”
-
-“We _can_ do nothing until we find the sphere.”
-
-He assented with a groan and stirred himself to move. He stared about
-him for a space, sighed, and indicated a direction. We struck out
-through the jungle. For a time we crawled resolutely, then with
-diminishing vigour. Presently among great shapes of flabby purple there
-came a noise of trampling and cries about us. We lay close, and for a
-long time the sounds went to and fro and very near. But this time we
-saw nothing. I tried to whisper to Cavor that I could hardly go without
-food much longer, but my mouth had become too dry for whispering.
-
-“Cavor,” I said, “I must have food.”
-
-He turned a face full of dismay towards me. “It’s a case for holding
-out,” he said.
-
-“But I _must_,” I said, “and look at my lips!”
-
-“I’ve been thirsty some time.”
-
-“If only some of that snow had remained!”
-
-“It’s clean gone! We’re driving from arctic to tropical at the rate of
-a degree a minute....”
-
-I gnawed my hand.
-
-“The sphere!” he said. “There is nothing for it but the sphere.”
-
-We roused ourselves to another spurt of crawling. My mind ran entirely
-on edible things, on the hissing profundity of summer drinks, more
-particularly I craved for beer. I was haunted by the memory of a
-sixteen gallon cask that had swaggered in my Lympne cellar. I thought
-of the adjacent larder, and especially of steak and kidney pie—tender
-steak and plenty of kidney, and rich, thick gravy between. Ever and
-again I was seized with fits of hungry yawning. We came to flat places
-overgrown with fleshy red things, monstrous coralline growths; as we
-pushed against them they snapped and broke. I noted the quality of the
-broken surfaces. The confounded stuff certainly looked of a biteable
-texture. Then it seemed to me that it smelt rather well.
-
-I picked up a fragment and sniffed at it.
-
-“Cavor,” I said in a hoarse undertone.
-
-He glanced at me with his face screwed up. “Don’t,” he said. I put down
-the fragment, and we crawled on through this tempting fleshiness for a
-space.
-
-“Cavor,” I asked, “why _not?_”
-
-“Poison,” I heard him say, but he did not look round.
-
-We crawled some way before I decided.
-
-“I’ll chance it,” said I.
-
-He made a belated gesture to prevent me. I stuffed my mouth full. He
-crouched watching my face, his own twisted into the oddest expression.
-“It’s good,” I said.
-
-“O Lord!” he cried.
-
-He watched me munch, his face wrinkled between desire and disapproval,
-then suddenly succumbed to appetite and began to tear off huge
-mouthfuls. For a time we did nothing but eat.
-
-The stuff was not unlike a terrestrial mushroom, only it was much laxer
-in texture, and, as one swallowed it, it warmed the throat. At first we
-experienced a mere mechanical satisfaction in eating; then our blood
-began to run warmer, and we tingled at the lips and fingers, and then
-new and slightly irrelevant ideas came bubbling up in our minds.
-
-“It’s good,” said I. “Infernally good! What a home for our surplus
-population! Our poor surplus population,” and I broke off another large
-portion. It filled me with a curiously benevolent satisfaction that
-there was such good food in the moon. The depression of my hunger gave
-way to an irrational exhilaration. The dread and discomfort in which I
-had been living vanished entirely. I perceived the moon no longer as a
-planet from which I most earnestly desired the means of escape, but as
-a possible refuge from human destitution. I think I forgot the
-Selenites, the mooncalves, the lid, and the noises completely so soon
-as I had eaten that fungus.
-
-Cavor replied to my third repetition of my “surplus population” remark
-with similar words of approval. I felt that my head swam, but I put
-this down to the stimulating effect of food after a long fast.
-“Ess’lent discov’ry yours, Cavor,” said I. “Se’nd on’y to the ‘tato.”
-
-“Whajer mean?” asked Cavor. “‘Scovery of the moon—se’nd on’y to the
-tato?”
-
-I looked at him, shocked at his suddenly hoarse voice, and by the
-badness of his articulation. It occurred to me in a flash that he was
-intoxicated, possibly by the fungus. It also occurred to me that he
-erred in imagining that he had discovered the moon; he had not
-discovered it, he had only reached it. I tried to lay my hand on his
-arm and explain this to him, but the issue was too subtle for his
-brain. It was also unexpectedly difficult to express. After a momentary
-attempt to understand me—I remember wondering if the fungus had made my
-eyes as fishy as his—he set off upon some observations on his own
-account.
-
-“We are,” he announced with a solemn hiccup, “the creashurs o’ what we
-eat and drink.”
-
-He repeated this, and as I was now in one of my subtle moods, I
-determined to dispute it. Possibly I wandered a little from the point.
-But Cavor certainly did not attend at all properly. He stood up as well
-as he could, putting a hand on my head to steady himself, which was
-disrespectful, and stood staring about him, quite devoid now of any
-fear of the moon beings.
-
-I tried to point out that this was dangerous for some reason that was
-not perfectly clear to me, but the word “dangerous” had somehow got
-mixed with “indiscreet,” and came out rather more like “injurious” than
-either; and after an attempt to disentangle them, I resumed my
-argument, addressing myself principally to the unfamiliar but attentive
-coralline growths on either side. I felt that it was necessary to clear
-up this confusion between the moon and a potato at once—I wandered into
-a long parenthesis on the importance of precision of definition in
-argument. I did my best to ignore the fact that my bodily sensations
-were no longer agreeable.
-
-In some way that I have now forgotten, my mind was led back to projects
-of colonisation. “We must annex this moon,” I said. “There must be no
-shilly-shally. This is part of the White Man’s Burthen. Cavor—we
-are—_hic_—Satap—mean Satraps! Nempire Cæsar never dreamt. B’in all the
-newspapers. Cavorecia. Bedfordecia. Bedfordecia—hic—Limited.
-Mean—unlimited! Practically.”
-
-Certainly I was intoxicated.
-
-I embarked upon an argument to show the infinite benefits our arrival
-would confer on the moon. I involved myself in a rather difficult proof
-that the arrival of Columbus was, on the whole, beneficial to America.
-I found I had forgotten the line of argument I had intended to pursue,
-and continued to repeat “sim’lar to C’lumbus,” to fill up time.
-
-From that point my memory of the action of that abominable fungus
-becomes confused. I remember vaguely that we declared our intention of
-standing no nonsense from any confounded insects, that we decided it
-ill became men to hide shamefully upon a mere satellite, that we
-equipped ourselves with huge armfuls of the fungus—whether for missile
-purposes or not I do not know—and, heedless of the stabs of the bayonet
-scrub, we started forth into the sunshine.
-
-Almost immediately we must have come upon the Selenites. There were six
-of them, and they were marching in single file over a rocky place,
-making the most remarkable piping and whining sounds. They all seemed
-to become aware of us at once, all instantly became silent and
-motionless, like animals, with their faces turned towards us.
-
-For a moment I was sobered.
-
-“Insects,” murmured Cavor, “insects! And they think I’m going to crawl
-about on my stomach—on my vertebrated stomach!
-
-“Stomach,” he repeated slowly, as though he chewed the indignity.
-
-Then suddenly, with a sort of fury, he made three vast strides and
-leapt towards them. He leapt badly; he made a series of somersaults in
-the air, whirled right over them, and vanished with an enormous splash
-amidst the cactus bladders. What the Selenites made of this amazing,
-and to my mind undignified irruption from another planet, I have no
-means of guessing. I seem to remember the sight of their backs as they
-ran in all directions, but I am not sure. All these last incidents
-before oblivion came are vague and faint in my mind. I know I made a
-step to follow Cavor, and tripped and fell headlong among the rocks. I
-was, I am certain, suddenly and vehemently ill. I seem to remember a
-violent struggle and being gripped by metallic clasps....
-
-My next clear recollection is that we were prisoners at we knew not
-what depths beneath the moon’s surface; we were in darkness amidst
-strange distracting noises; our bodies were covered with scratches and
-bruises, and our heads racked with pain.
-
-
-
-
-XII.
-The Selenite’s Face
-
-
-I found myself sitting crouched together in a tumultuous darkness. For
-a long time I could not understand where I was, nor how I had come to
-this perplexity. I thought of the cupboard into which I had been thrust
-at times when I was a child, and then of a very dark and noisy bedroom
-in which I had slept during an illness. But these sounds about me were
-not the noises I had known, and there was a thin flavour in the air
-like the wind of a stable. Then I supposed we must still be at work
-upon the sphere, and that somehow I had got into the cellar of Cavor’s
-house. I remembered we had finished the sphere, and fancied I must
-still be in it and travelling through space.
-
-“Cavor,” I said, “cannot we have some light?”
-
-There came no answer.
-
-“Cavor!” I insisted.
-
-I was answered by a groan. “My head!” I heard him say; “my head!”
-
-I attempted to press my hands to my brow, which ached, and discovered
-they were tied together. This startled me very much. I brought them up
-to my mouth and felt the cold smoothness of metal. They were chained
-together. I tried to separate my legs and made out they were similarly
-fastened, and also that I was fastened to the ground by a much thicker
-chain about the middle of my body.
-
-I was more frightened than I had yet been by anything in all our
-strange experiences. For a time I tugged silently at my bonds. “Cavor!”
-I cried out sharply. “Why am I tied? Why have you tied me hand and
-foot?”
-
-“I haven’t tied you,” he answered. “It’s the Selenites.”
-
-The Selenites! My mind hung on that for a space. Then my memories came
-back to me: the snowy desolation, the thawing of the air, the growth of
-the plants, our strange hopping and crawling among the rocks and
-vegetation of the crater. All the distress of our frantic search for
-the sphere returned to me.... Finally the opening of the great lid that
-covered the pit!
-
-Then as I strained to trace our later movements down to our present
-plight, the pain in my head became intolerable. I came to an
-insurmountable barrier, an obstinate blank.
-
-“Cavor!”
-
-“Yes?”
-
-“Where are we?”
-
-“How should I know?”
-
-“Are we dead?”
-
-“What nonsense!”
-
-“They’ve got us, then!”
-
-He made no answer but a grunt. The lingering traces of the poison
-seemed to make him oddly irritable.
-
-“What do you mean to do?”
-
-“How should I know what to do?”
-
-“Oh, very well!” said I, and became silent. Presently, I was roused
-from a stupor. “O _Lord!_” I cried; “I wish you’d stop that buzzing!”
-
-We lapsed into silence again, listening to the dull confusion of noises
-like the muffled sounds of a street or factory that filled our ears. I
-could make nothing of it, my mind pursued first one rhythm and then
-another, and questioned it in vain. But after a long time I became
-aware of a new and sharper element, not mingling with the rest but
-standing out, as it were, against that cloudy background of sound. It
-was a series of relatively very little definite sounds, tappings and
-rubbings, like a loose spray of ivy against a window or a bird moving
-about upon a box. We listened and peered about us, but the darkness was
-a velvet pall. There followed a noise like the subtle movement of the
-wards of a well-oiled lock. And then there appeared before me, hanging
-as it seemed in an immensity of black, a thin bright line.
-
-“Look!” whispered Cavor very softly.
-
-“What is it?”
-
-“I don’t know.”
-
-We stared.
-
-The thin bright line became a band, and broader and paler. It took upon
-itself the quality of a bluish light falling upon a white-washed wall.
-It ceased to be parallel-sided; it developed a deep indentation on one
-side. I turned to remark this to Cavor, and was amazed to see his ear
-in a brilliant illumination—all the rest of him in shadow. I twisted my
-head round as well as my bonds would permit. “Cavor,” I said, “it’s
-behind!”
-
-His ear vanished—gave place to an eye!
-
-Suddenly the crack that had been admitting the light broadened out, and
-revealed itself as the space of an opening door. Beyond was a sapphire
-vista, and in the doorway stood a grotesque outline silhouetted against
-the glare.
-
-We both made convulsive efforts to turn, and failing, sat staring over
-our shoulders at this. My first impression was of some clumsy quadruped
-with lowered head. Then I perceived it was the slender pinched body and
-short and extremely attenuated bandy legs of a Selenite, with his head
-depressed between his shoulders. He was without the helmet and body
-covering they wear upon the exterior.
-
-He was a blank, black figure to us, but instinctively our imaginations
-supplied features to his very human outline. I, at least, took it
-instantly that he was somewhat hunchbacked, with a high forehead and
-long features.
-
-He came forward three steps and paused for a time. His movements seemed
-absolutely noiseless. Then he came forward again. He walked like a
-bird, his feet fell one in front of the other. He stepped out of the
-ray of light that came through the doorway, and it seemed as though he
-vanished altogether in the shadow.
-
-For a moment my eyes sought him in the wrong place, and then I
-perceived him standing facing us both in the full light. Only the human
-features I had attributed to him were not there at all!
-
-Of course I ought to have expected that, only I didn’t. It came to me
-as an absolute, for a moment an overwhelming shock. It seemed as though
-it wasn’t a face, as though it must needs be a mask, a horror, a
-deformity, that would presently be disavowed or explained. There was no
-nose, and the thing had dull bulging eyes at the side—in the silhouette
-I had supposed they were ears. There were no ears.... I have tried to
-draw one of these heads, but I cannot. There was a mouth, downwardly
-curved, like a human mouth in a face that stares ferociously....
-
-The neck on which the head was poised was jointed in three places,
-almost like the short joints in the leg of a crab. The joints of the
-limbs I could not see, because of the puttee-like straps in which they
-were swathed, and which formed the only clothing the being wore.
-
-There the thing was, looking at us!
-
-At the time my mind was taken up by the mad impossibility of the
-creature. I suppose he also was amazed, and with more reason, perhaps,
-for amazement than we. Only, confound him! he did not show it. We did
-at least know what had brought about this meeting of incompatible
-creatures. But conceive how it would seem to decent Londoners, for
-example, to come upon a couple of living things, as big as men and
-absolutely unlike any other earthly animals, careering about among the
-sheep in Hyde Park! It must have taken him like that.
-
-Figure us! We were bound hand and foot, fagged and filthy; our beards
-two inches long, our faces scratched and bloody. Cavor you must imagine
-in his knickerbockers (torn in several places by the bayonet scrub) his
-Jaegar shirt and old cricket cap, his wiry hair wildly disordered, a
-tail to every quarter of the heavens. In that blue light his face did
-not look red but very dark, his lips and the drying blood upon my hands
-seemed black. If possible I was in a worse plight than he, on account
-of the yellow fungus into which I had jumped. Our jackets were
-unbuttoned, and our shoes had been taken off and lay at our feet. And
-we were sitting with our backs to this queer bluish light, peering at
-such a monster as Durer might have invented.
-
-Cavor broke the silence; started to speak, went hoarse, and cleared his
-throat. Outside began a terrific bellowing, as if a mooncalf were in
-trouble. It ended in a shriek, and everything was still again.
-
-Presently the Selenite turned about, flickered into the shadow, stood
-for a moment retrospective at the door, and then closed it on us; and
-once more we were in that murmurous mystery of darkness into which we
-had awakened.
-
-
-
-
-XIII.
-Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions
-
-
-For a time neither of us spoke. To focus together all the things we had
-brought upon ourselves seemed beyond my mental powers.
-
-“They’ve got us,” I said at last.
-
-“It was that fungus.”
-
-“Well—if I hadn’t taken it we should have fainted and starved.”
-
-“We might have found the sphere.”
-
-I lost my temper at his persistence, and swore to myself. For a time we
-hated one another in silence. I drummed with my fingers on the floor
-between my knees, and gritted the links of my fetters together.
-Presently I was forced to talk again.
-
-“What do you make of it, anyhow?” I asked humbly.
-
-“They are reasonable creatures—they can make things and do things.
-Those lights we saw...”
-
-He stopped. It was clear he could make nothing of it.
-
-When he spoke again it was to confess, “After all, they are more human
-than we had a right to expect. I suppose—”
-
-He stopped irritatingly.
-
-“Yes?”
-
-“I suppose, anyhow—on any planet where there is an intelligent
-animal—it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands, and walk
-erect.”
-
-Presently he broke away in another direction.
-
-“We are some way in,” he said. “I mean—perhaps a couple of thousand
-feet or more.”
-
-“Why?”
-
-“It’s cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality—it
-has altogether gone. And the feeling in one’s ears and throat.”
-
-I had not noted that, but I did now.
-
-“The air is denser. We must be some depths—a mile even, we may
-be—inside the moon.”
-
-“We never thought of a world inside the moon.”
-
-“No.”
-
-“How could we?”
-
-“We might have done. Only one gets into habits of mind.”
-
-He thought for a time.
-
-“_Now_,” he said, “it seems such an obvious thing.”
-
-“Of course! The moon must be enormously cavernous, with an atmosphere
-within, and at the centre of its caverns a sea.
-
-“One knew that the moon had a lower specific gravity than the earth,
-one knew that it had little air or water outside, one knew, too, that
-it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that
-it should be different in composition. The inference that it was
-hollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact.
-Kepler, of course—”
-
-His voice had the interest now of a man who has discerned a pretty
-sequence of reasoning.
-
-“Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his _sub-volvani_ was right after all.”
-
-“I wish you had taken the trouble to find that out before we came,” I
-said.
-
-He answered nothing, buzzing to himself softly, as he pursued his
-thoughts. My temper was going.
-
-“What do you think has become of the sphere, anyhow?” I asked.
-
-“Lost,” he said, like a man who answers an uninteresting question.
-
-“Among those plants?”
-
-“Unless they find it.”
-
-“And then?”
-
-“How can I tell?”
-
-“Cavor,” I said, with a sort of hysterical bitterness, “things look
-bright for my Company...”
-
-He made no answer.
-
-“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Just think of all the trouble we took to get
-into this pickle! What did we come for? What are we after? What was the
-moon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. We
-ought to have started the little things first. It was you proposed the
-moon! Those Cavorite spring blinds! I am certain we could have worked
-them for terrestrial purposes. Certain! Did you really understand what
-I proposed? A steel cylinder—”
-
-“Rubbish!” said Cavor.
-
-We ceased to converse.
-
-For a time Cavor kept up a broken monologue without much help from me.
-
-“If they find it,” he began, “if they find it ... what will they do
-with it? Well, that’s a question. It may be that’s _the_ question. They
-won’t understand it, anyhow. If they understood that sort of thing they
-would have come long since to the earth. Would they? Why shouldn’t
-they? But they would have sent something—they couldn’t keep their hands
-off such a possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearly they are
-intelligent and inquisitive. They will examine it—get inside it—trifle
-with the studs. Off! ... That would mean the moon for us for all the
-rest of our lives. Strange creatures, strange knowledge....”
-
-“As for strange knowledge—” said I, and language failed me.
-
-“Look here, Bedford,” said Cavor, “you came on this expedition of your
-own free will.”
-
-“You said to me, ‘Call it prospecting’.”
-
-“There’s always risks in prospecting.”
-
-“Especially when you do it unarmed and without thinking out every
-possibility.”
-
-“I was so taken up with the sphere. The thing rushed on us, and carried
-us away.”
-
-“Rushed on _me_, you mean.”
-
-“Rushed on me just as much. How was I to know when I set to work on
-molecular physics that the business would bring me here—of all places?”
-
-“It’s this accursed science,” I cried. “It’s the very Devil. The
-mediæval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all
-wrong. You tamper with it—and it offers you gifts. And directly you
-take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions
-and new weapons—now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social
-ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”
-
-“Anyhow, it’s no use your quarrelling with me _now_. These
-creatures—these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them—have got
-us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go through with it
-in, you will have to go through with it.... We have experiences before
-us that will need all our coolness.”
-
-He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. “Confound
-your science!” I said.
-
-“The problem is communication. Gestures, I fear, will be different.
-Pointing, for example. No creatures but men and monkeys point.”
-
-That was too obviously wrong for me. “Pretty nearly every animal,” I
-cried, “points with its eyes or nose.”
-
-Cavor meditated over that. “Yes,” he said at last, “and we don’t.
-There’s such differences—such differences!”
-
-“One might.... But how can I tell? There is speech. The sounds they
-make, a sort of fluting and piping. I don’t see how we are to imitate
-that. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have different
-senses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds and
-we are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far we
-may not get to an understanding?”
-
-“The things are outside us,” I said. “They’re more different from us
-than the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What is
-the good of talking like this?”
-
-Cavor thought. “I don’t see that. Where there are minds they will have
-something _similar_—even though they have been evolved on different
-planets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they are
-no more than animals—”
-
-“Well, _are_ they? They’re much more like ants on their hind legs than
-human beings, and who ever got to any sort of understanding with ants?”
-
-“But these machines and clothing! No, I don’t hold with you, Bedford.
-The difference is wide—”
-
-“It’s insurmountable.”
-
-“The resemblance must bridge it. I remember reading once a paper by the
-late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the
-planets. Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that that
-would be of any material benefit to me, and I fear I did not give it
-the attention I should have done—in view of this state of affairs.
-Yet.... Now, let me see!
-
-“His idea was to begin with those broad truths that must underlie all
-conceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The great
-principles of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leading
-proposition of Euclid’s, and show by construction that its truth was
-known to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base
-of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that if the equal sides be
-produced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, or
-that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal
-to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our
-knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a
-reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the
-geometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace it in the air....”
-
-He fell silent. I sat meditating his words. For a time his wild hope of
-communication, of interpretation, with these weird beings held me. Then
-that angry despair that was a part of my exhaustion and physical misery
-resumed its sway. I perceived with a sudden novel vividness the
-extraordinary folly of everything I had ever done. “Ass!” I said; “oh,
-ass, unutterable ass.... I seem to exist only to go about doing
-preposterous things. Why did we ever leave the thing? ... Hopping about
-looking for patents and concessions in the craters of the moon!... If
-only we had had the sense to fasten a handkerchief to a stick to show
-where we had left the sphere!”
-
-I subsided, fuming.
-
-“It is clear,” meditated Cavor, “they are intelligent. One can
-hypothecate certain things. As they have not killed us at once, they
-must have ideas of mercy. Mercy! at any rate of restraint. Possibly of
-intercourse. They may meet us. And this apartment and the glimpses we
-had of its guardian. These fetters! A high degree of intelligence...”
-
-“I wish to heaven,” cried I, “I’d thought even twice! Plunge after
-plunge. First one fluky start and then another. It was my confidence in
-you! _Why_ didn’t I stick to my play? That was what I was equal to.
-That was my world and the life I was made for. I could have finished
-that play. I’m certain ... it was a good play. I had the scenario as
-good as done. Then.... Conceive it! leaping to the moon!
-Practically—I’ve thrown my life away! That old woman in the inn near
-Canterbury had better sense.”
-
-I looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. The darkness had given place
-to that bluish light again. The door was opening, and several noiseless
-Selenites were coming into the chamber. I became quite still, staring
-at their grotesque faces.
-
-Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest.
-I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls. One elemental
-need at least our minds could understand in common. They were bowls of
-some metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light;
-and each contained a number of whitish fragments. All the cloudy pain
-and misery that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape of
-hunger. I eyed these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in
-dreams, at that time it seemed a small matter that at the end of the
-arms that lowered one towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and
-thumb, like the end of an elephant’s trunk. The stuff in the bowl was
-loose in texture, and whitish brown in colour—rather like lumps of some
-cold souffle, and it smelt faintly like mushrooms. From a partially
-divided carcass of a mooncalf that we presently saw, I am inclined to
-believe it must have been mooncalf flesh.
-
-My hands were so tightly chained that I could barely contrive to reach
-the bowl; but when they saw the effort I made, two of them dexterously
-released one of the turns about my wrist. Their tentacle hands were
-soft and cold to my skin. I immediately seized a mouthful of the food.
-It had the same laxness in texture that all organic structures seem to
-have upon the moon; it tasted rather like a gauffre or a damp meringue,
-but in no way was it disagreeable. I took two other mouthfuls. “I
-_wanted_—foo’!” said I, tearing off a still larger piece....
-
-For a time we ate with an utter absence of self-consciousness. We ate
-and presently drank like tramps in a soup kitchen. Never before nor
-since have I been hungry to the ravenous pitch, and save that I have
-had this very experience I could never have believed that, a quarter of
-a million of miles out of our proper world, in utter perplexity of
-soul, surrounded, watched, touched by beings more grotesque and inhuman
-than the worst creations of a nightmare, it would be possible for me to
-eat in utter forgetfulness of all these things. They stood about us
-watching us, and ever and again making a slight elusive twittering that
-stood, I suppose, in the stead of speech. I did not even shiver at
-their touch. And when the first zeal of my feeding was over, I could
-note that Cavor, too, had been eating with the same shameless abandon.
-
-
-
-
-XIV.
-Experiments in intercourse
-
-
-When at last we had made an end of eating, the Selenites linked our
-hands closely together again, and then untwisted the chains about our
-feet and rebound them, so as to give us a limited freedom of movement.
-Then they unfastened the chains about our waists. To do all this they
-had to handle us freely, and ever and again one of their queer heads
-came down close to my face, or a soft tentacle-hand touched my head or
-neck. I don’t remember that I was afraid then or repelled by their
-proximity. I think that our incurable anthropomorphism made us imagine
-there were human heads inside their masks. The skin, like everything
-else, looked bluish, but that was on account of the light; and it was
-hard and shiny, quite in the beetle-wing fashion, not soft, or moist,
-or hairy, as a vertebrated animal’s would be. Along the crest of the
-head was a low ridge of whitish spines running from back to front, and
-a much larger ridge curved on either side over the eyes. The Selenite
-who untied me used his mouth to help his hands.
-
-“They seem to be releasing us,” said Cavor. “Remember we are on the
-moon! Make no sudden movements!”
-
-“Are you going to try that geometry?”
-
-“If I get a chance. But, of course, they may make an advance first.”
-
-We remained passive, and the Selenites, having finished their
-arrangements, stood back from us, and seemed to be looking at us. I say
-seemed to be, because as their eyes were at the side and not in front,
-one had the same difficulty in determining the direction in which they
-were looking as one has in the case of a hen or a fish. They conversed
-with one another in their reedy tones, that seemed to me impossible to
-imitate or define. The door behind us opened wider, and, glancing over
-my shoulder, I saw a vague large space beyond, in which quite a little
-crowd of Selenites were standing. They seemed a curiously miscellaneous
-rabble.
-
-“Do they want us to imitate those sounds?” I asked Cavor.
-
-“I don’t think so,” he said.
-
-“It seems to me that they are trying to make us understand something.”
-
-“I can’t make anything of their gestures. Do you notice this one, who
-is worrying with his head like a man with an uncomfortable collar?”
-
-“Let us shake our heads at him.”
-
-We did that, and finding it ineffectual, attempted an imitation of the
-Selenites’ movements. That seemed to interest them. At any rate they
-all set up the same movement. But as that seemed to lead to nothing, we
-desisted at last and so did they, and fell into a piping argument among
-themselves. Then one of them, shorter and very much thicker than the
-others, and with a particularly wide mouth, squatted down suddenly
-beside Cavor, and put his hands and feet in the same posture as Cavor’s
-were bound, and then by a dexterous movement stood up.
-
-“Cavor,” I shouted, “they want us to get up!”
-
-He stared open-mouthed. “That’s it!” he said.
-
-And with much heaving and grunting, because our hands were tied
-together, we contrived to struggle to our feet. The Selenites made way
-for our elephantine heavings, and seemed to twitter more volubly. As
-soon as we were on our feet the thick-set Selenite came and patted each
-of our faces with his tentacles, and walked towards the open doorway.
-That also was plain enough, and we followed him. We saw that four of
-the Selenites standing in the doorway were much taller than the others,
-and clothed in the same manner as those we had seen in the crater,
-namely, with spiked round helmets and cylindrical body-cases, and that
-each of the four carried a goad with spike and guard made of that same
-dull-looking metal as the bowls. These four closed about us, one on
-either side of each of us, as we emerged from our chamber into the
-cavern from which the light had come.
-
-We did not get our impression of that cavern all at once. Our attention
-was taken up by the movements and attitudes of the Selenites
-immediately about us, and by the necessity of controlling our motion,
-lest we should startle and alarm them and ourselves by some excessive
-stride. In front of us was the short, thick-set being who had solved
-the problem of asking us to get up, moving with gestures that seemed,
-almost all of them, intelligible to us, inviting us to follow him. His
-spout-like face turned from one of us to the other with a quickness
-that was clearly interrogative. For a time, I say, we were taken up
-with these things.
-
-But at last the great place that formed a background to our movements
-asserted itself. It became apparent that the source of much, at least,
-of the tumult of sounds which had filled our ears ever since we had
-recovered from the stupefaction of the fungus was a vast mass of
-machinery in active movement, whose flying and whirling parts were
-visible indistinctly over the heads and between the bodies of the
-Selenites who walked about us. And not only did the web of sounds that
-filled the air proceed from this mechanism, but also the peculiar blue
-light that irradiated the whole place. We had taken it as a natural
-thing that a subterranean cavern should be artificially lit, and even
-now, though the fact was patent to my eyes, I did not really grasp its
-import until presently the darkness came. The meaning and structure of
-this huge apparatus we saw I cannot explain, because we neither of us
-learnt what it was for or how it worked. One after another, big shafts
-of metal flung out and up from its centre, their heads travelling in
-what seemed to me to be a parabolic path; each dropped a sort of
-dangling arm as it rose towards the apex of its flight and plunged down
-into a vertical cylinder, forcing this down before it. About it moved
-the shapes of tenders, little figures that seemed vaguely different
-from the beings about us. As each of the three dangling arms of the
-machine plunged down, there was a clank and then a roaring, and out of
-the top of the vertical cylinder came pouring this incandescent
-substance that lit the place, and ran over as milk runs over a boiling
-pot, and dripped luminously into a tank of light below. It was a cold
-blue light, a sort of phosphorescent glow but infinitely brighter, and
-from the tanks into which it fell it ran in conduits athwart the
-cavern.
-
-Thud, thud, thud, thud, came the sweeping arms of this unintelligible
-apparatus, and the light substance hissed and poured. At first the
-thing seemed only reasonably large and near to us, and then I saw how
-exceedingly little the Selenites upon it seemed, and I realised the
-full immensity of cavern and machine. I looked from this tremendous
-affair to the faces of the Selenites with a new respect. I stopped, and
-Cavor stopped, and stared at this thunderous engine.
-
-“But this is stupendous!” I said. “What can it be for?”
-
-Cavor’s blue-lit face was full of an intelligent respect. “I can’t
-dream! Surely these beings— Men could not make a thing like that! Look
-at those arms, are they on connecting rods?”
-
-The thick-set Selenite had gone some paces unheeded. He came back and
-stood between us and the great machine. I avoided seeing him, because I
-guessed somehow that his idea was to beckon us onward. He walked away
-in the direction he wished us to go, and turned and came back, and
-flicked our faces to attract our attention.
-
-Cavor and I looked at one another.
-
-“Cannot we show him we are interested in the machine?” I said.
-
-“Yes,” said Cavor. “We’ll try that.” He turned to our guide and smiled,
-and pointed to the machine, and pointed again, and then to his head,
-and then to the machine. By some defect of reasoning he seemed to
-imagine that broken English might help these gestures. “Me look ‘im,”
-he said, “me think ‘im very much. Yes.”
-
-His behaviour seemed to check the Selenites in their desire for our
-progress for a moment. They faced one another, their queer heads moved,
-the twittering voices came quick and liquid. Then one of them, a lean,
-tall creature, with a sort of mantle added to the puttee in which the
-others were dressed, twisted his elephant trunk of a hand about Cavor’s
-waist, and pulled him gently to follow our guide, who again went on
-ahead. Cavor resisted. “We may just as well begin explaining ourselves
-now. They may think we are new animals, a new sort of mooncalf perhaps!
-It is most important that we should show an intelligent interest from
-the outset.”
-
-He began to shake his head violently. “No, no,” he said, “me not come
-on one minute. Me look at ‘im.”
-
-“Isn’t there some geometrical point you might bring in _apropos_ of
-that affair?” I suggested, as the Selenites conferred again.
-
-“Possibly a parabolic—” he began.
-
-He yelled loudly, and leaped six feet or more!
-
-One of the four armed moon-men had pricked him with a goad!
-
-I turned on the goad-bearer behind me with a swift threatening gesture,
-and he started back. This and Cavor’s sudden shout and leap clearly
-astonished all the Selenites. They receded hastily, facing us. For one
-of those moments that seem to last for ever, we stood in angry protest,
-with a scattered semicircle of these inhuman beings about us.
-
-“He pricked me!” said Cavor, with a catching of the voice.
-
-“I saw him,” I answered.
-
-“Confound it!” I said to the Selenites; “we’re not going to stand that!
-What on earth do you take us for?”
-
-I glanced quickly right and left. Far away across the blue wilderness
-of cavern I saw a number of other Selenites running towards us; broad
-and slender they were, and one with a larger head than the others. The
-cavern spread wide and low, and receded in every direction into
-darkness. Its roof, I remember, seemed to bulge down as if with the
-weight of the vast thickness of rocks that prisoned us. There was no
-way out of it—no way out of it. Above, below, in every direction, was
-the unknown, and these inhuman creatures, with goads and gestures,
-confronting us, and we two unsupported men!
-
-
-
-
-XV.
-The Giddy Bridge
-
-
-Just for a moment that hostile pause endured. I suppose that both we
-and the Selenites did some very rapid thinking. My clearest impression
-was that there was nothing to put my back against, and that we were
-bound to be surrounded and killed. The overwhelming folly of our
-presence there loomed over me in black, enormous reproach. Why had I
-ever launched myself on this mad, inhuman expedition?
-
-Cavor came to my side and laid his hand on my arm. His pale and
-terrified face was ghastly in the blue light.
-
-“We can’t do anything,” he said. “It’s a mistake. They don’t
-understand. We must go. As they want us to go.”
-
-I looked down at him, and then at the fresh Selenites who were coming
-to help their fellows. “If I had my hands free—”
-
-“It’s no use,” he panted.
-
-“No.”
-
-“We’ll go.”
-
-And he turned about and led the way in the direction that had been
-indicated for us.
-
-I followed, trying to look as subdued as possible, and feeling at the
-chains about my wrists. My blood was boiling. I noted nothing more of
-that cavern, though it seemed to take a long time before we had marched
-across it, or if I noted anything I forgot it as I saw it. My thoughts
-were concentrated, I think, upon my chains and the Selenites, and
-particularly upon the helmeted ones with the goads. At first they
-marched parallel with us, and at a respectful distance, but presently
-they were overtaken by three others, and then they drew nearer, until
-they were within arms length again. I winced like a beaten horse as
-they came near to us. The shorter, thicker Selenite marched at first on
-our right flank, but presently came in front of us again.
-
-How well the picture of that grouping has bitten into my brain; the
-back of Cavor’s downcast head just in front of me, and the dejected
-droop of his shoulders, and our guide’s gaping visage, perpetually
-jerking about him, and the goad-bearers on either side, watchful, yet
-open-mouthed—a blue monochrome. And after all, I _do_ remember one
-other thing besides the purely personal affair, which is, that a sort
-of gutter came presently across the floor of the cavern, and then ran
-along by the side of the path of rock we followed. And it was full of
-that same bright blue luminous stuff that flowed out of the great
-machine. I walked close beside it, and I can testify it radiated not a
-particle of heat. It was brightly shining, and yet it was neither
-warmer nor colder than anything else in the cavern.
-
-Clang, clang, clang, we passed right under the thumping levers of
-another vast machine, and so came at last to a wide tunnel, in which we
-could even hear the pad, pad, of our shoeless feet, and which, save for
-the trickling thread of blue to the right of us, was quite unlit. The
-shadows made gigantic travesties of our shapes and those of the
-Selenites on the irregular wall and roof of the tunnel. Ever and again
-crystals in the walls of the tunnel scintillated like gems, ever and
-again the tunnel expanded into a stalactitic cavern, or gave off
-branches that vanished into darkness.
-
-We seemed to be marching down that tunnel for a long time. “Trickle,
-trickle,” went the flowing light very softly, and our footfalls and
-their echoes made an irregular paddle, paddle. My mind settled down to
-the question of my chains. If I were to slip off one turn _so_, and
-then to twist it _so_ ...
-
-If I tried to do it very gradually, would they see I was slipping my
-wrist out of the looser turn? If they did, what would they do?
-
-“Bedford,” said Cavor, “it goes down. It keeps on going down.”
-
-His remark roused me from my sullen pre-occupation.
-
-“If they wanted to kill us,” he said, dropping back to come level with
-me, “there is no reason why they should not have done it.”
-
-“No,” I admitted, “that’s true.”
-
-“They don’t understand us,” he said, “they think we are merely strange
-animals, some wild sort of mooncalf birth, perhaps. It will be only
-when they have observed us better that they will begin to think we have
-minds—”
-
-“When you trace those geometrical problems,” said I.
-
-“It may be that.”
-
-We tramped on for a space.
-
-“You see,” said Cavor, “these may be Selenites of a lower class.”
-
-“The infernal fools!” said I viciously, glancing at their exasperating
-faces.
-
-“If we endure what they do to us—”
-
-“We’ve got to endure it,” said I.
-
-“There may be others less stupid. This is the mere outer fringe of
-their world. It must go down and down, cavern, passage, tunnel, down at
-last to the sea—hundreds of miles below.”
-
-His words made me think of the mile or so of rock and tunnel that might
-be over our heads already. It was like a weight dropping on my
-shoulders. “Away from the sun and air,” I said. “Even a mine half a
-mile deep is stuffy.”
-
-“This is not, anyhow. It’s probable—Ventilation! The air would blow
-from the dark side of the moon to the sunlit, and all the carbonic acid
-would well out there and feed those plants. Up this tunnel, for
-example, there is quite a breeze. And what a world it must be. The
-earnest we have in that shaft, and those machines—”
-
-“And the goad,” I said. “Don’t forget the goad!”
-
-He walked a little in front of me for a time.
-
-“Even that goad—” he said.
-
-“Well?”
-
-“I was angry at the time. But—it was perhaps necessary we should get
-on. They have different skins, and probably different nerves. They may
-not understand our objection—just as a being from Mars might not like
-our earthly habit of nudging.”
-
-“They’d better be careful how they nudge _me_.”
-
-“And about that geometry. After all, their way is a way of
-understanding, too. They begin with the elements of life and not of
-thought. Food. Compulsion. Pain. They strike at fundamentals.”
-
-“There’s no doubt about _that_,” I said.
-
-He went on to talk of the enormous and wonderful world into which we
-were being taken. I realised slowly from his tone, that even now he was
-not absolutely in despair at the prospect of going ever deeper into
-this inhuman planet-burrow. His mind ran on machines and invention, to
-the exclusion of a thousand dark things that beset me. It wasn’t that
-he intended to make any use of these things, he simply wanted to know
-them.
-
-“After all,” he said, “this is a tremendous occasion. It is the meeting
-of two worlds! What are we going to see? Think of what is below us
-here.”
-
-“We shan’t see much if the light isn’t better,” I remarked.
-
-“This is only the outer crust. Down below— On this scale— There will be
-everything. Do you notice how different they seem one from another? The
-story we shall take back!”
-
-“Some rare sort of animal,” I said, “might comfort himself in that way
-while they were bringing him to the Zoo.... It doesn’t follow that we
-are going to be shown all these things.”
-
-“When they find we have reasonable minds,” said Cavor, “they will want
-to learn about the earth. Even if they have no generous emotions, they
-will teach in order to learn.... And the things they must know! The
-unanticipated things!”
-
-He went on to speculate on the possibility of their knowing things he
-had never hoped to learn on earth, speculating in that way, with a raw
-wound from that goad already in his skin! Much that he said I forget,
-for my attention was drawn to the fact that the tunnel along which we
-had been marching was opening out wider and wider. We seemed, from the
-feeling of the air, to be going out into a huge space. But how big the
-space might really be we could not tell, because it was unlit. Our
-little stream of light ran in a dwindling thread and vanished far
-ahead. Presently the rocky walls had vanished altogether on either
-hand. There was nothing to be seen but the path in front of us and the
-trickling hurrying rivulet of blue phosphorescence. The figures of
-Cavor and the guiding Selenite marched before me, the sides of their
-legs and heads that were towards the rivulet were clear and bright
-blue, their darkened sides, now that the reflection of the tunnel wall
-no longer lit them, merged indistinguishably in the darkness beyond.
-
-And soon I perceived that we were approaching a declivity of some sort,
-because the little blue stream dipped suddenly out of sight.
-
-In another moment, as it seemed, we had reached the edge. The shining
-stream gave one meander of hesitation and then rushed over. It fell to
-a depth at which the sound of its descent was absolutely lost to us.
-Far below was a bluish glow, a sort of blue mist—at an infinite
-distance below. And the darkness the stream dropped out of became
-utterly void and black, save that a thing like a plank projected from
-the edge of the cliff and stretched out and faded and vanished
-altogether. There was a warm air blowing up out of the gulf.
-
-For a moment I and Cavor stood as near the edge as we dared, peering
-into a blue-tinged profundity. And then our guide was pulling at my
-arm.
-
-Then he left me, and walked to the end of that plank and stepped upon
-it, looking back. Then when he perceived we watched him, he turned
-about and went on along it, walking as surely as though he was on firm
-earth. For a moment his form was distinct, then he became a blue blur,
-and then vanished into the obscurity. I became aware of some vague
-shape looming darkly out of the black.
-
-There was a pause. “Surely!—” said Cavor.
-
-One of the other Selenites walked a few paces out upon the plank, and
-turned and looked back at us unconcernedly. The others stood ready to
-follow after us. Our guide’s expectant figure reappeared. He was
-returning to see why we had not advanced.
-
-“What is that beyond there?” I asked.
-
-“I can’t see.”
-
-“We can’t cross this at any price,” said I.
-
-“I could not go three steps on it,” said Cavor, “even with my hands
-free.”
-
-We looked at each other’s drawn faces in blank consternation.
-
-“They can’t know what it is to be giddy!” said Cavor.
-
-“It’s quite impossible for us to walk that plank.”
-
-“I don’t believe they see as we do. I’ve been watching them. I wonder
-if they know this is simply blackness for us. How can we make them
-understand?”
-
-“Anyhow, we must make them understand.”
-
-I think we said these things with a vague half hope the Selenites might
-somehow understand. I knew quite clearly that all that was needed was
-an explanation. Then as I saw their faces, I realised that an
-explanation was impossible. Just here it was that our resemblances were
-not going to bridge our differences. Well, I wasn’t going to walk the
-plank, anyhow. I slipped my wrist very quickly out of the coil of chain
-that was loose, and then began to twist my wrists in opposite
-directions. I was standing nearest to the bridge, and as I did this two
-of the Selenites laid hold of me, and pulled me gently towards it.
-
-I shook my head violently. “No go,” I said, “no use. You don’t
-understand.”
-
-Another Selenite added his compulsion. I was forced to step forward.
-
-“I’ve got an idea,” said Cavor; but I knew his ideas.
-
-“Look here!” I exclaimed to the Selenites. “Steady on! It’s all very
-well for you—”
-
-I sprang round upon my heel. I burst out into curses. For one of the
-armed Selenites had stabbed me behind with his goad.
-
-I wrenched my wrists free from the little tentacles that held them. I
-turned on the goad-bearer. “Confound you!” I cried. “I’ve warned you of
-that. What on earth do you think I’m made of, to stick that into me? If
-you touch me again—”
-
-By way of answer he pricked me forthwith.
-
-I heard Cavor’s voice in alarm and entreaty. Even then I think he
-wanted to compromise with these creatures. “I say, Bedford,” he cried,
-“I know a way!” But the sting of that second stab seemed to set free
-some pent-up reserve of energy in my being. Instantly the link of the
-wrist-chain snapped, and with it snapped all considerations that had
-held us unresisting in the hands of these moon creatures. For that
-second, at least, I was mad with fear and anger. I took no thought of
-consequences. I hit straight out at the face of the thing with the
-goad. The chain was twisted round my fist.
-
-There came another of these beastly surprises of which the moon world
-is full.
-
-My mailed hand seemed to go clean through him. He smashed like—like
-some softish sort of sweet with liquid in it! He broke right in! He
-squelched and splashed. It was like hitting a damp toadstool. The
-flimsy body went spinning a dozen yards, and fell with a flabby impact.
-I was astonished. I was incredulous that any living thing could be so
-flimsy. For an instant I could have believed the whole thing a dream.
-
-Then it had become real and imminent again. Neither Cavor nor the other
-Selenites seemed to have done anything from the time when I had turned
-about to the time when the dead Selenite hit the ground. Every one
-stood back from us two, every one alert. That arrest seemed to last at
-least a second after the Selenite was down. Every one must have been
-taking the thing in. I seem to remember myself standing with my arm
-half retracted, trying also to take it in. “What next?” clamoured my
-brain; “what next?” Then in a moment every one was moving!
-
-I perceived we must get our chains loose, and that before we could do
-this these Selenites had to be beaten off. I faced towards the group of
-the three goad-bearers. Instantly one threw his goad at me. It swished
-over my head, and I suppose went flying into the abyss behind.
-
-I leaped right at him with all my might as the goad flew over me. He
-turned to run as I jumped, and I bore him to the ground, came down
-right upon him, and slipped upon his smashed body and fell. He seemed
-to wriggle under my foot.
-
-I came into a sitting position, and on every hand the blue backs of the
-Selenites were receding into the darkness. I bent a link by main force
-and untwisted the chain that had hampered me about the ankles, and
-sprang to my feet, with the chain in my hand. Another goad, flung
-javelin-wise, whistled by me, and I made a rush towards the darkness
-out of which it had come. Then I turned back towards Cavor, who was
-still standing in the light of the rivulet near the gulf convulsively
-busy with his wrists, and at the same time jabbering nonsense about his
-idea.
-
-“Come on!” I cried.
-
-“My hands!” he answered.
-
-Then, realising that I dared not run back to him, because my
-ill-calculated steps might carry me over the edge, he came shuffling
-towards me, with his hands held out before him.
-
-I gripped his chains at once to unfasten them.
-
-“Where are they?” he panted.
-
-“Run away. They’ll come back. They’re throwing things! Which way shall
-we go?”
-
-“By the light. To that tunnel. Eh?”
-
-“Yes,” said I, and his hands were free.
-
-I dropped on my knees and fell to work on his ankle bonds. Whack came
-something—I know not what—and splashed the livid streamlet into drops
-about us. Far away on our right a piping and whistling began.
-
-I whipped the chain off his feet, and put it in his hand. “Hit with
-that!” I said, and without waiting for an answer, set off in big bounds
-along the path by which we had come. I had a nasty sort of feeling that
-these things could jump out of the darkness on to my back. I heard the
-impact of his leaps come following after me.
-
-We ran in vast strides. But that running, you must understand, was an
-altogether different thing from any running on earth. On earth one
-leaps and almost instantly hits the ground again, but on the moon,
-because of its weaker pull, one shot through the air for several
-seconds before one came to earth. In spite of our violent hurry this
-gave an effect of long pauses, pauses in which one might have counted
-seven or eight. “Step,” and one soared off! All sorts of questions ran
-through my mind: “Where are the Selenites? What will they do? Shall we
-ever get to that tunnel? Is Cavor far behind? Are they likely to cut
-him off?” Then whack, stride, and off again for another step.
-
-I saw a Selenite running in front of me, his legs going exactly as a
-man’s would go on earth, saw him glance over his shoulder, and heard
-him shriek as he ran aside out of my way into the darkness. He was, I
-think, our guide, but I am not sure. Then in another vast stride the
-walls of rock had come into view on either hand, and in two more
-strides I was in the tunnel, and tempering my pace to its low roof. I
-went on to a bend, then stopped and turned back, and plug, plug, plug,
-Cavor came into view, splashing into the stream of blue light at every
-stride, and grew larger and blundered into me. We stood clutching each
-other. For a moment, at least, we had shaken off our captors and were
-alone.
-
-We were both very much out of breath. We spoke in panting, broken
-sentences.
-
-“You’ve spoilt it all!” panted Cavor. “Nonsense,” I cried. “It was that
-or death!”
-
-“What are we to do?”
-
-“Hide.”
-
-“How can we?”
-
-“It’s dark enough.”
-
-“But where?”
-
-“Up one of these side caverns.”
-
-“And then?”
-
-“Think.”
-
-“Right—come on.”
-
-We strode on, and presently came to a radiating dark cavern. Cavor was
-in front. He hesitated, and chose a black mouth that seemed to promise
-good hiding. He went towards it and turned.
-
-“It’s dark,” he said.
-
-“Your legs and feet will light us. You’re wet with that luminous
-stuff.”
-
-“But—”
-
-A tumult of sounds, and in particular a sound like a clanging gong,
-advancing up the main tunnel, became audible. It was horribly
-suggestive of a tumultuous pursuit. We made a bolt for the unlit side
-cavern forthwith. As we ran along it our way was lit by the irradiation
-of Cavor’s legs. “It’s lucky,” I panted, “they took off our boots, or
-we should fill this place with clatter.” On we rushed, taking as small
-steps as we could to avoid striking the roof of the cavern. After a
-time we seemed to be gaining on the uproar. It became muffled, it
-dwindled, it died away.
-
-I stopped and looked back, and I heard the pad, pad of Cavor’s feet
-receding. Then he stopped also. “Bedford,” he whispered; “there’s a
-sort of light in front of us.”
-
-I looked, and at first could see nothing. Then I perceived his head and
-shoulders dimly outlined against a fainter darkness. I saw, also, that
-this mitigation of the darkness was not blue, as all the other light
-within the moon had been, but a pallid grey, a very vague, faint white,
-the daylight colour. Cavor noted this difference as soon, or sooner,
-than I did, and I think, too, that it filled him with much the same
-wild hope.
-
-“Bedford,” he whispered, and his voice trembled. “That light—it is
-possible—”
-
-He did not dare to say the thing he hoped. Then came a pause. Suddenly
-I knew by the sound of his feet that he was striding towards that
-pallor. I followed him with a beating heart.
-
-
-
-
-XVI.
-Points of View
-
-
-The light grew stronger as we advanced. In a little time it was nearly
-as strong as the phosphorescence on Cavor’s legs. Our tunnel was
-expanding into a cavern, and this new light was at the farther end of
-it. I perceived something that set my hopes leaping and bounding.
-
-“Cavor,” I said, “it comes from above! I am certain it comes from
-above!”
-
-He made no answer, but hurried on.
-
-Indisputably it was a grey light, a silvery light.
-
-In another moment we were beneath it. It filtered down through a chink
-in the walls of the cavern, and as I stared up, drip, came a drop of
-water upon my face. I started and stood aside—drip, fell another drop
-quite audibly on the rocky floor.
-
-“Cavor,” I said, “if one of us lifts the other, he can reach that
-crack!”
-
-“I’ll lift you,” he said, and incontinently hoisted me as though I was
-a baby.
-
-I thrust an arm into the crack, and just at my finger tips found a
-little ledge by which I could hold. I could see the white light was
-very much brighter now. I pulled myself up by two fingers with scarcely
-an effort, though on earth I weigh twelve stone, reached to a still
-higher corner of rock, and so got my feet on the narrow ledge. I stood
-up and searched up the rocks with my fingers; the cleft broadened out
-upwardly. “It’s climbable,” I said to Cavor. “Can you jump up to my
-hand if I hold it down to you?”
-
-I wedged myself between the sides of the cleft, rested knee and foot on
-the ledge, and extended a hand. I could not see Cavor, but I could hear
-the rustle of his movements as he crouched to spring. Then whack and he
-was hanging to my arm—and no heavier than a kitten! I lugged him up
-until he had a hand on my ledge, and could release me.
-
-“Confound it!” I said, “any one could be a mountaineer on the moon;”
-and so set myself in earnest to the climbing. For a few minutes I
-clambered steadily, and then I looked up again. The cleft opened out
-steadily, and the light was brighter. Only—
-
-It was not daylight after all.
-
-In another moment I could see what it was, and at the sight I could
-have beaten my head against the rocks with disappointment. For I beheld
-simply an irregularly sloping open space, and all over its slanting
-floor stood a forest of little club-shaped fungi, each shining
-gloriously with that pinkish silvery light. For a moment I stared at
-their soft radiance, then sprang forward and upward among them. I
-plucked up half a dozen and flung them against the rocks, and then sat
-down, laughing bitterly, as Cavor’s ruddy face came into view.
-
-“It’s phosphorescence again!” I said. “No need to hurry. Sit down and
-make yourself at home.” And as he spluttered over our disappointment, I
-began to lob more of these growths into the cleft.
-
-“I thought it was daylight,” he said.
-
-“Daylight!” cried I. “Daybreak, sunset, clouds, and windy skies! Shall
-we ever see such things again?”
-
-As I spoke, a little picture of our world seemed to rise before me,
-bright and little and clear, like the background of some old Italian
-picture. “The sky that changes, and the sea that changes, and the hills
-and the green trees and the towns and cities shining in the sun. Think
-of a wet roof at sunset, Cavor! Think of the windows of a westward
-house!” He made no answer.
-
-“Here we are burrowing in this beastly world that isn’t a world, with
-its inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outside
-that torrid day and that death stillness of night. And all these things
-that are chasing us now, beastly men of leather—insect men, that come
-out of a nightmare! After all, they’re right! What business have we
-here smashing them and disturbing their world! For all we know the
-whole planet is up and after us already. In a minute we may hear them
-whimpering, and their gongs going. What are we to do? Where are we to
-go? Here we are as comfortable as snakes from Jamrach’s loose in a
-Surbiton villa!”
-
-“It was your fault,” said Cavor.
-
-“My fault!” I shouted. “Good Lord!”
-
-“I had an idea!”
-
-“Curse your ideas!”
-
-“If we had refused to budge—”
-
-“Under those goads?”
-
-“Yes. They would have carried us!”
-
-“Over that bridge?”
-
-“Yes. They must have carried us from outside.”
-
-“I’d rather be carried by a fly across a ceiling.”
-
-“Good Heavens!”
-
-I resumed my destruction of the fungi. Then suddenly I saw something
-that struck me even then. “Cavor,” I said, “these chains are of gold!”
-
-He was thinking intently, with his hands gripping his cheeks. He turned
-his head slowly and stared at me, and when I had repeated my words, at
-the twisted chain about his right hand. “So they are,” he said, “so
-they are.” His face lost its transitory interest even as he looked. He
-hesitated for a moment, then went on with his interrupted meditation. I
-sat for a space puzzling over the fact that I had only just observed
-this, until I considered the blue light in which we had been, and which
-had taken all the colour out of the metal. And from that discovery I
-also started upon a train of thought that carried me wide and far. I
-forgot that I had just been asking what business we had in the moon.
-Gold....
-
-It was Cavor who spoke first. “It seems to me that there are two
-courses open to us.”
-
-“Well?”
-
-“Either we can attempt to make our way—fight our way if necessary—out
-to the exterior again, and then hunt for our sphere until we find it,
-or the cold of the night comes to kill us, or else—”
-
-He paused. “Yes?” I said, though I knew what was coming.
-
-“We might attempt once more to establish some sort of understanding
-with the minds of the people in the moon.”
-
-“So far as I’m concerned—it’s the first.”
-
-“I doubt.”
-
-“I don’t.”
-
-“You see,” said Cavor, “I do not think we can judge the Selenites by
-what we have seen of them. Their central world, their civilised world
-will be far below in the profounder caverns about their sea. This
-region of the crust in which we are is an outlying district, a pastoral
-region. At any rate, that is my interpretation. These Selenites we have
-seen may be only the equivalent of cowboys and engine-tenders. Their
-use of goads—in all probability mooncalf goads—the lack of imagination
-they show in expecting us to be able to do just what they can do, their
-indisputable brutality, all seem to point to something of that sort.
-But if we endured—”
-
-“Neither of us could endure a six-inch plank across the bottomless pit
-for very long.”
-
-“No,” said Cavor; “but then—”
-
-“I _won’t_,” I said.
-
-He discovered a new line of possibilities. “Well, suppose we got
-ourselves into some corner, where we could defend ourselves against
-these hinds and labourers. If, for example, we could hold out for a
-week or so, it is probable that the news of our appearance would filter
-down to the more intelligent and populous parts—”
-
-“If they exist.”
-
-“They must exist, or whence came those tremendous machines?”
-
-“That’s possible, but it’s the worst of the two chances.”
-
-“We might write up inscriptions on walls—”
-
-“How do we know their eyes would see the sort of marks we made?”
-
-“If we cut them—”
-
-“That’s possible, of course.”
-
-I took up a new thread of thought. “After all,” I said, “I suppose you
-don’t think these Selenites so infinitely wiser than men.”
-
-“They must know a lot more—or at least a lot of different things.”
-
-“Yes, but—” I hesitated.
-
-“I think you’ll quite admit, Cavor, that you’re rather an exceptional
-man.”
-
-“How?”
-
-“Well, you—you’re a rather lonely man—have been, that is. You haven’t
-married.”
-
-“Never wanted to. But why—”
-
-“And you never grew richer than you happened to be?”
-
-“Never wanted that either.”
-
-“You’ve just rooted after knowledge?”
-
-“Well, a certain curiosity is natural—”
-
-“You think so. That’s just it. You think every other mind wants to
-_know_. I remember once, when I asked you why you conducted all these
-researches, you said you wanted your F.R.S., and to have the stuff
-called Cavorite, and things like that. You know perfectly well you
-didn’t do it for that; but at the time my question took you by
-surprise, and you felt you ought to have something to look like a
-motive. Really you conducted researches because you _had_ to. It’s your
-twist.”
-
-“Perhaps it is—”
-
-“It isn’t one man in a million has that twist. Most men want—well,
-various things, but very few want knowledge for its own sake. _I_
-don’t, I know perfectly well. Now, these Selenites seem to be a
-driving, busy sort of being, but how do you know that even the most
-intelligent will take an interest in us or our world? I don’t believe
-they’ll even know we have a world. They never come out at night—they’d
-freeze if they did. They’ve probably never seen any heavenly body at
-all except the blazing sun. How are they to know there is another
-world? What does it matter to them if they do? Well, even if they
-_have_ had a glimpse of a few stars, or even of the earth crescent,
-what of that? Why should people living _inside_ a planet trouble to
-observe that sort of thing? Men wouldn’t have done it except for the
-seasons and sailing; why should the moon people?...
-
-“Well, suppose there are a few philosophers like yourself. They are
-just the very Selenites who’ll never have heard of our existence.
-Suppose a Selenite had dropped on the earth when you were at Lympne,
-you’d have been the last man in the world to hear he had come. You
-never read a newspaper! You see the chances against you. Well, it’s for
-these chances we’re sitting here doing nothing while precious time is
-flying. I tell you we’ve got into a fix. We’ve come unarmed, we’ve lost
-our sphere, we’ve got no food, we’ve shown ourselves to the Selenites,
-and made them think we’re strange, strong, dangerous animals; and
-unless these Selenites are perfect fools, they’ll set about now and
-hunt us till they find us, and when they find us they’ll try to take us
-if they can, and kill us if they can’t, and that’s the end of the
-matter. If they take us, they’ll probably kill us, through some
-misunderstanding. After we’re done for, they may discuss us perhaps,
-but we shan’t get much fun out of that.”
-
-“Go on.”
-
-“On the other hand, here’s gold knocking about like cast iron at home.
-If only we can get some of it back, if only we can find our sphere
-again before they do, and get back, then—”
-
-“Yes?”
-
-“We might put the thing on a sounder footing. Come back in a bigger
-sphere with guns.”
-
-“Good Lord!” cried Cavor, as though that was horrible.
-
-I shied another luminous fungus down the cleft.
-
-“Look here, Cavor,” I said, “I’ve half the voting power anyhow in this
-affair, and this is a case for a practical man. I’m a practical man,
-and you are not. I’m not going to trust to Selenites and geometrical
-diagrams if I can help it. That’s all. Get back. Drop all this
-secrecy—or most of it. And come again.”
-
-He reflected. “When I came to the moon,” he said, “I ought to have come
-alone.”
-
-“The question before the meeting,” I said, “is how to get back to the
-sphere.”
-
-For a time we nursed our knees in silence. Then he seemed to decide for
-my reasons.
-
-“I think,” he said, “one can get data. It is clear that while the sun
-is on this side of the moon the air will be blowing through this planet
-sponge from the dark side hither. On this side, at any rate, the air
-will be expanding and flowing out of the moon caverns into the
-craters.... Very well, there’s a draught here.”
-
-“So there is.”
-
-“And that means that this is not a dead end; somewhere behind us this
-cleft goes on and up. The draught is blowing up, and that is the way we
-have to go. If we try to get up any sort of chimney or gully there is,
-we shall not only get out of these passages where they are hunting for
-us—”
-
-“But suppose the gully is too narrow?”
-
-“We’ll come down again.”
-
-“Ssh!” I said suddenly; “what’s that?”
-
-We listened. At first it was an indistinct murmur, and then one picked
-out the clang of a gong. “They must think we are mooncalves,” said I,
-“to be frightened at that.”
-
-“They’re coming along that passage,” said Cavor.
-
-“They must be.”
-
-“They’ll not think of the cleft. They’ll go past.”
-
-I listened again for a space. “This time,” I whispered, “they’re likely
-to have some sort of weapon.”
-
-Then suddenly I sprang to my feet. “Good heavens, Cavor!” I cried. “But
-they _will!_ They’ll see the fungi I have been pitching down. They’ll—”
-
-I didn’t finish my sentence. I turned about and made a leap over the
-fungus tops towards the upper end of the cavity. I saw that the space
-turned upward and became a draughty cleft again, ascending to
-impenetrable darkness. I was about to clamber up into this, and then
-with a happy inspiration turned back.
-
-“What are you doing?” asked Cavor.
-
-“Go on!” said I, and went back and got two of the shining fungi, and
-putting one into the breast pocket of my flannel jacket, so that it
-stuck out to light our climbing, went back with the other for Cavor.
-The noise of the Selenites was now so loud that it seemed they must be
-already beneath the cleft. But it might be they would have difficulty
-in clambering in to it, or might hesitate to ascend it against our
-possible resistance. At any rate, we had now the comforting knowledge
-of the enormous muscular superiority our birth in another planet gave
-us. In other minute I was clambering with gigantic vigour after Cavor’s
-blue-lit heels.
-
-
-
-
-XVII.
-The Fight in the Cave of the Moon Butchers
-
-
-I do not know how far we clambered before we came to the grating. It
-may be we ascended only a few hundred feet, but at the time it seemed
-to me we might have hauled and jammed and hopped and wedged ourselves
-through a mile or more of vertical ascent. Whenever I recall that time,
-there comes into my head the heavy clank of our golden chains that
-followed every movement. Very soon my knuckles and knees were raw, and
-I had a bruise on one cheek. After a time the first violence of our
-efforts diminished, and our movements became more deliberate and less
-painful. The noise of the pursuing Selenites had died away altogether.
-It seemed almost as though they had not traced us up the crack after
-all, in spite of the tell-tale heap of broken fungi that must have lain
-beneath it. At times the cleft narrowed so much that we could scarce
-squeeze up it; at others it expanded into great drusy cavities, studded
-with prickly crystals or thickly beset with dull, shining fungoid
-pimples. Sometimes it twisted spirally, and at other times slanted down
-nearly to the horizontal direction. Ever and again there was the
-intermittent drip and trickle of water by us. Once or twice it seemed
-to us that small living things had rustled out of our reach, but what
-they were we never saw. They may have been venomous beasts for all I
-know, but they did us no harm, and we were now tuned to a pitch when a
-weird creeping thing more or less mattered little. And at last, far
-above, came the familiar bluish light again, and then we saw that it
-filtered through a grating that barred our way.
-
-We whispered as we pointed this out to one another, and became more and
-more cautious in our ascent. Presently we were close under the grating,
-and by pressing my face against its bars I could see a limited portion
-of the cavern beyond. It was clearly a large space, and lit no doubt by
-some rivulet of the same blue light that we had seen flow from the
-beating machinery. An intermittent trickle of water dropped ever and
-again between the bars near my face.
-
-My first endeavour was naturally to see what might be upon the floor of
-the cavern, but our grating lay in a depression whose rim hid all this
-from our eyes. Our foiled attention then fell back upon the suggestion
-of the various sounds we heard, and presently my eye caught a number of
-faint shadows that played across the dim roof far overhead.
-
-Indisputably there were several Selenites, perhaps a considerable
-number, in this space, for we could hear the noises of their
-intercourse, and faint sounds that I identified as their footfalls.
-There was also a succession of regularly repeated sounds—chid, chid,
-chid—which began and ceased, suggestive of a knife or spade hacking at
-some soft substance. Then came a clank as if of chains, a whistle and a
-rumble as of a truck running over a hollowed place, and then again that
-chid, chid, chid resumed. The shadows told of shapes that moved quickly
-and rhythmically, in agreement with that regular sound, and rested when
-it ceased.
-
-We put our heads close together, and began to discuss these things in
-noiseless whispers.
-
-“They are occupied,” I said, “they are occupied in some way.”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“They’re not seeking us, or thinking of us.”
-
-“Perhaps they have not heard of us.”
-
-“Those others are hunting about below. If suddenly we appeared here—”
-
-We looked at one another.
-
-“There might be a chance to parley,” said Cavor.
-
-“No,” I said. “Not as we are.”
-
-For a space we remained, each occupied by his own thoughts.
-
-Chid, chid, chid went the chipping, and the shadows moved to and fro.
-
-I looked at the grating. “It’s flimsy,” I said. “We might bend two of
-the 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 being cut up, much as the crew of a whaler
-might cut up a moored whale. They were cutting off the flesh in strips,
-and on some of the farther trunks the white ribs were showing. It was
-the sound of their hatchets that made that chid, chid, chid. Some way
-away a thing like a trolley cable, drawn and loaded with chunks of lax
-meat, was running up the slope of the cavern floor. This enormous long
-avenue of hulls that were destined to be food gave us a sense of the
-vast populousness of the moon world second only to the effect of our
-first glimpse down the shaft.
-
-It seemed to me at first that the Selenites must be standing on
-trestle-supported planks,[2] and then I saw that the planks and
-supports and the hatchets were really of the same leaden hue as my
-fetters had seemed before white light came to bear on them. A number of
-very thick-looking crowbars lay about the floor, and had apparently
-assisted to turn the dead mooncalf over on its side. They were perhaps
-six feet long, with shaped handles, very tempting-looking weapons. The
-whole place was lit by three transverse streams of the blue fluid.
-
- [2] I do not remember seeing any wooden things on the moon; doors,
- tables, everything corresponding to our terrestrial joinery was made
- of metal, and I believe for the most part of gold, which as a metal
- would, of course, naturally recommend itself—other things being
- equal—on account of the ease in working it, and its toughness and
- durability.
-
-
-We lay for a long time noting all these things in silence. “Well?” said
-Cavor at last.
-
-I crouched over and turned to him. I had come upon a brilliant idea.
-“Unless they lowered those bodies by a crane,” I said, “we must be
-nearer the surface than I thought.”
-
-“Why?”
-
-“The mooncalf doesn’t hop, and it hasn’t got wings.”
-
-He peered over the edge of the hollow again. “I wonder now—” he began.
-“After all, we have never gone far from the surface—”
-
-I stopped him by a grip on his arm. I had heard a noise from the cleft
-below us!
-
-We twisted ourselves about, and lay as still as death, with every sense
-alert. In a little while I did not doubt that something was quietly
-ascending the cleft. Very slowly and quite noiselessly I assured myself
-of a good grip on my chain, and waited for that something to appear.
-
-“Just look at those chaps with the hatchets again,” I said.
-
-“They’re all right,” said Cavor.
-
-I took a sort of provisional aim at the gap in the grating. I could
-hear now quite distinctly the soft twittering of the ascending
-Selenites, the dab of their hands against the rock, and the falling of
-dust from their grips as they clambered.
-
-Then I could see that there was something moving dimly in the blackness
-below the grating, but what it might be I could not distinguish. The
-whole thing seemed to hang fire just for a moment—then smash! I had
-sprung to my feet, struck savagely at something that had flashed out at
-me. It was the keen point of a spear. I have thought since that its
-length in the narrowness of the cleft must have prevented its being
-sloped to reach me. Anyhow, it shot out from the grating like the
-tongue of a snake, and missed and flew back and flashed again. But the
-second time I snatched and caught it, and wrenched it away, but not
-before another had darted ineffectually at me.
-
-I shouted with triumph as I felt the hold of the Selenite resist my
-pull for a moment and give, and then I was jabbing down through the
-bars, amidst squeals from the darkness, and Cavor had snapped off the
-other spear, and was leaping and flourishing it beside me, and making
-inefficient jabs. Clang, clang, came up through the grating, and then
-an axe hurtled through the air and whacked against the rocks beyond, to
-remind me of the fleshers at the carcasses up the cavern.
-
-I turned, and they were all coming towards us in open order waving
-their axes. They were short, thick, little beggars, with long arms,
-strikingly different from the ones we had seen before. If they had not
-heard of us before, they must have realised the situation with
-incredible swiftness. I stared at them for a moment, spear in hand.
-“Guard that grating, Cavor,” I cried, howled to intimidate them, and
-rushed to meet them. Two of them missed with their hatchets, and the
-rest fled incontinently. Then the two also were sprinting away up the
-cavern, with hands clenched and heads down. I never saw men run like
-them!
-
-I knew the spear I had was no good for me. It was thin and flimsy, only
-effectual for a thrust, and too long for a quick recover. So I only
-chased the Selenites as far as the first carcass, and stopped there and
-picked up one of the crowbars that were lying about. It felt
-comfortingly heavy, and equal to smashing any number of Selenites. I
-threw away my spear, and picked up a second crowbar for the other hand.
-I felt five times better than I had with the spear. I shook the two
-threateningly at the Selenites, who had come to a halt in a little
-crowd far away up the cavern, and then turned about to look at Cavor.
-
-He was leaping from side to side of the grating, making threatening
-jabs with his broken spear. That was all right. It would keep the
-Selenites down—for a time at any rate. I looked up the cavern again.
-What on earth were we going to do now?
-
-We were cornered in a sort of way already. But these butchers up the
-cavern had been surprised, they were probably scared, and they had no
-special weapons, only those little hatchets of theirs. And that way lay
-escape. Their sturdy little forms—ever so much shorter and thicker than
-the mooncalf herds—were scattered up the slope in a way that was
-eloquent of indecision. I had the moral advantage of a mad bull in a
-street. But for all that, there seemed a tremendous crowd of them. Very
-probably there was. Those Selenites down the cleft had certainly some
-infernally long spears. It might be they had other surprises for us....
-But, confound it! if we charged up the cave we should let them up
-behind us, and if we didn’t those little brutes up the cave would
-probably get reinforced. Heaven alone knew what tremendous engines of
-warfare—guns, bombs, terrestrial torpedoes—this unknown world below our
-feet, this vaster world of which we had only pricked the outer cuticle,
-might not presently send up to our destruction. It became clear the
-only thing to do was to charge! It became clearer as the legs of a
-number of fresh Selenites appeared running down the cavern towards us.
-
-“Bedford!” cried Cavor, and behold! he was halfway between me and the
-grating.
-
-“Go back!” I cried. “What are you doing—”
-
-“They’ve got—it’s like a gun!”
-
-And struggling in the grating between those defensive spears appeared
-the head and shoulders of a singularly lean and angular Selenite,
-bearing some complicated apparatus.
-
-I realised Cavor’s utter incapacity for the fight we had in hand. For a
-moment I hesitated. Then I rushed past him whirling my crowbars, and
-shouting to confound the aim of the Selenite. He was aiming in the
-queerest way with the thing against his stomach. “_Chuzz!_” The thing
-wasn’t a gun; it went off like a cross-bow more, and dropped me in the
-middle of a leap.
-
-I didn’t fall down, I simply came down a little shorter than I should
-have done if I hadn’t been hit, and from the feel of my shoulder the
-thing might have tapped me and glanced off. Then my left hand hit
-against the shaft, and I perceived there was a sort of spear sticking
-half through my shoulder. The moment after I got home with the crowbar
-in my right hand, and hit the Selenite fair and square. He collapsed—he
-crushed and crumpled—his head smashed like an egg.
-
-I dropped a crowbar, pulled the spear out of my shoulder, and began to
-jab it down the grating into the darkness. At each jab came a shriek
-and twitter. Finally I hurled the spear down upon them with all my
-strength, leapt up, picked up the crowbar again, and started for the
-multitude up the cavern.
-
-“Bedford!” cried Cavor. “Bedford!” as I flew past him.
-
-I seem to remember his footsteps coming on behind me.
-
-Step, leap ... whack, step, leap.... Each leap seemed to last ages.
-With each, the cave opened out and the number of Selenites visible
-increased. At first they seemed all running about like ants in a
-disturbed ant-hill, one or two waving hatchets and coming to meet me,
-more running away, some bolting sideways into the avenue of carcasses,
-then presently others came in sight carrying spears, and then others. I
-saw a most extraordinary thing, all hands and feet, bolting for cover.
-The cavern grew darker farther up.
-
-Flick! something flew over my head. Flick! As I soared in mid-stride I
-saw a spear hit and quiver in one of the carcasses to my left. Then, as
-I came down, one hit the ground before me, and I heard the remote
-chuzz! with which their things were fired. Flick, flick! for a moment
-it was a shower. They were volleying!
-
-I stopped dead.
-
-I don’t think I thought clearly then. I seem to remember a kind of
-stereotyped phrase running through my mind: “Zone of fire, seek cover!”
-I know I made a dash for the space between two of the carcasses, and
-stood there panting and feeling very wicked.
-
-I looked round for Cavor, and for a moment it seemed as if he had
-vanished from the world. Then he came out of the darkness between the
-row of the carcasses and the rocky wall of the cavern. I saw his little
-face, dark and blue, and shining with perspiration and emotion.
-
-He was saying something, but what it was I did not heed. I had realised
-that we might work from mooncalf to mooncalf up the cave until we were
-near enough to charge home. It was charge or nothing. “Come on!” I
-said, and led the way.
-
-“Bedford!” he cried unavailingly.
-
-My mind was busy as we went up that narrow alley between the dead
-bodies and the wall of the cavern. The rocks curved about—they could
-not enfilade us. Though in that narrow space we could not leap, yet
-with our earth-born strength we were still able to go very much faster
-than the Selenites. I reckoned we should presently come right among
-them. Once we were on them, they would be nearly as formidable as black
-beetles. Only there would first of all be a volley. I thought of a
-stratagem. I whipped off my flannel jacket as I ran.
-
-“Bedford!” panted Cavor behind me.
-
-I glanced back. “What?” said I.
-
-He was pointing upward over the carcasses. “White light!” he said.
-“White light again!”
-
-I looked, and it was even so; a faint white ghost of light in the
-remoter cavern roof. That seemed to give me double strength.
-
-“Keep close,” I said. A flat, long Selenite dashed out of the darkness,
-and squealed and fled. I halted, and stopped Cavor with my hand. I hung
-my jacket over my crowbar, ducked round the next carcass, dropped
-jacket and crowbar, showed myself, and darted back.
-
-“Chuzz-flick,” just one arrow came. We were close on the Selenites, and
-they were standing in a crowd, broad, short, and tall together, with a
-little battery of their shooting implements pointing down the cave.
-Three or four other arrows followed the first, then their fire ceased.
-
-I stuck out my head, and escaped by a hair’s-breadth. This time I drew
-a dozen shots or more, and heard the Selenites shouting and twittering
-as if with excitement as they shot. I picked up jacket and crowbar
-again.
-
-“_Now!_” said I, and thrust out the jacket.
-
-“Chuzz-zz-zz-zz! Chuzz!” In an instant my jacket had grown a thick
-beard of arrows, and they were quivering all over the carcass behind
-us. Instantly I slipped the crowbar out of the jacket, dropped the
-jacket—for all I know to the contrary it is lying up there in the moon
-now—and rushed out upon them.
-
-For a minute perhaps it was massacre. I was too fierce to discriminate,
-and the Selenites were probably too scared to fight. At any rate they
-made no sort of fight against me. I saw scarlet, as the saying is. I
-remember I seemed to be wading among those leathery, thin things as a
-man wades through tall grass, mowing and hitting, first right, then
-left; smash. Little drops of moisture flew about. I trod on things that
-crushed and piped and went slippery. The crowd seemed to open and close
-and flow like water. They seemed to have no combined plan whatever.
-There were spears flew about me, I was grazed over the ear by one. I
-was stabbed once in the arm and once in the cheek, but I only found
-that out afterwards, when the blood had had time to run and cool and
-feel wet.
-
-What Cavor did I do not know. For a space it seemed that this fighting
-had lasted for an age, and must needs go on for ever. Then suddenly it
-was all over, and there was nothing to be seen but the backs of heads
-bobbing up and down as their owners ran in all directions.... I seemed
-altogether unhurt. I ran forward some paces, shouting, then turned
-about. I was amazed.
-
-I had come right through them in vast flying strides, they were all
-behind me, and running hither and thither to hide.
-
-I felt an enormous astonishment at the evaporation of the great fight
-into which I had hurled myself, and not a little exultation. It did not
-seem to me that I had discovered the Selenites were unexpectedly
-flimsy, but that I was unexpectedly strong. I laughed stupidly. This
-fantastic moon!
-
-I glanced for a moment at the smashed and writhing bodies that were
-scattered over the cavern floor, with a vague idea of further violence,
-then hurried on after Cavor.
-
-
-
-
-XVIII.
-In the Sunlight
-
-
-Presently we saw that the cavern before us opened upon a hazy void. In
-another moment we had emerged upon a sort of slanting gallery, that
-projected into a vast circular space, a huge cylindrical pit running
-vertically up and down. Round this pit the slanting gallery ran without
-any parapet or protection for a turn and a half, and then plunged high
-above into the rock again. Somehow it reminded me then of one of those
-spiral turns of the railway through the Saint Gothard. It was all
-tremendously huge. I can scarcely hope to convey to you the Titanic
-proportion of all that place, the Titanic effect of it. Our eyes
-followed up the vast declivity of the pit wall, and overhead and far
-above we beheld a round opening set with faint stars, and half of the
-lip about it well nigh blinding with the white light of the sun. At
-that we cried aloud simultaneously.
-
-“Come on!” I said, leading the way.
-
-“But there?” said Cavor, and very carefully stepped nearer the edge of
-the gallery. I followed his example, and craned forward and looked
-down, but I was dazzled by that gleam of light above, and I could see
-only a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purple
-floating therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of this
-darkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one
-puts one’s ear outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormous
-hollow, it may be, four miles beneath our feet...
-
-For a moment I listened, then tightened my grip on my crowbar, and led
-the way up the gallery.
-
-“This must be the shaft we looked down upon,” said Cavor. “Under that
-lid.”
-
-“And below there, is where we saw the lights.”
-
-“The lights!” said he. “Yes—the lights of the world that now we shall
-never see.”
-
-“We’ll come back,” I said, for now we had escaped so much I was rashly
-sanguine that we should recover the sphere.
-
-His answer I did not catch.
-
-“Eh?” I asked.
-
-“It doesn’t matter,” he answered, and we hurried on in silence.
-
-I suppose that slanting lateral way was four or five miles long,
-allowing for its curvature, and it ascended at a slope that would have
-made it almost impossibly steep on earth, but which one strode up
-easily under lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites during all
-that portion of our flight, and directly they became aware of us they
-ran headlong. It was clear that the knowledge of our strength and
-violence had reached them. Our way to the exterior was unexpectedly
-plain. The spiral gallery straightened into a steeply ascendent tunnel,
-its floor bearing abundant traces of the mooncalves, and so straight
-and short in proportion to its vast arch, that no part of it was
-absolutely dark. Almost immediately it began to lighten, and then far
-off and high up, and quite blindingly brilliant, appeared its opening
-on the exterior, a slope of Alpine steepness surmounted by a crest of
-bayonet shrub, tall and broken down now, and dry and dead, in spiky
-silhouette against the sun.
-
-And it is strange that we men, to whom this very vegetation had seemed
-so weird and horrible a little time ago, should now behold it with the
-emotion a home-coming exile might feel at sight of his native land. We
-welcomed even the rareness of the air that made us pant as we ran, and
-which rendered speaking no longer the easy thing that it had been, but
-an effort to make oneself heard. Larger grew the sunlit circle above
-us, and larger, and all the nearer tunnel sank into a rim of
-indistinguishable black. We saw the dead bayonet shrub no longer with
-any touch of green in it, but brown and dry and thick, and the shadow
-of its upper branches high out of sight made a densely interlaced
-pattern upon the tumbled rocks. And at the immediate mouth of the
-tunnel was a wide trampled space where the mooncalves had come and
-gone.
-
-We came out upon this space at last into a light and heat that hit and
-pressed upon us. We traversed the exposed area painfully, and clambered
-up a slope among the scrub stems, and sat down at last panting in a
-high place beneath the shadow of a mass of twisted lava. Even in the
-shade the rock felt hot.
-
-The air was intensely hot, and we were in great physical discomfort,
-but for all that we were no longer in a nightmare. We seemed to have
-come to our own province again, beneath the stars. All the fear and
-stress of our flight through the dim passages and fissures below had
-fallen from us. That last fight had filled us with an enormous
-confidence in ourselves so far as the Selenites were concerned. We
-looked back almost incredulously at the black opening from which we had
-just emerged. Down there it was, in a blue glow that now in our
-memories seemed the next thing to absolute darkness, we had met with
-things like mad mockeries of men, helmet-headed creatures, and had
-walked in fear before them, and had submitted to them until we could
-submit no longer. And behold, they had smashed like wax and scattered
-like chaff, and fled and vanished like the creatures of a dream!
-
-I rubbed my eyes, doubting whether we had not slept and dreamt these
-things by reason of the fungus we had eaten, and suddenly discovered
-the blood upon my face, and then that my shirt was sticking painfully
-to my shoulder and arm.
-
-“Confound it!” I said, gauging my injuries with an investigatory hand,
-and suddenly that distant tunnel mouth became, as it were, a watching
-eye.
-
-“Cavor!” I said; “what are they going to do now? And what are we going
-to do?”
-
-He shook his head, with his eyes fixed upon the tunnel. “How can one
-tell what they will do?”
-
-“It depends on what they think of us, and I don’t see how we can begin
-to guess that. And it depends upon what they have in reserve. It’s as
-you say, Cavor, we have touched the merest outside of this world. They
-may have all sorts of things inside here. Even with those shooting
-things they might make it bad for us....
-
-“Yet after all,” I said, “even if we _don’t_ find the sphere at once,
-there is a chance for us. We might hold out. Even through the night. We
-might go down there again and make a fight for it.”
-
-I stared about me with speculative eyes. The character of the scenery
-had altered altogether by reason of the enormous growth and subsequent
-drying of the scrub. The crest on which we sat was high, and commanded
-a wide prospect of the crater landscape, and we saw it now all sere and
-dry in the late autumn of the lunar afternoon. Rising one behind the
-other were long slopes and fields of trampled brown where the
-mooncalves had pastured, and far away in the full blaze of the sun a
-drove of them basked slumberously, scattered shapes, each with a blot
-of shadow against it like sheep on the side of a down. But never a sign
-of a Selenite was to be seen. Whether they had fled on our emergence
-from the interior passages, or whether they were accustomed to retire
-after driving out the mooncalves, I cannot guess. At the time I
-believed the former was the case.
-
-“If we were to set fire to all this stuff,” I said, “we might find the
-sphere among the ashes.”
-
-Cavor did not seem to hear me. He was peering under his hand at the
-stars, that still, in spite of the intense sunlight, were abundantly
-visible in the sky. “How long do you think we’ve have been here?” he
-asked at last.
-
-“Been where?”
-
-“On the moon.”
-
-“Two earthly days, perhaps.”
-
-“More nearly ten. Do you know, the sun is past its zenith, and sinking
-in the west. In four days’ time or less it will be night.”
-
-“But—we’ve only eaten once!”
-
-“I know that. And— But there are the stars!”
-
-“But why should time seem different because we are on a smaller
-planet?”
-
-“I don’t know. There it is!”
-
-“How does one tell time?”
-
-“Hunger—fatigue—all those things are different. Everything is
-different—everything. To me it seems that since first we came out of
-the sphere has been only a question of hours—long hours—at most.”
-
-“Ten days,” I said; “that leaves—” I looked up at the sun for a moment,
-and then saw that it was halfway from the zenith to the western edge of
-things. “Four days! ... Cavor, we mustn’t sit here and dream. How do
-you think we may begin?”
-
-I stood up. “We must get a fixed point we can recognise—we might hoist
-a flag, or a handkerchief, or something—and quarter the ground, and
-work round that.”
-
-He stood up beside me.
-
-“Yes,” he said, “there is nothing for it but to hunt the sphere.
-Nothing. We may find it—certainly we may find it. And if not—”
-
-“We must keep on looking.”
-
-He looked this way and that, glanced up at the sky and down at the
-tunnel, and astonished me by a sudden gesture of impatience. “Oh! but
-we have done foolishly! To have come to this pass! Think how it might
-have been, and the things we might have done!”
-
-“We might do something yet.”
-
-“Never the thing we might have done. Here below our feet is a world.
-Think of what that world must be! Think of that machine we saw, and the
-lid and the shaft! They were just remote outlying things, and those
-creatures we have seen and fought with no more than ignorant peasants,
-dwellers in the outskirts, yokels and labourers half akin to brutes.
-Down below! Caverns beneath caverns, tunnels, structures, ways... It
-must open out, and be greater and wider and more populous as one
-descends. Assuredly. Right down at the last the central sea that washes
-round the core of the moon. Think of its inky waters under the spare
-lights—if, indeed, their eyes _need_ lights! Think of the cascading
-tributaries pouring down their channels to feed it! Think of the tides
-upon its surface, and the rush and swirl of its ebb and flow! Perhaps
-they have ships that go upon it, perhaps down there are mighty cities
-and swarming ways, and wisdom and order passing the wit of man. And we
-may die here upon it, and never see the masters who _must_ be—ruling
-over these things! We may freeze and die here, and the air will freeze
-and thaw upon us, and then—! Then they will come upon us, come on our
-stiff and silent bodies, and find the sphere we cannot find, and they
-will understand at last too late all the thought and effort that ended
-here in vain!”
-
-His voice for all that speech sounded like the voice of someone heard
-in a telephone, weak and far away.
-
-“But the darkness,” I said.
-
-“One might get over that.”
-
-“How?”
-
-“I don’t know. How am I to know? One might carry a torch, one might
-have a lamp— The others—might understand.”
-
-He stood for a moment with his hands held down and a rueful face,
-staring out over the waste that defied him. Then with a gesture of
-renunciation he turned towards me with proposals for the systematic
-hunting of the sphere.
-
-“We can return,” I said.
-
-He looked about him. “First of all we shall have to get to earth.”
-
-“We could bring back lamps to carry and climbing irons, and a hundred
-necessary things.”
-
-“Yes,” he said.
-
-“We can take back an earnest of success in this gold.”
-
-He looked at my golden crowbars, and said nothing for a space. He stood
-with his hands clasped behind his back, staring across the crater. At
-last he signed and spoke. “It was _I_ found the way here, but to find a
-way isn’t always to be master of a way. If I take my secret back to
-earth, what will happen? I do not see how I can keep my secret for a
-year, for even a part of a year. Sooner or later it must come out, even
-if other men rediscover it. And then ... Governments and powers will
-struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, and
-against these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiply the
-occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while, if I tell
-my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn with
-human dead. Other things are doubtful, but that is certain. It is not
-as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to
-men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battle-ground
-and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his
-time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can
-do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use.
-It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again—in
-a thousand years’ time.”
-
-“There are methods of secrecy,” I said.
-
-He looked up at me and smiled. “After all,” he said, “why should one
-worry? There is little chance of our finding the sphere, and down below
-things are brewing. It’s simply the human habit of hoping till we die
-that makes us think of return. Our troubles are only beginning. We have
-shown these moon folk violence, we have given them a taste of our
-quality, and our chances are about as good as a tiger’s that has got
-loose and killed a man in Hyde Park. The news of us must be running
-down from gallery to gallery, down towards the central parts.... No
-sane beings will ever let us take that sphere back to earth after so
-much as they have seen of us.”
-
-“We aren’t improving our chances,” said I, “by sitting here.”
-
-We stood up side by side.
-
-“After all,” he said, “we must separate. We must stick up a
-handkerchief on these tall spikes here and fasten it firmly, and from
-this as a centre we must work over the crater. You must go westward,
-moving out in semicircles to and fro towards the setting sun. You must
-move first with your shadow on your right until it is at right angles
-with the direction of your handkerchief, and then with your shadow on
-your left. And I will do the same to the east. We will look into every
-gully, examine every skerry of rocks; we will do all we can to find my
-sphere. If we see the Selenites we will hide from them as well as we
-can. For drink we must take snow, and if we feel the need of food, we
-must kill a mooncalf if we can, and eat such flesh as it has—raw—and so
-each will go his own way.”
-
-“And if one of us comes upon the sphere?”
-
-“He must come back to the white handkerchief, and stand by it and
-signal to the other.”
-
-“And if neither?”
-
-Cavor glanced up at the sun. “We go on seeking until the night and cold
-overtake us.”
-
-“Suppose the Selenites have found the sphere and hidden it?”
-
-He shrugged his shoulders.
-
-“Or if presently they come hunting us?”
-
-He made no answer.
-
-“You had better take a club,” I said.
-
-He shook his head, and stared away from me across the waste.
-
-But for a moment he did not start. He looked round at me shyly,
-hesitated. “_Au revoir_,” he said.
-
-I felt an odd stab of emotion. A sense of how we had galled each other,
-and particularly how I must have galled him, came to me. “Confound it,”
-thought I, “we might have done better!” I was on the point of asking
-him to shake hands—for that, somehow, was how I felt just then—when he
-put his feet together and leapt away from me towards the north. He
-seemed to drift through the air as a dead leaf would do, fell lightly,
-and leapt again. I stood for a moment watching him, then faced westward
-reluctantly, pulled myself together, and with something of the feeling
-of a man who leaps into icy water, selected a leaping point, and
-plunged forward to explore my solitary half of the moon world. I
-dropped rather clumsily among rocks, stood up and looked about me,
-clambered on to a rocky slab, and leapt again....
-
-When presently I looked for Cavor he was hidden from my eyes, but the
-handkerchief showed out bravely on its headland, white in the blaze of
-the sun.
-
-I determined not to lose sight of that handkerchief whatever might
-betide.
-
-
-
-
-XIX.
-Mr. Bedford Alone
-
-
-In a little while it seemed to me as though I had always been alone on
-the moon. I hunted for a time with a certain intentness, but the heat
-was still very great, and the thinness of the air felt like a hoop
-about one’s chest. I came presently into a hollow basin bristling with
-tall, brown, dry fronds about its edge, and I sat down under these to
-rest and cool. I intended to rest for only a little while. I put down
-my clubs beside me, and sat resting my chin on my hands. I saw with a
-sort of colourless interest that the rocks of the basin, where here and
-there the crackling dry lichens had shrunk away to show them, were all
-veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded
-and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter. What did that matter
-now? A sort of languor had possession of my limbs and mind, I did not
-believe for a moment that we should ever find the sphere in that vast
-desiccated wilderness. I seemed to lack a motive for effort until the
-Selenites should come. Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying
-that unreasonable imperative that urges a man before all things to
-preserve and defend his life, albeit he may preserve it only to die
-more painfully in a little while.
-
-Why had we come to the moon?
-
-The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem. What is this
-spirit in man that urges him for ever to depart from happiness and
-security, to toil, to place himself in danger, to risk even a
-reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon
-as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to
-go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Almost any
-man, if you put the thing to him, not in words, but in the shape of
-opportunities, will show that he knows as much. Against his interest,
-against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable
-things. Some force not himself impels him, and go he must. But why?
-Why? Sitting there in the midst of that useless moon gold, amidst the
-things of another world, I took count of all my life. Assuming I was to
-die a castaway upon the moon, I failed altogether to see what purpose I
-had served. I got no light on that point, but at any rate it was
-clearer to me than it had ever been in my life before that I was not
-serving my own purpose, that all my life I had in truth never served
-the purposes of my private life. Whose purposes, what purposes, was I
-serving? ... I ceased to speculate on why we had come to the moon, and
-took a wider sweep. Why had I come to the earth? Why had I a private
-life at all? ... I lost myself at last in bottomless speculations....
-
-My thoughts became vague and cloudy, no longer leading in definite
-directions. I had not felt heavy or weary—I cannot imagine one doing so
-upon the moon—but I suppose I was greatly fatigued. At any rate I
-slept.
-
-Slumbering there rested me greatly, I think, and the sun was setting
-and the violence of the heat abating, through all the time I slumbered.
-When at last I was roused from my slumbers by a remote clamour, I felt
-active and capable again. I rubbed my eyes and stretched my arms. I
-rose to my feet—I was a little stiff—and at once prepared to resume my
-search. I shouldered my golden clubs, one on each shoulder, and went on
-out of the ravine of the gold-veined rocks.
-
-The sun was certainly lower, much lower than it had been; the air was
-very much cooler. I perceived I must have slept some time. It seemed to
-me that a faint touch of misty blueness hung about the western cliff. I
-leapt to a little boss of rock and surveyed the crater. I could see no
-signs of mooncalves or Selenites, nor could I see Cavor, but I could
-see my handkerchief far off, spread out on its thicket of thorns. I
-looked about me, and then leapt forward to the next convenient
-view-point.
-
-I beat my way round in a semicircle, and back again in a still remoter
-crescent. It was very fatiguing and hopeless. The air was really very
-much cooler, and it seemed to me that the shadow under the westward
-cliff was growing broad. Ever and again I stopped and reconnoitred, but
-there was no sign of Cavor, no sign of Selenites; and it seemed to me
-the mooncalves must have been driven into the interior again—I could
-see none of them. I became more and more desirous of seeing Cavor. The
-winged outline of the sun had sunk now, until it was scarcely the
-distance of its diameter from the rim of the sky. I was oppressed by
-the idea that the Selenites would presently close their lids and
-valves, and shut us out under the inexorable onrush of the lunar night.
-It seemed to me high time that he abandoned his search, and that we
-took counsel together. I felt how urgent it was that we should decide
-soon upon our course. We had failed to find the sphere, we no longer
-had time to seek it, and once these valves were closed with us outside,
-we were lost men. The great night of space would descend upon us—that
-blackness of the void which is the only absolute death. All my being
-shrank from that approach. We must get into the moon again, though we
-were slain in doing it. I was haunted by a vision of our freezing to
-death, of our hammering with our last strength on the valve of the
-great pit.
-
-I took no thought any more of the sphere. I thought only of finding
-Cavor again. I was half inclined to go back into the moon without him,
-rather than seek him until it was too late. I was already half-way back
-towards our handkerchief, when suddenly—
-
-I saw the sphere!
-
-I did not find it so much as it found me. It was lying much farther to
-the westward than I had gone, and the sloping rays of the sinking sun
-reflected from its glass had suddenly proclaimed its presence in a
-dazzling beam. For an instant I thought this was some new device of the
-Selenites against us, and then I understood.
-
-I threw up my arms, shouted a ghostly shout, and set off in vast leaps
-towards it. I missed one of my leaps and dropped into a deep ravine and
-twisted my ankle, and after that I stumbled at almost every leap. I was
-in a state of hysterical agitation, trembling violently, and quite
-breathless long before I got to it. Three times at least I had to stop
-with my hands resting on my side and in spite of the thin dryness of
-the air, the perspiration was wet upon my face.
-
-I thought of nothing but the sphere until I reached it, I forgot even
-my trouble of Cavor’s whereabouts. My last leap flung me with my hands
-hard against its glass; then I lay against it panting, and trying
-vainly to shout, “Cavor! here is the sphere!” When I had recovered a
-little I peered through the thick glass, and the things inside seemed
-tumbled. I stooped to peer closer. Then I attempted to get in. I had to
-hoist it over a little to get my head through the manhole. The screw
-stopper was inside, and I could see now that nothing had been touched,
-nothing had suffered. It lay there as we had left it when we had
-dropped out amidst the snow. For a time I was wholly occupied in making
-and remaking this inventory. I found I was trembling violently. It was
-good to see that familiar dark interior again! I cannot tell you how
-good. Presently I crept inside and sat down among the things. I looked
-through the glass at the moon world and shivered. I placed my gold
-clubs upon the table, and sought out and took a little food; not so
-much because I wanted it, but because it was there. Then it occurred to
-me that it was time to go out and signal for Cavor. But I did not go
-out and signal for Cavor forthwith. Something held me to the sphere.
-
-After all, everything was coming right. There would be still time for
-us to get more of the magic stone that gives one mastery over men. Away
-there, close handy, was gold for the picking up; and the sphere would
-travel as well half full of gold as though it were empty. We could go
-back now, masters of ourselves and our world, and then—
-
-I roused myself at last, and with an effort got myself out of the
-sphere. I shivered as I emerged, for the evening air was growing very
-cold. I stood in the hollow staring about me. I scrutinised the bushes
-round me very carefully before I leapt to the rocky shelf hard by, and
-took once more what had been my first leap in the moon. But now I made
-it with no effort whatever.
-
-The growth and decay of the vegetation had gone on apace, and the whole
-aspect of the rocks had changed, but still it was possible to make out
-the slope on which the seeds had germinated, and the rocky mass from
-which we had taken our first view of the crater. But the spiky shrub on
-the slope stood brown and sere now, and thirty feet high, and cast long
-shadows that stretched out of sight, and the little seeds that
-clustered in its upper branches were brown and ripe. Its work was done,
-and it was brittle and ready to fall and crumple under the freezing
-air, so soon as the nightfall came. And the huge cacti, that had
-swollen as we watched them, had long since burst and scattered their
-spores to the four quarters of the moon. Amazing little corner in the
-universe—the landing place of men!
-
-Some day, thought I, I will have an inscription standing there right in
-the midst of the hollow. It came to me, if only this teeming world
-within knew of the full import of the moment, how furious its tumult
-would become!
-
-But as yet it could scarcely be dreaming of the significance of our
-coming. For if it did, the crater would surely be an uproar of pursuit,
-instead of as still as death! I looked about for some place from which
-I might signal Cavor, and saw that same patch of rock to which he had
-leapt from my present standpoint, still bare and barren in the sun. For
-a moment I hesitated at going so far from the sphere. Then with a pang
-of shame at that hesitation, I leapt....
-
-From this vantage point I surveyed the crater again. Far away at the
-top of the enormous shadow I cast was the little white handkerchief
-fluttering on the bushes. It was very little and very far, and Cavor
-was not in sight. It seemed to me that by this time he ought to be
-looking for me. That was the agreement. But he was nowhere to be seen.
-
-I stood waiting and watching, hands shading my eyes, expecting every
-moment to distinguish him. Very probably I stood there for quite a long
-time. I tried to shout, and was reminded of the thinness of the air. I
-made an undecided step back towards the sphere. But a lurking dread of
-the Selenites made me hesitate to signal my whereabouts by hoisting one
-of our sleeping-blankets on to the adjacent scrub. I searched the
-crater again.
-
-It had an effect of emptiness that chilled me. And it was still. Any
-sound from the Selenites in the world beneath had died away. It was as
-still as death. Save for the faint stir of the shrub about me in the
-little breeze that was rising, there was no sound nor shadow of a
-sound. And the breeze blew chill.
-
-Confound Cavor!
-
-I took a deep breath. I put my hands to the sides of my mouth. “Cavor!”
-I bawled, and the sound was like some manikin shouting far away.
-
-I looked at the handkerchief, I looked behind me at the broadening
-shadow of the westward cliff, I looked under my hand at the sun. It
-seemed to me that almost visibly it was creeping down the sky.
-
-I felt I must act instantly if I was to save Cavor. I whipped off my
-vest and flung it as a mark on the sere bayonets of the shrubs behind
-me, and then set off in a straight line towards the handkerchief.
-Perhaps it was a couple of miles away—a matter of a few hundred leaps
-and strides. I have already told how one seemed to hang through those
-lunar leaps. In each suspense I sought Cavor, and marvelled why he
-should be hidden. In each leap I could feel the sun setting behind me.
-Each time I touched the ground I was tempted to go back.
-
-A last leap and I was in the depression below our handkerchief, a
-stride, and I stood on our former vantage point within arms’ reach of
-it. I stood up straight and scanned the world about me, between its
-lengthening bars of shadow. Far away, down a long declivity, was the
-opening of the tunnel up which we had fled, and my shadow reached
-towards it, stretched towards it, and touched it, like a finger of the
-night.
-
-Not a sign of Cavor, not a sound in all the stillness, only the stir
-and waving of the scrub and of the shadows increased. And suddenly and
-violently I shivered. “Cav—” I began, and realised once more the
-uselessness of the human voice in that thin air. Silence. The silence
-of death.
-
-Then it was my eye caught something—a little thing lying, perhaps fifty
-yards away down the slope, amidst a litter of bent and broken branches.
-What was it? I knew, and yet for some reason I would not know. I went
-nearer to it. It was the little cricket-cap Cavor had worn. I did not
-touch it, I stood looking at it.
-
-I saw then that the scattered branches about it had been forcibly
-smashed and trampled. I hesitated, stepped forward, and picked it up.
-
-I stood with Cavor’s cap in my hand, staring at the trampled reeds and
-thorns about me. On some of them were little smears of something dark,
-something that I dared not touch. A dozen yards away, perhaps, the
-rising breeze dragged something into view, something small and vividly
-white.
-
-It was a little piece of paper crumpled tightly, as though it had been
-clutched tightly. I picked it up, and on it were smears of red. My eye
-caught faint pencil marks. I smoothed it out, and saw uneven and broken
-writing ending at last in a crooked streak upon the paper.
-
-I set myself to decipher this.
-
-“I have been injured about the knee, I think my kneecap is hurt, and I
-cannot run or crawl,” it began—pretty distinctly written.
-
-Then less legibly: “They have been chasing me for some time, and it is
-only a question of”—the word “time” seemed to have been written here
-and erased in favour of something illegible—“before they get me. They
-are beating all about me.”
-
-Then the writing became convulsive. “I can hear them,” I guessed the
-tracing meant, and then it was quite unreadable for a space. Then came
-a little string of words that were quite distinct: “a different sort of
-Selenite altogether, who appears to be directing the—” The writing
-became a mere hasty confusion again.
-
-“They have larger brain cases—much larger, and slenderer bodies, and
-very short legs. They make gentle noises, and move with organized
-deliberation...
-
-“And though I am wounded and helpless here, their appearance still
-gives me hope.” That was like Cavor. “They have not shot at me or
-attempted... injury. I intend—”
-
-Then came the sudden streak of the pencil across the paper, and on the
-back and edges—blood!
-
-And as I stood there stupid, and perplexed, with this dumbfounding
-relic in my hand, something very soft and light and chill touched my
-hand for a moment and ceased to be, and then a thing, a little white
-speck, drifted athwart a shadow. It was a tiny snowflake, the first
-snowflake, the herald of the night.
-
-I looked up with a start, and the sky had darkened almost to blackness,
-and was thick with a gathering multitude of coldly watchful stars. I
-looked eastward, and the light of that shrivelled world was touched
-with sombre bronze; westward, and the sun robbed now by a thickening
-white mist of half its heat and splendour, was touching the crater rim,
-was sinking out of sight, and all the shrubs and jagged and tumbled
-rocks stood out against it in a bristling disorder of black shapes.
-Into the great lake of darkness westward, a vast wreath of mist was
-sinking. A cold wind set all the crater shivering. Suddenly, for a
-moment, I was in a puff of falling snow, and all the world about me
-grey and dim.
-
-And then it was I heard, not loud and penetrating as at first, but
-faint and dim like a dying voice, that tolling, that same tolling that
-had welcomed the coming of the day: Boom!... Boom!... Boom!...
-
-It echoed about the crater, it seemed to throb with the throbbing of
-the greater stars, the blood-red crescent of the sun’s disc sank as it
-tolled out: Boom!... Boom!... Boom!...
-
-What had happened to Cavor? All through that tolling I stood there
-stupidly, and at last the tolling ceased.
-
-And suddenly the open mouth of the tunnel down below there, shut like
-an eye and vanished out of sight.
-
-Then indeed was I alone.
-
-Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the
-Eternal; that which was before the beginning, and that which triumphs
-over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being
-is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold,
-the stillness, the silence—the infinite and final Night of space.
-
-The sense of solitude and desolation became the sense of an
-overwhelming presence that stooped towards me, that almost touched me.
-
-“No,” I cried. “_No!_ Not yet! not yet! Wait! Wait! Oh, wait!” My voice
-went up to a shriek. I flung the crumpled paper from me, scrambled back
-to the crest to take my bearings, and then, with all the will that was
-in me, leapt out towards the mark I had left, dim and distant now in
-the very margin of the shadow.
-
-Leap, leap, leap, and each leap was seven ages.
-
-Before me the pale serpent-girdled section of the sun sank and sank,
-and the advancing shadow swept to seize the sphere before I could reach
-it. I was two miles away, a hundred leaps or more, and the air about me
-was thinning out as it thins under an air-pump, and the cold was
-gripping at my joints. But had I died, I should have died leaping.
-Once, and then again my foot slipped on the gathering snow as I leapt
-and shortened my leap; once I fell short into bushes that crashed and
-smashed into dusty chips and nothingness, and once I stumbled as I
-dropped and rolled head over heels into a gully, and rose bruised and
-bleeding and confused as to my direction.
-
-But such incidents were as nothing to the intervals, those awful pauses
-when one drifted through the air towards that pouring tide of night. My
-breathing made a piping noise, and it was as though knives were
-whirling in my lungs. My heart seemed to beat against the top of my
-brain. “Shall I reach it? O Heaven! Shall I reach it?”
-
-My whole being became anguish.
-
-“Lie down!” screamed my pain and despair; “lie down!”
-
-The nearer I struggled, the more awfully remote it seemed. I was numb,
-I stumbled, I bruised and cut myself and did not bleed.
-
-It was in sight.
-
-I fell on all fours, and my lungs whooped.
-
-I crawled. The frost gathered on my lips, icicles hung from my
-moustache, I was white with the freezing atmosphere.
-
-I was a dozen yards from it. My eyes had become dim. “Lie down!”
-screamed despair; “lie down!”
-
-I touched it, and halted. “Too late!” screamed despair; “lie down!”
-
-I fought stiffly with it. I was on the manhole lip, a stupefied,
-half-dead being. The snow was all about me. I pulled myself in. There
-lurked within a little warmer air.
-
-The snowflakes—the airflakes—danced in about me, as I tried with
-chilling hands to thrust the valve in and spun it tight and hard. I
-sobbed. “I will,” I chattered in my teeth. And then, with fingers that
-quivered and felt brittle, I turned to the shutter studs.
-
-As I fumbled with the switches—for I had never controlled them before—I
-could see dimly through the steaming glass the blazing red streamers of
-the sinking sun, dancing and flickering through the snowstorm, and the
-black forms of the scrub thickening and bending and breaking beneath
-the accumulating snow. Thicker whirled the snow and thicker, black
-against the light. What if even now the switches overcame me? Then
-something clicked under my hands, and in an instant that last vision of
-the moon world was hidden from my eyes. I was in the silence and
-darkness of the inter-planetary sphere.
-
-
-
-
-XX.
-Mr. Bedford in Infinite Space
-
-
-It was almost as though I had been killed. Indeed, I could imagine a
-man suddenly and violently killed would feel very much as I did. One
-moment, a passion of agonising existence and fear; the next, darkness
-and stillness, neither light nor life nor sun, moon nor stars, the
-blank infinite. Although the thing was done by my own act, although I
-had already tasted this very of effect in Cavor’s company, I felt
-astonished, dumbfounded, and overwhelmed. I seemed to be borne upward
-into an enormous darkness. My fingers floated off the studs, I hung as
-if I were annihilated, and at last very softly and gently I came
-against the bale and the golden chain, and the crowbars that had
-drifted to the middle of the sphere.
-
-I do not know how long that drifting took. In the sphere of course,
-even more than on the moon, one’s earthly time sense was ineffectual.
-At the touch of the bale it was as if I had awakened from a dreamless
-sleep. I immediately perceived that if I wanted to keep awake and alive
-I must get a light or open a window, so as to get a grip of something
-with my eyes. And besides, I was cold. I kicked off from the bale,
-therefore, clawed on to the thin cords within the glass, crawled along
-until I got to the manhole rim, and so got my bearings for the light
-and blind studs, took a shove off, and flying once round the bale, and
-getting a scare from something big and flimsy that was drifting loose,
-I got my hand on the cord quite close to the studs, and reached them. I
-lit the little lamp first of all to see what it was I had collided
-with, and discovered that old copy of _Lloyd’s News_ had slipped its
-moorings, and was adrift in the void. That brought me out of the
-infinite to my own proper dimensions again. It made me laugh and pant
-for a time, and suggested the idea of a little oxygen from one of the
-cylinders. After that I lit the heater until I felt warm, and then I
-took food. Then I set to work in a very gingerly fashion on the
-Cavorite blinds, to see if I could guess by any means how the sphere
-was travelling.
-
-The first blind I opened I shut at once, and hung for a time flattened
-and blinded by the sunlight that had hit me. After thinking a little I
-started upon the windows at right angles to this one, and got the huge
-crescent moon and the little crescent earth behind it, the second time.
-I was amazed to find how far I was from the moon. I had reckoned that
-not only should I have little or none of the “kick-off” that the
-earth’s atmosphere had given us at our start, but that the tangential
-“fly off” of the moon’s spin would be at least twenty-eight times less
-than the earth’s. I had expected to discover myself hanging over our
-crater, and on the edge of the night, but all that was now only a part
-of the outline of the white crescent that filled the sky. And Cavor—?
-
-He was already infinitesimal.
-
-I tried to imagine what could have happened to him. But at that time I
-could think of nothing but death. I seemed to see him, bent and smashed
-at the foot of some interminably high cascade of blue. And all about
-him the stupid insects stared...
-
-Under the inspiring touch of the drifting newspaper I became practical
-again for a while. It was quite clear to me that what I had to do was
-to get back to earth, but as far as I could see I was drifting away
-from it. Whatever had happened to Cavor, even if he was still alive,
-which seemed to me incredible after that blood-stained scrap, I was
-powerless to help him. There he was, living or dead behind the mantle
-of that rayless night, and there he must remain at least until I could
-summon our fellow men to his assistance. Should I do that? Something of
-the sort I had in my mind; to come back to earth if it were possible,
-and then as maturer consideration might determine, either to show and
-explain the sphere to a few discreet persons, and act with them, or
-else to keep my secret, sell my gold, obtain weapons, provisions, and
-an assistant, and return with these advantages to deal on equal terms
-with the flimsy people of the moon, to rescue Cavor, if that were still
-possible, and at any rate to procure a sufficient supply of gold to
-place my subsequent proceedings on a firmer basis. But that was hoping
-far; I had first to get back.
-
-I set myself to decide just exactly how the return to earth could be
-contrived. As I struggled with that problem I ceased to worry about
-what I should do when I got there. At last my only care was to get
-back.
-
-I puzzled out at last that my best chance would be to drop back towards
-the moon as near as I dared in order to gather velocity, then to shut
-my windows, and fly behind it, and when I was past to open my earthward
-windows, and so get off at a good pace homeward. But whether I should
-ever reach the earth by that device, or whether I might not simply find
-myself spinning about it in some hyperbolic or parabolic curve or
-other, I could not tell. Later I had a happy inspiration, and by
-opening certain windows to the moon, which had appeared in the sky in
-front of the earth, I turned my course aside so as to head off the
-earth, which it had become evident to me I must pass behind without
-some such expedient. I did a very great deal of complicated thinking
-over these problems—for I am no mathematician—and in the end I am
-certain it was much more my good luck than my reasoning that enabled me
-to hit the earth. Had I known then, as I know now, the mathematical
-chances there were against me, I doubt if I should have troubled even
-to touch the studs to make any attempt. And having puzzled out what I
-considered to be the thing to do, I opened all my moonward windows, and
-squatted down—the effort lifted me for a time some feet or so into the
-air, and I hung there in the oddest way—and waited for the crescent to
-get bigger and bigger until I felt I was near enough for safety. Then I
-would shut the windows, fly past the moon with the velocity I had got
-from it—if I did not smash upon it—and so go on towards the earth.
-
-And that is what I did.
-
-At last I felt my moonward start was sufficient. I shut out the sight
-of the moon from my eyes, and in a state of mind that was, I now
-recall, incredibly free from anxiety or any distressful quality, I sat
-down to begin a vigil in that little speck of matter in infinite space
-that would last until I should strike the earth. The heater had made
-the sphere tolerably warm, the air had been refreshed by the oxygen,
-and except for that faint congestion of the head that was always with
-me while I was away from earth, I felt entire physical comfort. I had
-extinguished the light again, lest it should fail me in the end; I was
-in darkness, save for the earthshine and the glitter of the stars below
-me. Everything was so absolutely silent and still that I might indeed
-have been the only being in the universe, and yet, strangely enough, I
-had no more feeling of loneliness or fear than if I had been lying in
-bed on earth. Now, this seems all the stranger to me, since during my
-last hours in that crater of the moon, the sense of my utter loneliness
-had been an agony....
-
-Incredible as it will seem, this interval of time that I spent in space
-has no sort of proportion to any other interval of time in my life.
-Sometimes it seemed as though I sat through immeasurable eternities
-like some god upon a lotus leaf, and again as though there was a
-momentary pause as I leapt from moon to earth. In truth, it was
-altogether some weeks of earthly time. But I had done with care and
-anxiety, hunger or fear, for that space. I floated, thinking with a
-strange breadth and freedom of all that we had undergone, and of all my
-life and motives, and the secret issues of my being. I seemed to myself
-to have grown greater and greater, to have lost all sense of movement;
-to be floating amidst the stars, and always the sense of earth’s
-littleness and the infinite littleness of my life upon it, was implicit
-in my thoughts.
-
-I can’t profess to explain the things that happened in my mind. No
-doubt they could all be traced directly or indirectly to the curious
-physical conditions under which I was living. I set them down here just
-for what they are worth, and without any comment. The most prominent
-quality of it was a pervading doubt of my own identity. I became, if I
-may so express it, dissociate from Bedford; I looked down on Bedford as
-a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be connected. I saw
-Bedford in many relations—as an ass or as a poor beast, where I had
-hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very
-spirited or rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, but
-as the son of many generations of asses. I reviewed his school-days and
-his early manhood, and his first encounter with love, very much as one
-might review the proceedings of an ant in the sand. Something of that
-period of lucidity I regret still hangs about me, and I doubt if I
-shall ever recover the full-bodied self satisfaction of my early days.
-But at the time the thing was not in the least painful, because I had
-that extraordinary persuasion that, as a matter of fact, I was no more
-Bedford than I was any one else, but only a mind floating in the still
-serenity of space. Why should I be disturbed about this Bedford’s
-shortcomings? I was not responsible for him or them.
-
-For a time I struggled against this really very grotesque delusion. I
-tried to summon the memory of vivid moments, of tender or intense
-emotions to my assistance; I felt that if I could recall one genuine
-twinge of feeling the growing severance would be stopped. But I could
-not do it. I saw Bedford rushing down Chancery Lane, hat on the back of
-his head, coat tails flying out, _en route_ for his public examination.
-I saw him dodging and bumping against, and even saluting, other similar
-little creatures in that swarming gutter of people. Me? I saw Bedford
-that same evening in the sitting-room of a certain lady, and his hat
-was on the table beside him, and it wanted brushing badly, and he was
-in tears. Me? I saw him with that lady in various attitudes and
-emotions—I never felt so detached before.... I saw him hurrying off to
-Lympne to write a play, and accosting Cavor, and in his shirt sleeves
-working at the sphere, and walking out to Canterbury because he was
-afraid to come! Me? I did not believe it.
-
-I still reasoned that all this was hallucination due to my solitude,
-and the fact that I had lost all weight and sense of resistance. I
-endeavoured to recover that sense by banging myself about the sphere,
-by pinching my hands and clasping them together. Among other things, I
-lit the light, captured that torn copy of _Lloyd’s_, and read those
-convincingly realistic advertisements about the Cutaway bicycle, and
-the gentleman of private means, and the lady in distress who was
-selling those “forks and spoons.” There was no doubt they existed
-surely enough, and, said I, “This is your world, and you are Bedford,
-and you are going back to live among things like that for all the rest
-of your life.” But the doubts within me could still argue: “It is not
-you that is reading, it is Bedford, but you are not Bedford, you know.
-That’s just where the mistake comes in.”
-
-“Confound it!” I cried; “and if I am not Bedford, what am I?”
-
-But in that direction no light was forthcoming, though the strangest
-fancies came drifting into my brain, queer remote suspicions, like
-shadows seen from away. Do you know, I had a sort of idea that really I
-was something quite outside not only the world, but all worlds, and out
-of space and time, and that this poor Bedford was just a peephole
-through which I looked at life? ...
-
-Bedford! However I disavowed him, there I was most certainly bound up
-with him, and I knew that wherever or whatever I might be, I must needs
-feel the stress of his desires, and sympathise with all his joys and
-sorrows until his life should end. And with the dying of Bedford—what
-then? ...
-
-Enough of this remarkable phase of my experiences! I tell it here
-simply to show how one’s isolation and departure from this planet
-touched not only the functions and feeling of every organ of the body,
-but indeed also the very fabric of the mind, with strange and
-unanticipated disturbances. All through the major portion of that vast
-space journey I hung thinking of such immaterial things as these, hung
-dissociated and apathetic, a cloudy megalomaniac, as it were, amidst
-the stars and planets in the void of space; and not only the world to
-which I was returning, but the blue-lit caverns of the Selenites, their
-helmet faces, their gigantic and wonderful machines, and the fate of
-Cavor, dragged helpless into that world, seemed infinitely minute and
-altogether trivial things to me.
-
-Until at last I began to feel the pull of the earth upon my being,
-drawing me back again to the life that is real for men. And then,
-indeed, it grew clearer and clearer to me that I was quite certainly
-Bedford after all, and returning after amazing adventures to this world
-of ours, and with a life that I was very likely to lose in this return.
-I set myself to puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to
-earth.
-
-
-
-
-XXI.
-Mr. Bedford at Littlestone
-
-
-My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came into
-the upper air. The temperature of the sphere began to rise forthwith. I
-knew it behoved me to drop at once. Far below me, in a darkling
-twilight, stretched a great expanse of sea. I opened every window I
-could, and fell—out of sunshine into evening, and out of evening into
-night. Vaster grew the earth and vaster, swallowing up the stars, and
-the silvery translucent starlit veil of cloud it wore spread out to
-catch me. At last the world seemed no longer a sphere but flat, and
-then concave. It was no longer a planet in the sky, but the world of
-Man. I shut all but an inch or so of earthward window, and dropped with
-a slackening velocity. The broadening water, now so near that I could
-see the dark glitter of the waves, rushed up to meet me. The sphere
-became very hot. I snapped the last strip of window, and sat scowling
-and biting my knuckles, waiting for the impact....
-
-The sphere hit the water with a huge splash: it must have sent it
-fathoms high. At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open. Down I
-went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere pressing
-against my feet, and so drove up again as a bubble drives. And at the
-last I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the sea, and my
-journey in space was at an end.
-
-The night was dark and overcast. Two yellow pinpoints far away showed
-the passing of a ship, and nearer was a red glare that came and went.
-Had not the electricity of my glow-lamp exhausted itself, I could have
-got picked up that night. In spite of the inordinate fatigue I was
-beginning to feel, I was excited now, and for a time hopeful, in a
-feverish, impatient way, that so my travelling might end.
-
-But at last I ceased to move about, and sat, wrists on knees, staring
-at a distant red light. It swayed up and down, rocking, rocking. My
-excitement passed. I realised I had yet to spend another night at least
-in the sphere. I perceived myself infinitely heavy and fatigued. And so
-I fell asleep.
-
-A change in my rhythmic motion awakened me. I peered through the
-refracting glass, and saw that I had come aground upon a huge shallow
-of sand. Far away I seemed to see houses and trees, and seaward a
-curved, vague distortion of a ship hung between sea and sky.
-
-I stood up and staggered. My one desire was to emerge. The manhole was
-upward, and I wrestled with the screw. Slowly I opened the manhole. At
-last the air was singing in again as once it had sung out. But this
-time I did not wait until the pressure was adjusted. In another moment
-I had the weight of the window on my hands, and I was open, wide open,
-to the old familiar sky of earth.
-
-The air hit me on the chest so that I gasped. I dropped the glass
-screw. I cried out, put my hands to my chest, and sat down. For a time
-I was in pain. Then I took deep breaths. At last I could rise and move
-about again.
-
-I tried to thrust my head through the manhole, and the sphere rolled
-over. It was as though something had lugged my head down directly it
-emerged. I ducked back sharply, or I should have been pinned face under
-water. After some wriggling and shoving I managed to crawl out upon
-sand, over which the retreating waves still came and went.
-
-I did not attempt to stand up. It seemed to me that my body must be
-suddenly changed to lead. Mother Earth had her grip on me now—no
-Cavorite intervening. I sat down heedless of the water that came over
-my feet.
-
-It was dawn, a grey dawn, rather overcast but showing here and there a
-long patch of greenish grey. Some way out a ship was lying at anchor, a
-pale silhouette of a ship with one yellow light. The water came
-rippling in in long shallow waves. Away to the right curved the land, a
-shingle bank with little hovels, and at last a lighthouse, a sailing
-mark and a point. Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken here
-and there by pools of water, and ending a mile away perhaps in a low
-shore of scrub. To the north-east some isolated watering-place was
-visible, a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest things that I could
-see on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky. What strange men
-can have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I do
-not know. There they are, like pieces of Brighton lost in the waste.
-
-For a long time I sat there, yawning and rubbing my face. At last I
-struggled to rise. It made me feel that I was lifting a weight. I stood
-up.
-
-I stared at the distant houses. For the first time since our starvation
-in the crater I thought of earthly food. “Bacon,” I whispered, “eggs.
-Good toast and good coffee.... And how the devil am I going to get all
-this stuff to Lympne?” I wondered where I was. It was an east shore
-anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.
-
-I heard footsteps crunching in the sand, and a little round-faced,
-friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped about
-his shoulders, and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up the
-beach. I knew instantly that I must be in England. He was staring most
-intently at the sphere and me. He advanced staring. I dare say I looked
-a ferocious savage enough—dirty, unkempt, to an indescribable degree;
-but it did not occur to me at the time. He stopped at a distance of
-twenty yards. “Hul-lo, my man!” he said doubtfully.
-
-“Hullo yourself!” said I.
-
-He advanced, reassured by that. “What on earth is that thing?” he
-asked.
-
-“Can you tell me where I am?” I asked.
-
-“That’s Littlestone,” he said, pointing to the houses; “and that’s
-Dungeness! Have you just landed? What’s that thing you’ve got? Some
-sort of machine?”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“Have you floated ashore? Have you been wrecked or something? What is
-it?”
-
-I meditated swiftly. I made an estimate of the little man’s appearance
-as he drew nearer. “By Jove!” he said, “you’ve had a time of it! I
-thought you— Well— Where were you cast away? Is that thing a sort of
-floating thing for saving life?”
-
-I decided to take that line for the present. I made a few vague
-affirmatives. “I want help,” I said hoarsely. “I want to get some stuff
-up the beach—stuff I can’t very well leave about.” I became aware of
-three other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and straw
-hats, coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathing
-section of this Littlestone.
-
-“Help!” said the young man: “rather!” He became vaguely active. “What
-particularly do you want done?” He turned round and gesticulated. The
-three young men accelerated their pace. In a minute they were about me,
-plying me with questions I was indisposed to answer. “I’ll tell all
-that later,” I said. “I’m dead beat. I’m a rag.”
-
-“Come up to the hotel,” said the foremost little man. “We’ll look after
-that thing there.”
-
-I hesitated. “I can’t,” I said. “In that sphere there’s two big bars of
-gold.”
-
-They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a new
-inquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently they
-had the Selenites’ crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had
-not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was like
-kittens round a beetle. They didn’t know what to do with the stuff. The
-fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars, and then
-dropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.
-
-“It’s lead, or gold!” said one.
-
-“Oh, it’s _gold!_” said another.
-
-“Gold, right enough,” said the third.
-
-Then they all stared at me, and then they all stared at the ship lying
-at anchor.
-
-“I say!” cried the little man. “But where did you get that?”
-
-I was too tired to keep up a lie. “I got it in the moon.”
-
-I saw them stare at one another.
-
-“Look here!” said I, “I’m not going to argue now. Help me carry these
-lumps of gold up to the hotel—I guess, with rests, two of you can
-manage one, and I’ll trail this chain thing—and I’ll tell you more when
-I’ve had some food.”
-
-“And how about that thing?”
-
-“It won’t hurt there,” I said. “Anyhow—confound it!—it must stop there
-now. If the tide comes up, it will float all right.”
-
-And in a state of enormous wonderment, these young men most obediently
-hoisted my treasures on their shoulders, and with limbs that felt like
-lead I headed a sort of procession towards that distant fragment of
-“sea-front.” Half-way there we were reinforced by two awe-stricken
-little girls with spades, and later a lean little boy, with a
-penetrating sniff, appeared. He was, I remember, wheeling a bicycle,
-and he accompanied us at a distance of about a hundred yards on our
-right flank, and then I suppose, gave us up as uninteresting, mounted
-his bicycle and rode off over the level sands in the direction of the
-sphere.
-
-I glanced back after him.
-
-“_He_ won’t touch it,” said the stout young man reassuringly, and I was
-only too willing to be reassured.
-
-At first something of the grey of the morning was in my mind, but
-presently the sun disengaged itself from the level clouds of the
-horizon and lit the world, and turned the leaden sea to glittering
-waters. My spirits rose. A sense of the vast importance of the things I
-had done and had yet to do came with the sunlight into my mind. I
-laughed aloud as the foremost man staggered under my gold. When indeed
-I took my place in the world, how amazed the world would be!
-
-If it had not been for my inordinate fatigue, the landlord of the
-Littlestone hotel would have been amusing, as he hesitated between my
-gold and my respectable company on the one and my filthy appearance on
-the other. But at last I found myself in a terrestrial bathroom once
-more with warm water to wash myself with, and a change of raiment,
-preposterously small indeed, but anyhow clean, that the genial little
-man had lent me. He lent me a razor too, but I could not screw up my
-resolution to attack even the outposts of the bristling beard that
-covered my face.
-
-I sat down to an English breakfast and ate with a sort of languid
-appetite—an appetite many weeks old and very decrepit—and stirred
-myself to answer the questions of the four young men. And I told them
-the truth.
-
-“Well,” said I, “as you press me—I got it in the moon.”
-
-“The moon?”
-
-“Yes, the moon in the sky.”
-
-“But how do you mean?”
-
-“What I say, confound it!”
-
-“Then you have just come from the moon?”
-
-“Exactly! through space—in that ball.” And I took a delicious mouthful
-of egg. I made a private note that when I went back to the moon I would
-take a box of eggs.
-
-I could see clearly that they did not believe one word of what I told
-them, but evidently they considered me the most respectable liar they
-had ever met. They glanced at one another, and then concentrated the
-fire of their eyes on me. I fancy they expected a clue to me in the way
-I helped myself to salt. They seemed to find something significant in
-my peppering my egg. These strangely shaped masses of gold they had
-staggered under held their minds. There the lumps lay in front of me,
-each worth thousands of pounds, and as impossible for any one to steal
-as a house or a piece of land. As I looked at their curious faces over
-my coffee-cup, I realised something of the enormous wilderness of
-explanations into which I should have to wander to render myself
-comprehensible again.
-
-“You don’t _really_ mean—” began the youngest young man, in the tone of
-one who speaks to an obstinate child.
-
-“Just pass me that toast-rack,” I said, and shut him up completely.
-
-“But look here, I say,” began one of the others. “We’re not going to
-believe that, you know.”
-
-“Ah, well,” said I, and shrugged my shoulders.
-
-“He doesn’t want to tell us,” said the youngest young man in a stage
-aside; and then, with an appearance of great _sang-froid_, “You don’t
-mind if I take a cigarette?”
-
-I waved him a cordial assent, and proceeded with my breakfast. Two of
-the others went and looked out of the farther window and talked
-inaudibly. I was struck by a thought. “The tide,” I said, “is running
-out?”
-
-There was a pause, a doubt who should answer me.
-
-“It’s near the ebb,” said the fat little man.
-
-“Well, anyhow,” I said, “it won’t float far.”
-
-I decapitated my third egg, and began a little speech. “Look here,” I
-said. “Please don’t imagine I’m surly or telling you uncivil lies, or
-anything of that sort. I’m forced almost, to be a little short and
-mysterious. I can quite understand this is as queer as it can be, and
-that your imaginations must be going it. I can assure you, you’re in at
-a memorable time. But I can’t make it clear to you now—it’s impossible.
-I give you my word of honour I’ve come from the moon, and that’s all I
-can tell you.... All the same, I’m tremendously obliged to you, you
-know, tremendously. I hope that my manner hasn’t in any way given you
-offence.”
-
-“Oh, not in the least!” said the youngest young man affably. “We can
-quite understand,” and staring hard at me all the time, he heeled his
-chair back until it very nearly upset, and recovered with some
-exertion. “Not a bit of it,” said the fat young man.
-
-“Don’t you imagine _that!_” and they all got up and dispersed, and
-walked about and lit cigarettes, and generally tried to show they were
-perfectly amiable and disengaged, and entirely free from the slightest
-curiosity about me and the sphere. “I’m going to keep an eye on that
-ship out there all the same,” I heard one of them remarking in an
-undertone. If only they could have forced themselves to it, they would,
-I believe, even have gone out and left me. I went on with my third egg.
-
-“The weather,” the fat little man remarked presently, “has been
-immense, has it not? I don’t know _when_ we have had such a summer.”
-
-Phoo-whizz! Like a tremendous rocket!
-
-And somewhere a window was broken....
-
-“What’s that?” said I.
-
-“It isn’t—?” cried the little man, and rushed to the corner window.
-
-All the others rushed to the window likewise. I sat staring at them.
-
-Suddenly I leapt up, knocked over my third egg, rushed for the window
-also. I had just thought of something. “Nothing to be seen there,”
-cried the little man, rushing for the door.
-
-“It’s that boy!” I cried, bawling in hoarse fury; “it’s that accursed
-boy!” and turning about I pushed the waiter aside—he was just bringing
-me some more toast—and rushed violently out of the room and down and
-out upon the queer little esplanade in front of the hotel.
-
-The sea, which had been smooth, was rough now with hurrying cat’s-paws,
-and all about where the sphere had been was tumbled water like the wake
-of a ship. Above, a little puff of cloud whirled like dispersing smoke,
-and the three or four people on the beach were staring up with
-interrogative faces towards the point of that unexpected report. And
-that was all! Boots and waiter and the four young men in blazers came
-rushing out behind me. Shouts came from windows and doors, and all
-sorts of worrying people came into sight—agape.
-
-For a time I stood there, too overwhelmed by this new development to
-think of the people.
-
-At first I was too stunned to see the thing as any definite disaster—I
-was just stunned, as a man is by some accidental violent blow. It is
-only afterwards he begins to appreciate his specific injury.
-
-“Good Lord!”
-
-I felt as though somebody was pouring funk out of a can down the back
-of my neck. My legs became feeble. I had got the first intimation of
-what the disaster meant for me. There was that confounded boy—sky high!
-I was utterly left. There was the gold in the coffee-room—my only
-possession on earth. How would it all work out? The general effect was
-of a gigantic unmanageable confusion.
-
-“I say,” said the voice of the little man behind. “I _say_, you know.”
-
-I wheeled about, and there were twenty or thirty people, a sort of
-irregular investment of people, all bombarding me with dumb
-interrogation, with infinite doubt and suspicion. I felt the compulsion
-of their eyes intolerably. I groaned aloud.
-
-“I _can’t_,” I shouted. “I tell you I can’t! I’m not equal to it! You
-must puzzle and—and be damned to you!”
-
-I gesticulated convulsively. He receded a step as though I had
-threatened him. I made a bolt through them into the hotel. I charged
-back into the coffee-room, rang the bell furiously. I gripped the
-waiter as he entered. “D’ye hear?” I shouted. “Get help and carry these
-bars up to my room right away.”
-
-He failed to understand me, and I shouted and raved at him. A
-scared-looking little old man in a green apron appeared, and further
-two of the young men in flannels. I made a dash at them and
-commandeered their services. As soon as the gold was in my room I felt
-free to quarrel. “Now get out,” I shouted; “all of you get out if you
-don’t want to see a man go mad before your eyes!” And I helped the
-waiter by the shoulder as he hesitated in the doorway. And then, as
-soon as I had the door locked on them all, I tore off the little man’s
-clothes again, shied them right and left, and got into bed forthwith.
-And there I lay swearing and panting and cooling for a very long time.
-
-At last I was calm enough to get out of bed and ring up the round-eyed
-waiter for a flannel nightshirt, a soda and whisky, and some good
-cigars. And these things being procured me, after an exasperating delay
-that drove me several times to the bell, I locked the door again and
-proceeded very deliberately to look the entire situation in the face.
-
-The net result of the great experiment presented itself as an absolute
-failure. It was a rout, and I was the sole survivor. It was an absolute
-collapse, and this was the final disaster. There was nothing for it but
-to save myself, and as much as I could in the way of prospects from our
-_débâcle_. At one fatal crowning blow all my vague resolutions of
-return and recovery had vanished. My intention of going back to the
-moon, of getting a sphereful of gold, and afterwards of having a
-fragment of Cavorite analysed and so recovering the great
-secret—perhaps, finally, even of recovering Cavor’s body—all these
-ideas vanished altogether.
-
-I was the sole survivor, and that was all.
-
-I think that going to bed was one of the luckiest ideas I have ever had
-in an emergency. I really believe I should either have got loose-headed
-or done some indiscreet thing. But there, locked in and secure from all
-interruptions, I could think out the position in all its bearings and
-make my arrangements at leisure.
-
-Of course, it was quite clear to me what had happened to the boy. He
-had crawled into the sphere, meddled with the studs, shut the Cavorite
-windows, and gone up. It was highly improbable he had screwed the
-manhole stopper, and, even if he had, the chances were a thousand to
-one against his getting back. It was fairly evident that he would
-gravitate with my bales to somewhere near the middle of the sphere and
-remain there, and so cease to be a legitimate terrestrial interest,
-however remarkable he might seem to the inhabitants of some remote
-quarter of space. I very speedily convinced myself on that point. And
-as for any responsibility I might have in the matter, the more I
-reflected upon that, the clearer it became that if only I kept quiet
-about things, I need not trouble myself about that. If I was faced by
-sorrowing parents demanding their lost boy, I had merely to demand my
-lost sphere—or ask them what they meant. At first I had had a vision of
-weeping parents and guardians, and all sorts of complications; but now
-I saw that I simply had to keep my mouth shut, and nothing in that way
-could arise. And, indeed, the more I lay and smoked and thought, the
-more evident became the wisdom of impenetrability.
-
-It is within the right of every British citizen, provided he does not
-commit damage nor indecorum, to appear suddenly wherever he pleases,
-and as ragged and filthy as he pleases, and with whatever amount of
-virgin gold he sees fit to encumber himself, and no one has any right
-at all to hinder and detain him in this procedure. I formulated that at
-last to myself, and repeated it over as a sort of private Magna Charta
-of my liberty.
-
-Once I had put that issue on one side, I could take up and consider in
-an equable manner certain considerations I had scarcely dared to think
-of before, namely, those arising out of the circumstances of my
-bankruptcy. But now, looking at this matter calmly and at leisure, I
-could see that if only I suppressed my identity by a temporary
-assumption of some less well-known name, and if I retained the two
-months’ beard that had grown upon me, the risks of any annoyance from
-the spiteful creditor to whom I have already alluded became very small
-indeed. From that to a definite course of rational worldly action was
-plain sailing. It was all amazingly petty, no doubt, but what was there
-remaining for me to do?
-
-Whatever I did I was resolved that I would keep myself level and right
-side up.
-
-I ordered up writing materials, and addressed a letter to the New
-Romney Bank—the nearest, the waiter informed me—telling the manager I
-wished to open an account with him, and requesting him to send two
-trustworthy persons properly authenticated in a cab with a good horse
-to fetch some hundredweight of gold with which I happened to be
-encumbered. I signed the letter “Blake,” which seemed to me to be a
-thoroughly respectable sort of name. This done, I got a Folkstone Blue
-Book, picked out an outfitter, and asked him to send a cutter to
-measure me for a dark tweed suit, ordering at the same time a valise,
-dressing bag, brown boots, shirts, hat (to fit), and so forth; and from
-a watchmaker I also ordered a watch. And these letters being
-despatched, I had up as good a lunch as the hotel could give, and then
-lay smoking a cigar, as calm and ordinary as possible, until in
-accordance with my instructions two duly authenticated clerks came from
-the bank and weighed and took away my gold. After which I pulled the
-clothes over my ears in order to drown any knocking, and went very
-comfortably to sleep.
-
-I went to sleep. No doubt it was a prosaic thing for the first man back
-from the moon to do, and I can imagine that the young and imaginative
-reader will find my behaviour disappointing. But I was horribly
-fatigued and bothered, and, confound it! what else was there to do?
-There certainly was not the remotest chance of my being believed, if I
-had told my story then, and it would certainly have subjected me to
-intolerable annoyances. I went to sleep. When at last I woke up again I
-was ready to face the world as I have always been accustomed to face it
-since I came to years of discretion. And so I got away to Italy, and
-there it is I am writing this story. If the world will not have it as
-fact, then the world may take it as fiction. It is no concern of mine.
-
-And now that the account is finished, I am amazed to think how
-completely this adventure is gone and done with. Everybody believes
-that Cavor was a not very brilliant scientific experimenter who blew up
-his house and himself at Lympne, and they explain the bang that
-followed my arrival at Littlestone by a reference to the experiments
-with explosives that are going on continually at the government
-establishment of Lydd, two miles away. I must confess that hitherto I
-have not acknowledged my share in the disappearance of Master Tommy
-Simmons, which was that little boy’s name. That, perhaps, may prove a
-difficult item of corroboration to explain away. They account for my
-appearance in rags with two bars of indisputable gold upon the
-Littlestone beach in various ingenious ways—it doesn’t worry me what
-they think of me. They say I have strung all these things together to
-avoid being questioned too closely as to the source of my wealth. I
-would like to see the man who could invent a story that would hold
-together like this one. Well, they must take it as fiction—there it is.
-
-I have told my story—and now, I suppose, I have to take up the worries
-of this terrestrial life again. Even if one has been to the moon, one
-has still to earn a living. So I am working here at Amalfi, on the
-scenario of that play I sketched before Cavor came walking into my
-world, and I am trying to piece my life together as it was before ever
-I saw him. I must confess that I find it hard to keep my mind on the
-play when the moonshine comes into my room. It is full moon here, and
-last night I was out on the pergola for hours, staring away at the
-shining blankness that hides so much. Imagine it! tables and chairs,
-and trestles and bars of gold! Confound it!—if only one could hit on
-that Cavorite again! But a thing like that doesn’t come twice in a
-life. Here I am, a little better off than I was at Lympne, and that is
-all. And Cavor has committed suicide in a more elaborate way than any
-human being ever did before. So the story closes as finally and
-completely as a dream. It fits in so little with all the other things
-of life, so much of it is so utterly remote from all human experience,
-the leaping, the eating, the breathing, and these weightless times,
-that indeed there are moments when, in spite of my moon gold, I do more
-than half believe myself that the whole thing was a dream....
-
-
-
-
-XXII.
-The Astonishing Communication of Mr. Julius Wendigee
-
-
-When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at
-Littlestone, I wrote, “The End,” made a flourish, and threw my pen
-aside, fully believing that the whole story of the First Men in the
-Moon was done. Not only had I done this, but I had placed my manuscript
-in the hands of a literary agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen
-the greater portion of it appear in the _Strand Magazine_, and was
-setting to work again upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at
-Lympne before I realised that the end was not yet. And then, following
-me from Amalfi to Algiers, there reached me (it is now about six months
-ago) one of the most astounding communications I have ever been fated
-to receive. Briefly, it informed me that Mr. Julius Wendigee, a Dutch
-electrician, who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to
-the apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering
-some method of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a
-curiously fragmentary message in English, which was indisputably
-emanating from Mr. Cavor in the moon.
-
-At first I thought the thing was an elaborate practical joke by some
-one who had seen the manuscript of my narrative. I answered Mr.
-Wendigee jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicion
-altogether aside, and in a state of inconceivable excitement I hurried
-from Algiers to the little observatory upon the Monte Rosa in which he
-was working. In the presence of his record and his appliances—and above
-all of the messages from Cavor that were coming to hand—my lingering
-doubts vanished. I decided at once to accept a proposal he made to me
-to remain with him, assisting him to take down the record from day to
-day, and endeavouring with him to send a message back to the moon.
-Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive, but free, in the midst of an
-almost inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men,
-in the blue darkness of the lunar caves. He was lamed, it seemed, but
-otherwise in quite good health—in better health, he distinctly said,
-than he usually enjoyed on earth. He had had a fever, but it had left
-no bad effects. But curiously enough he seemed to be labouring under a
-conviction that I was either dead in the moon crater or lost in the
-deep of space.
-
-His message began to be received by Mr. Wendigee when that gentleman
-was engaged in quite a different investigation. The reader will no
-doubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arising out
-of an announcement by Mr. Nikola Tesla, the American electrical
-celebrity, that he had received a message from Mars. His announcement
-renewed attention to a fact that had long been familiar to scientific
-people, namely: that from some unknown source in space, waves of
-electromagnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor
-Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth.
-Besides Tesla quite a number of other observers have been engaged in
-perfecting apparatus for receiving and recording these vibrations,
-though few would go so far as to consider them actual messages from
-some extraterrestrial sender. Among that few, however, we must
-certainly count Mr. Wendigee. Ever since 1898 he had devoted himself
-almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample means he had
-erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a position
-singularly adapted in every way for such observations.
-
-My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as
-they enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee’s contrivances for detecting and
-recording any disturbances in the electromagnetic conditions of space
-are singularly original and ingenious. And by a happy combination of
-circumstances they were set up and in operation about two months before
-Cavor made his first attempt to call up the earth. Consequently we have
-fragments of his communication even from the beginning. Unhappily, they
-are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things that he
-had to tell humanity—the instructions, that is, for the making of
-Cavorite, if, indeed, he ever transmitted them—have throbbed themselves
-away unrecorded into space. We never succeeded in getting a response
-back to Cavor. He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had received
-or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that any one
-on earth was really aware of his efforts to reach us. And the
-persistence he displayed in sending eighteen long descriptions of lunar
-affairs—as they would be if we had them complete—shows how much his
-mind must have turned back towards his native planet since he left it
-two years ago.
-
-You can imagine how amazed Mr. Wendigee must have been when he
-discovered his record of electromagnetic disturbances interlaced by
-Cavor’s straightforward English. Mr. Wendigee knew nothing of our wild
-journey moonward, and suddenly—this English out of the void!
-
-It is well the reader should understand the conditions under which it
-would seem these messages were sent. Somewhere within the moon Cavor
-certainly had access for a time to a considerable amount of electrical
-apparatus, and it would seem he rigged up—perhaps furtively—a
-transmitting arrangement of the Marconi type. This he was able to
-operate at irregular intervals: sometimes for only half an hour or so,
-sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch. At these times he
-transmitted his earthward message, regardless of the fact that the
-relative position of the moon and points upon the earth’s surface is
-constantly altering. As a consequence of this and of the necessary
-imperfections of our recording instruments his communication comes and
-goes in our records in an extremely fitful manner; it becomes blurred;
-it “fades out” in a mysterious and altogether exasperating way. And
-added to this is the fact that he was not an expert operator; he had
-partly forgotten, or never completely mastered, the code in general
-use, and as he became fatigued he dropped words and misspelt in a
-curious manner.
-
-Altogether we have probably lost quite half of the communications he
-made, and much we have is damaged, broken, and partly effaced. In the
-abstract that follows the reader must be prepared therefore for a
-considerable amount of break, hiatus, and change of topic. Mr. Wendigee
-and I are collaborating in a complete and annotated edition of the
-Cavor record, which we hope to publish, together with a detailed
-account of the instruments employed, beginning with the first volume in
-January next. That will be the full and scientific report, of which
-this is only the popular transcript. But here we give at least
-sufficient to complete the story I have told, and to give the broad
-outlines of the state of that other world so near, so akin, and yet so
-dissimilar to our own.
-
-
-
-
-XXIII.
-An Abstract of the Six Messages First Received from Mr. Cavor
-
-
-The two earlier messages of Mr. Cavor may very well be reserved for
-that larger volume. They simply tell, with greater brevity and with a
-difference in several details that is interesting, but not of any vital
-importance, the bare facts of the making of the sphere and our
-departure from the world. Throughout, Cavor speaks of me as a man who
-is dead, but with a curious change of temper as he approaches our
-landing on the moon. “Poor Bedford,” he says of me, and “this poor
-young man,” and he blames himself for inducing a young man, “by no
-means well equipped for such adventures,” to leave a planet “on which
-he was indisputably fitted to succeed” on so precarious a mission. I
-think he underrates the part my energy and practical capacity played in
-bringing about the realisation of his theoretical sphere. “We arrived,”
-he says, with no more account of our passage through space than if we
-had made a journey of common occurrence in a railway train.
-
-And then he becomes increasingly unfair to me. Unfair, indeed, to an
-extent I should not have expected in a man trained in the search for
-truth. Looking back over my previously written account of these things,
-I must insist that I have been altogether juster to Cavor than he has
-been to me. I have extenuated little and suppressed nothing. But his
-account is:—
-
-“It speedily became apparent that the entire strangeness of our
-circumstances and surroundings—great loss of weight, attenuated but
-highly oxygenated air, consequent exaggeration of the results of
-muscular effort, rapid development of weird plants from obscure spores,
-lurid sky—was exciting my companion unduly. On the moon his character
-seemed to deteriorate. He became impulsive, rash, and quarrelsome. In a
-little while his folly in devouring some gigantic vesicles and his
-consequent intoxication led to our capture by the Selenites—before we
-had had the slightest opportunity of properly observing their ways....”
-
-(He says, you observe, nothing of his own concession to these same
-“vesicles.”)
-
-And he goes on from that point to say that “We came to a difficult
-passage with them, and Bedford mistaking certain gestures of
-theirs”—pretty gestures they were!—“gave way to a panic violence. He
-ran amuck, killed three, and perforce I had to flee with him after the
-outrage. Subsequently we fought with a number who endeavoured to bar
-our way, and slew seven or eight more. It says much for the tolerance
-of these beings that on my recapture I was not instantly slain. We made
-our way to the exterior and separated in the crater of our arrival, to
-increase our chances of recovering our sphere. But presently I came
-upon a body of Selenites, led by two who were curiously different, even
-in form, from any of these we had seen hitherto, with larger heads and
-smaller bodies, and much more elaborately wrapped about. And after
-evading them for some time I fell into a crevasse, cut my head rather
-badly, and displaced my patella, and, finding crawling very painful,
-decided to surrender—if they would still permit me to do so. This they
-did, and, perceiving my helpless condition, carried me with them again
-into the moon. And of Bedford I have heard or seen nothing more, nor,
-so far as I can gather, has any Selenite. Either the night overtook him
-in the crater, or else, which is more probable, he found the sphere,
-and, desiring to steal a march upon me, made off with it—only, I fear,
-to find it uncontrollable, and to meet a more lingering fate in outer
-space.”
-
-And with that Cavor dismisses me and goes on to more interesting
-topics. I dislike the idea of seeming to use my position as his editor
-to deflect his story in my own interest, but I am obliged to protest
-here against the turn he gives these occurrences. He said nothing about
-that gasping message on the blood-stained paper in which he told, or
-attempted to tell, a very different story. The dignified self-surrender
-is an altogether new view of the affair that has come to him, I must
-insist, since he began to feel secure among the lunar people; and as
-for the “stealing a march” conception, I am quite willing to let the
-reader decide between us on what he has before him. I know I am not a
-model man—I have made no pretence to be. But am I _that?_
-
-However, that is the sum of my wrongs. From this point I can edit Cavor
-with an untroubled mind, for he mentions me no more.
-
-It would seem the Selenites who had come upon him carried him to some
-point in the interior down “a great shaft” by means of what he
-describes as “a sort of balloon.” We gather from the rather confused
-passage in which he describes this, and from a number of chance
-allusions and hints in other and subsequent messages, that this “great
-shaft” is one of an enormous system of artificial shafts that run, each
-from what is called a lunar “crater,” downwards for very nearly a
-hundred miles towards the central portion of our satellite. These
-shafts communicate by transverse tunnels, they throw out abysmal
-caverns and expand into great globular places; the whole of the moon’s
-substance for a hundred miles inward, indeed, is a mere sponge of rock.
-“Partly,” says Cavor, “this sponginess is natural, but very largely it
-is due to the enormous industry of the Selenites in the past. The
-enormous circular mounds of the excavated rock and earth it is that
-form these great circles about the tunnels known to earthly astronomers
-(misled by a false analogy) as volcanoes.”
-
-It was down this shaft they took him, in this “sort of balloon” he
-speaks of, at first into an inky blackness and then into a region of
-continually increasing phosphorescence. Cavor’s despatches show him to
-be curiously regardless of detail for a scientific man, but we gather
-that this light was due to the streams and cascades of water—“no doubt
-containing some phosphorescent organism”—that flowed ever more
-abundantly downward towards the Central Sea. And as he descended, he
-says, “The Selenites also became luminous.” And at last far below him
-he saw, as it were, a lake of heatless fire, the waters of the Central
-Sea, glowing and eddying in strange perturbation, “like luminous blue
-milk that is just on the boil.”
-
-“This Lunar Sea,” says Cavor, in a later passage, “is not a stagnant
-ocean; a solar tide sends it in a perpetual flow around the lunar axis,
-and strange storms and boilings and rushings of its waters occur, and
-at times cold winds and thunderings that ascend out of it into the busy
-ways of the great ant-hill above. It is only when the water is in
-motion that it gives out light; in its rare seasons of calm it is
-black. Commonly, when one sees it, its waters rise and fall in an oily
-swell, and flakes and big rafts of shining, bubbly foam drift with the
-sluggish, faintly glowing current. The Selenites navigate its cavernous
-straits and lagoons in little shallow boats of a canoe-like shape; and
-even before my journey to the galleries about the Grand Lunar, who is
-Master of the Moon, I was permitted to make a brief excursion on its
-waters.
-
-“The caverns and passages are naturally very tortuous. A large
-proportion of these ways are known only to expert pilots among the
-fishermen, and not infrequently Selenites are lost for ever in their
-labyrinths. In their remoter recesses, I am told, strange creatures
-lurk, some of them terrible and dangerous creatures that all the
-science of the moon has been unable to exterminate. There is
-particularly the Rapha, an inextricable mass of clutching tentacles
-that one hacks to pieces only to multiply; and the Tzee, a darting
-creature that is never seen, so subtly and suddenly does it slay...”
-
-He gives us a gleam of description.
-
-“I was reminded on this excursion of what I have read of the Mammoth
-Caves; if only I had had a yellow flambeau instead of the pervading
-blue light, and a solid-looking boatman with an oar instead of a
-scuttle-faced Selenite working an engine at the back of the canoe, I
-could have imagined I had suddenly got back to earth. The rocks about
-us were very various, sometimes black, sometimes pale blue and veined,
-and once they flashed and glittered as though we had come into a mine
-of sapphires. And below one saw the ghostly phosphorescent fishes flash
-and vanish in the hardly less phosphorescent deep. Then, presently, a
-long ultra-marine vista down the turgid stream of one of the channels
-of traffic, and a landing stage, and then, perhaps, a glimpse up the
-enormous crowded shaft of one of the vertical ways.
-
-“In one great place heavy with glistening stalactites a number of boats
-were fishing. We went alongside one of these and watched the long-armed
-Selenites winding in a net. They were little, hunchbacked insects, with
-very strong arms, short, bandy legs, and crinkled face-masks. As they
-pulled at it that net seemed the heaviest thing I had come upon in the
-moon; it was loaded with weights—no doubt of gold—and it took a long
-time to draw, for in those waters the larger and more edible fish lurk
-deep. The fish in the net came up like a blue moonrise—a blaze of
-darting, tossing blue.
-
-“Among their catch was a many-tentaculate, evil-eyed black thing,
-ferociously active, whose appearance they greeted with shrieks and
-twitters, and which with quick, nervous movements they hacked to pieces
-by means of little hatchets. All its dissevered limbs continued to lash
-and writhe in a vicious manner. Afterwards, when fever had hold of me,
-I dreamt again and again of that bitter, furious creature rising so
-vigorous and active out of the unknown sea. It was the most active and
-malignant thing of all the living creatures I have yet seen in this
-world inside the moon....
-
-“The surface of this sea must be very nearly two hundred miles (if not
-more) below the level of the moon’s exterior; all the cities of the
-moon lie, I learnt, immediately above this Central Sea, in such
-cavernous spaces and artificial galleries as I have described, and they
-communicate with the exterior by enormous vertical shafts which open
-invariably in what are called by earthly astronomers the ‘craters’ of
-the moon. The lid covering one such aperture I had already seen during
-the wanderings that had preceded my capture.
-
-“Upon the condition of the less central portion of the moon I have not
-yet arrived at very precise knowledge. There is an enormous system of
-caverns in which the mooncalves shelter during the night; and there are
-abattoirs and the like—in one of these it was that I and Bedford fought
-with the Selenite butchers—and I have since seen balloons laden with
-meat descending out of the upper dark. I have as yet scarcely learnt as
-much of these things as a Zulu in London would learn about the British
-corn supplies in the same time. It is clear, however, that these
-vertical shafts and the vegetation of the surface must play an
-essential role in ventilating and keeping fresh the atmosphere of the
-moon. At one time, and particularly on my first emergence from my
-prison, there was certainly a cold wind blowing _down_ the shaft, and
-later there was a kind of sirocco upward that corresponded with my
-fever. For at the end of about three weeks I fell ill of an indefinable
-sort of fever, and in spite of sleep and the quinine tabloids that very
-fortunately I had brought in my pocket, I remained ill and fretting
-miserably, almost to the time when I was taken into the presence of the
-Grand Lunar, who is Master of the Moon.
-
-“I will not dilate on the wretchedness of my condition,” he remarks,
-“during those days of ill-health.” And he goes on with great amplitude
-with details I omit here. “My temperature,” he concludes, “kept
-abnormally high for a long time, and I lost all desire for food. I had
-stagnant waking intervals, and sleep tormented by dreams, and at one
-phase I was, I remember, so weak as to be earth-sick and almost
-hysterical. I longed almost intolerably for colour to break the
-everlasting blue...”
-
-He reverts again presently to the topic of this sponge-caught lunar
-atmosphere. I am told by astronomers and physicists that all he tells
-is in absolute accordance with what was already known of the moon’s
-condition. Had earthly astronomers had the courage and imagination to
-push home a bold induction, says Mr. Wendigee, they might have foretold
-almost everything that Cavor has to say of the general structure of the
-moon. They know now pretty certainly that moon and earth are not so
-much satellite and primary as smaller and greater sisters, made out of
-one mass, and consequently made of the same material. And since the
-density of the moon is only three-fifths that of the earth, there can
-be nothing for it but that she is hollowed out by a great system of
-caverns. There was no necessity, said Sir Jabez Flap, F.R.S., that most
-entertaining exponent of the facetious side of the stars, that we
-should ever have gone to the moon to find out such easy inferences, and
-points the pun with an allusion to Gruyère, but he certainly might have
-announced his knowledge of the hollowness of the moon before. And if
-the moon is hollow, then the apparent absence of air and water is, of
-course, quite easily explained. The sea lies within at the bottom of
-the caverns, and the air travels through the great sponge of galleries,
-in accordance with simple physical laws. The caverns of the moon, on
-the whole, are very windy places. As the sunlight comes round the moon
-the air in the outer galleries on that side is heated, its pressure
-increases, some flows out on the exterior and mingles with the
-evaporating air of the craters (where the plants remove its carbonic
-acid), while the greater portion flows round through the galleries to
-replace the shrinking air of the cooling side that the sunlight has
-left. There is, therefore, a constant eastward breeze in the air of the
-outer galleries, and an upflow during the lunar day up the shafts,
-complicated, of course, very greatly by the varying shape of the
-galleries, and the ingenious contrivances of the Selenite mind....
-
-
-
-
-XXIV.
-The Natural History of the Selenites
-
-
-The messages of Cavor from the sixth up to the sixteenth are for the
-most part so much broken, and they abound so in repetitions, that they
-scarcely form a consecutive narrative. They will be given in full, of
-course, in the scientific report, but here it will be far more
-convenient to continue simply to abstract and quote as in the former
-chapter. We have subjected every word to a keen critical scrutiny, and
-my own brief memories and impressions of lunar things have been of
-inestimable help in interpreting what would otherwise have been
-impenetrably dark. And, naturally, as living beings, our interest
-centres far more upon the strange community of lunar insects in which
-he was living, it would seem, as an honoured guest than upon the mere
-physical condition of their world.
-
-I have already made it clear, I think, that the Selenites I saw
-resembled man in maintaining the erect attitude, and in having four
-limbs, and I have compared the general appearance of their heads and
-the jointing of their limbs to that of insects. I have mentioned, too,
-the peculiar consequence of the smaller gravitation of the moon on
-their fragile slightness. Cavor confirms me upon all these points. He
-calls them “animals,” though of course they fall under no division of
-the classification of earthly creatures, and he points out “the insect
-type of anatomy had, fortunately for men, never exceeded a relatively
-very small size on earth.” The largest terrestrial insects, living or
-extinct, do not, as a matter of fact, measure six inches in length;
-“but here, against the lesser gravitation of the moon, a creature
-certainly as much an insect as vertebrate seems to have been able to
-attain to human and ultra-human dimensions.”
-
-He does not mention the ant, but throughout his allusions the ant is
-continually being brought before my mind, in its sleepless activity, in
-its intelligence and social organisation, in its structure, and more
-particularly in the fact that it displays, in addition to the two
-forms, the male and the female form, that almost all other animals
-possess, a number of other sexless creatures, workers, soldiers, and
-the like, differing from one another in structure, character, power,
-and use, and yet all members of the same species. For these Selenites,
-also, have a great variety of forms. Of course, they are not only
-colossally greater in size than ants, but also, in Cavor’s opinion at
-least, in intelligence, morality, and social wisdom are they colossally
-greater than men. And instead of the four or five different forms of
-ant that are found, there are almost innumerably different forms of
-Selenite. I had endeavoured to indicate the very considerable
-difference observable in such Selenites of the outer crust as I
-happened to encounter; the differences in size and proportions were
-certainly as wide as the differences between the most widely separated
-races of men. But such differences as I saw fade absolutely to nothing
-in comparison with the huge distinctions of which Cavor tells. It would
-seem the exterior Selenites I saw were, indeed, mostly engaged in
-kindred occupations—mooncalf herds, butchers, fleshers, and the like.
-But within the moon, practically unsuspected by me, there are, it
-seems, a number of other sorts of Selenite, differing in size,
-differing in the relative size of part to part, differing in power and
-appearance, and yet not different species of creatures, but only
-different forms of one species, and retaining through all their
-variations a certain common likeness that marks their specific unity.
-The moon is, indeed, a sort of vast ant-hill, only, instead of there
-being only four or five sorts of ant, there are many hundred different
-sorts of Selenite, and almost every gradation between one sort and
-another.
-
-It would seem the discovery came upon Cavor very speedily. I infer
-rather than learn from his narrative that he was captured by the
-mooncalf herds under the direction of these other Selenites who “have
-larger brain cases (heads?) and very much shorter legs.” Finding he
-would not walk even under the goad, they carried him into darkness,
-crossed a narrow, plank-like bridge that may have been the identical
-bridge I had refused, and put him down in something that must have
-seemed at first to be some sort of lift. This was the balloon—it had
-certainly been absolutely invisible to us in the darkness—and what had
-seemed to me a mere plank-walking into the void was really, no doubt,
-the passage of the gangway. In this he descended towards constantly
-more luminous caverns of the moon. At first they descended in
-silence—save for the twitterings of the Selenites—and then into a stir
-of windy movement. In a little while the profound blackness had made
-his eyes so sensitive that he began to see more and more of the things
-about him, and at last the vague took shape.
-
-“Conceive an enormous cylindrical space,” says Cavor, in his seventh
-message, “a quarter of a mile across, perhaps; very dimly lit at first
-and then brighter, with big platforms twisting down its sides in a
-spiral that vanishes at last below in a blue profundity; and lit even
-more brightly—one could not tell how or why. Think of the well of the
-very largest spiral staircase or lift-shaft that you have ever looked
-down, and magnify that by a hundred. Imagine it at twilight seen
-through blue glass. Imagine yourself looking down that; only imagine
-also that you feel extraordinarily light, and have got rid of any giddy
-feeling you might have on earth, and you will have the first conditions
-of my impression. Round this enormous shaft imagine a broad gallery
-running in a much steeper spiral than would be credible on earth, and
-forming a steep road protected from the gulf only by a little parapet
-that vanishes at last in perspective a couple of miles below.
-
-“Looking up, I saw the very fellow of the downward vision; it had, of
-course, the effect of looking into a very steep cone. A wind was
-blowing down the shaft, and far above I fancy I heard, growing fainter
-and fainter, the bellowing of the mooncalves that were being driven
-down again from their evening pasturage on the exterior. And up and
-down the spiral galleries were scattered numerous moon people, pallid,
-faintly luminous beings, regarding our appearance or busied on unknown
-errands.
-
-“Either I fancied it or a flake of snow came drifting down on the icy
-breeze. And then, falling like a snowflake, a little figure, a little
-man-insect, clinging to a parachute, drove down very swiftly towards
-the central places of the moon.
-
-“The big-headed Selenite sitting beside me, seeing me move my head with
-the gesture of one who saw, pointed with his trunk-like ‘hand’ and
-indicated a sort of jetty coming into sight very far below: a little
-landing-stage, as it were, hanging into the void. As it swept up
-towards us our pace diminished very rapidly, and in a few moments, as
-it seemed, we were abreast of it, and at rest. A mooring-rope was flung
-and grasped, and I found myself pulled down to a level with a great
-crowd of Selenites, who jostled to see me.
-
-“It was an incredible crowd. Suddenly and violently there was forced
-upon my attention the vast amount of difference there is amongst these
-beings of the moon.
-
-“Indeed, there seemed not two alike in all that jostling multitude.
-They differed in shape, they differed in size, they rang all the
-horrible changes on the theme of Selenite form! Some bulged and
-overhung, some ran about among the feet of their fellows. All of them
-had a grotesque and disquieting suggestion of an insect that has
-somehow contrived to mock humanity; but all seemed to present an
-incredible exaggeration of some particular feature: one had a vast
-right fore-limb, an enormous antennal arm, as it were; one seemed all
-leg, poised, as it were, on stilts; another protruded the edge of his
-face mask into a nose-like organ that made him startlingly human until
-one saw his expressionless gaping mouth. The strange and (except for
-the want of mandibles and palps) most insect-like head of the
-mooncalf-minders underwent, indeed, the most incredible
-transformations: here it was broad and low, here high and narrow; here
-its leathery brow was drawn out into horns and strange features; here
-it was whiskered and divided, and there with a grotesquely human
-profile. One distortion was particularly conspicuous. There were
-several brain cases distended like bladders to a huge size, with the
-face mask reduced to quite small proportions. There were several
-amazing forms, with heads reduced to microscopic proportions and blobby
-bodies; and fantastic, flimsy things that existed, it would seem, only
-as a basis for vast, trumpet-like protrusions of the lower part of the
-mask. And oddest of all, as it seemed to me for the moment, two or
-three of these weird inhabitants of a subterranean world, a world
-sheltered by innumerable miles of rock from sun or rain, _carried
-umbrellas_ in their tentaculate hands—real terrestrial looking
-umbrellas! And then I thought of the parachutist I had watched descend.
-
-“These moon people behaved exactly as a human crowd might have done in
-similar circumstances: they jostled and thrust one another, they shoved
-one another aside, they even clambered upon one another to get a
-glimpse of me. Every moment they increased in numbers, and pressed more
-urgently upon the discs of my ushers”—Cavor does not explain what he
-means by this—“every moment fresh shapes emerged from the shadows and
-forced themselves upon my astounded attention. And presently I was
-signed and helped into a sort of litter, and lifted up on the shoulders
-of strong-armed bearers, and so borne through the twilight over this
-seething multitude towards the apartments that were provided for me in
-the moon. All about me were eyes, faces, masks, a leathery noise like
-the rustling of beetle wings, and a great bleating and cricket-like
-twittering of Selenite voices.”
-
-We gather he was taken to a “hexagonal apartment,” and there for a
-space he was confined. Afterwards he was given a much more considerable
-liberty; indeed, almost as much freedom as one has in a civilised town
-on earth. And it would appear that the mysterious being who is the
-ruler and master of the moon appointed two Selenites “with large heads”
-to guard and study him, and to establish whatever mental communications
-were possible with him. And, amazing and incredible as it may seem,
-these two creatures, these fantastic men insects, these beings of other
-world, were presently communicating with Cavor by means of terrestrial
-speech.
-
-Cavor speaks of them as Phi-oo and Tsi-puff. Phi-oo, he says, was about
-5 feet high; he had small slender legs about 18 inches long, and slight
-feet of the common lunar pattern. On these balanced a little body,
-throbbing with the pulsations of his heart. He had long, soft,
-many-jointed arms ending in a tentacled grip, and his neck was
-many-jointed in the usual way, but exceptionally short and thick. His
-head, says Cavor—apparently alluding to some previous description that
-has gone astray in space—“is of the common lunar type, but strangely
-modified. The mouth has the usual expressionless gape, but it is
-unusually small and pointing downward, and the mask is reduced to the
-size of a large flat nose-flap. On either side are the little eyes.
-
-“The rest of the head is distended into a huge globe and the chitinous
-leathery cuticle of the mooncalf herds thins out to a mere membrane,
-through which the pulsating brain movements are distinctly visible. He
-is a creature, indeed, with a tremendously hypertrophied brain, and
-with the rest of his organism both relatively and absolutely dwarfed.”
-
-In another passage Cavor compares the back view of him to Atlas
-supporting the world. Tsi-puff it seems was a very similar insect, but
-his “face” was drawn out to a considerable length, and the brain
-hypertrophy being in different regions, his head was not round but
-pear-shaped, with the stalk downward. There were also litter-carriers,
-lopsided beings, with enormous shoulders, very spidery ushers, and a
-squat foot attendant in Cavor’s retinue.
-
-The manner in which Phi-oo and Tsi-puff attacked the problem of speech
-was fairly obvious. They came into this “hexagonal cell” in which Cavor
-was confined, and began imitating every sound he made, beginning with a
-cough. He seems to have grasped their intention with great quickness,
-and to have begun repeating words to them and pointing to indicate the
-application. The procedure was probably always the same. Phi-oo would
-attend to Cavor for a space, then point also and say the word he had
-heard.
-
-The first word he mastered was “man,” and the second “Mooney”—which
-Cavor on the spur of the moment seems to have used instead of
-“Selenite” for the moon race. As soon as Phi-oo was assured of the
-meaning of a word he repeated it to Tsi-puff, who remembered it
-infallibly. They mastered over one hundred English nouns at their first
-session.
-
-Subsequently it seems they brought an artist with them to assist the
-work of explanation with sketches and diagrams—Cavor’s drawings being
-rather crude. “He was,” says Cavor, “a being with an active arm and an
-arresting eye,” and he seemed to draw with incredible swiftness.
-
-The eleventh message is undoubtedly only a fragment of a longer
-communication. After some broken sentences, the record of which is
-unintelligible, it goes on:—
-
-“But it will interest only linguists, and delay me too long, to give
-the details of the series of intent parleys of which these were the
-beginning, and, indeed, I very much doubt if I could give in anything
-like the proper order all the twistings and turnings that we made in
-our pursuit of mutual comprehension. Verbs were soon plain sailing—at
-least, such active verbs as I could express by drawings; some
-adjectives were easy, but when it came to abstract nouns, to
-prepositions, and the sort of hackneyed figures of speech, by means of
-which so much is expressed on earth, it was like diving in
-cork-jackets. Indeed, these difficulties were insurmountable until to
-the sixth lesson came a fourth assistant, a being with a huge
-football-shaped head, whose _forte_ was clearly the pursuit of
-intricate analogy. He entered in a preoccupied manner, stumbling
-against a stool, and the difficulties that arose had to be presented to
-him with a certain amount of clamour and hitting and pricking before
-they reached his apprehension. But once he was involved his penetration
-was amazing. Whenever there came a need of thinking beyond Phi-oo’s by
-no means limited scope, this prolate-headed person was in request, but
-he invariably told the conclusion to Tsi-puff, in order that it might
-be remembered; Tsi-puff was ever the arsenal for facts. And so we
-advanced again.
-
-“It seemed long and yet brief—a matter of days—before I was positively
-talking with these insects of the moon. Of course, at first it was an
-intercourse infinitely tedious and exasperating, but imperceptibly it
-has grown to comprehension. And my patience has grown to meet its
-limitations, Phi-oo it is who does all the talking. He does it with a
-vast amount of meditative provisional ‘M’m—M’m’ and has caught up one
-or two phrases, If I may say,’ ‘If you understand,’ and beads all his
-speech with them.
-
-“Thus he would discourse. Imagine him explaining his artist.
-
-“‘M’m—M’m—he—if I may say—draw. Eat little—drink little—draw. Love
-draw. No other thing. Hate all who not draw like him. Angry. Hate all
-who draw like him better. Hate most people. Hate all who not think all
-world for to draw. Angry. M’m. All things mean nothing to him—only
-draw. He like you ... if you understand.... New thing to draw.
-Ugly—striking. Eh?
-
-“‘He’—turning to Tsi-puff—‘love remember words. Remember wonderful more
-than any. Think no, draw no—remember. Say’—here he referred to his
-gifted assistant for a word—‘histories—all things. He hear once—say
-ever.’
-
-“It is more wonderful to me than I dreamt that anything ever could be
-again, to hear, in this perpetual obscurity, these extraordinary
-creatures—for even familiarity fails to weaken the inhuman effect of
-their appearance—continually piping a nearer approach to coherent
-earthly speech—asking questions, giving answers. I feel that I am
-casting back to the fable-hearing period of childhood again, when the
-ant and the grasshopper talked together and the bee judged between
-them...”
-
-And while these linguistic exercises were going on Cavor seems to have
-experienced a considerable relaxation of his confinement. “The first
-dread and distrust our unfortunate conflict aroused is being,” he said,
-“continually effaced by the deliberate rationality of all I do.... I am
-now able to come and go as I please, or I am restricted only for my own
-good. So it is I have been able to get at this apparatus, and, assisted
-by a happy find among the material that is littered in this enormous
-store-cave, I have contrived to despatch these messages. So far not the
-slightest attempt has been made to interfere with me in this, though I
-have made it quite clear to Phi-oo that I am signalling to the earth.
-
-“‘You talk to other?’ he asked, watching me.
-
-“‘Others,’ said I.
-
-“‘Others,’ he said. ‘Oh yes, Men?’
-
-“And I went on transmitting.”
-
-Cavor was continually making corrections in his previous accounts of
-the Selenites as fresh facts flowed upon him to modify his conclusions,
-and accordingly one gives the quotations that follow with a certain
-amount of reservation. They are quoted from the ninth, thirteenth, and
-sixteenth messages, and, altogether vague and fragmentary as they are,
-they probably give as complete a picture of the social life of this
-strange community as mankind can now hope to have for many generations.
-
-“In the moon,” says Cavor, “every citizen knows his place. He is born
-to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education
-and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he
-has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. ‘Why should
-he?’ Phi-oo would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be a
-mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that end.
-They check any incipient disposition to other pursuits, they encourage
-his mathematical bias with a perfect psychological skill. His brain
-grows, or at least the mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and
-the rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain this essential
-part of him. At last, save for rest and food, his one delight lies in
-the exercise and display of his faculty, his one interest in its
-application, his sole society with other specialists in his own line.
-His brain grows continually larger, at least so far as the portions
-engaging in mathematics are concerned; they bulge ever larger and seem
-to suck all life and vigour from the rest of his frame. His limbs
-shrivel, his heart and digestive organs diminish, his insect face is
-hidden under its bulging contours. His voice becomes a mere
-stridulation for the stating of formulæ; he seems deaf to all but
-properly enunciated problems. The faculty of laughter, save for the
-sudden discovery of some paradox, is lost to him; his deepest emotion
-is the evolution of a novel computation. And so he attains his end.
-
-“Or, again, a Selenite appointed to be a minder of mooncalves is from
-his earliest years induced to think and live mooncalf, to find his
-pleasure in mooncalf lore, his exercise in their tending and pursuit.
-He is trained to become wiry and active, his eye is indurated to the
-tight wrappings, the angular contours that constitute a ‘smart
-mooncalfishness.’ He takes at last no interest in the deeper part of
-the moon; he regards all Selenites not equally versed in mooncalves
-with indifference, derision, or hostility. His thoughts are of mooncalf
-pastures, and his dialect an accomplished mooncalf technique. So also
-he loves his work, and discharges in perfect happiness the duty that
-justifies his being. And so it is with all sorts and conditions of
-Selenites—each is a perfect unit in a world machine....
-
-“These beings with big heads, on whom the intellectual labours fall,
-form a sort of aristocracy in this strange society, and at the head of
-them, quintessential of the moon, is that marvellous gigantic ganglion
-the Grand Lunar, into whose presence I am finally to come. The
-unlimited development of the minds of the intellectual class is
-rendered possible by the absence of any bony skull in the lunar
-anatomy, that strange box of bone that clamps about the developing
-brain of man, imperiously insisting ‘thus far and no farther’ to all
-his possibilities. They fall into three main classes differing greatly
-in influence and respect. There are administrators, of whom Phi-oo is
-one, Selenites of considerable initiative and versatility, responsible
-each for a certain cubic content of the moon’s bulk; the experts like
-the football-headed thinker, who are trained to perform certain special
-operations; and the erudite, who are the repositories of all knowledge.
-To the latter class belongs Tsi-puff, the first lunar professor of
-terrestrial languages. With regard to these latter, it is a curious
-little thing to note that the unlimited growth of the lunar brain has
-rendered unnecessary the invention of all those mechanical aids to
-brain work which have distinguished the career of man. There are no
-books, no records of any sort, no libraries or inscriptions. All
-knowledge is stored in distended brains much as the honey-ants of Texas
-store honey in their distended abdomens. The lunar Somerset House and
-the lunar British Museum Library are collections of living brains...
-
-“The less specialised administrators, I note, do for the most part take
-a very lively interest in me whenever they encounter me. They will come
-out of the way and stare at me and ask questions to which Phi-oo will
-reply. I see them going hither and thither with a retinue of bearers,
-attendants, shouters, parachute-carriers, and so forth—queer groups to
-see. The experts for the most part ignore me completely, even as they
-ignore each other, or notice me only to begin a clamorous exhibition of
-their distinctive skill. The erudite for the most part are rapt in an
-impervious and apoplectic complacency, from which only a denial of
-their erudition can rouse them. Usually they are led about by little
-watchers and attendants, and often there are small and active-looking
-creatures, small females usually, that I am inclined to think are a
-sort of wife to them; but some of the profounder scholars are
-altogether too great for locomotion, and are carried from place to
-place in a sort of sedan tub, wabbling jellies of knowledge that enlist
-my respectful astonishment. I have just passed one in coming to this
-place where I am permitted to amuse myself with these electrical toys,
-a vast, shaven, shaky head, bald and thin-skinned, carried on his
-grotesque stretcher. In front and behind came his bearers, and curious,
-almost trumpet-faced, news disseminators shrieked his fame.
-
-“I have already mentioned the retinues that accompany most of the
-intellectuals: ushers, bearers, valets, extraneous tentacles and
-muscles, as it were, to replace the abortive physical powers of these
-hypertrophied minds. Porters almost invariably accompany them. There
-are also extremely swift messengers with spider-like legs and ‘hands’
-for grasping parachutes, and attendants with vocal organs that could
-well nigh wake the dead. Apart from their controlling intelligence
-these subordinates are as inert and helpless as umbrellas in a stand.
-They exist only in relation to the orders they have to obey, the duties
-they have to perform.
-
-“The bulk of these insects, however, who go to and fro upon the spiral
-ways, who fill the ascending balloons and drop past me clinging to
-flimsy parachutes are, I gather, of the operative class. ‘Machine
-hands,’ indeed, some of these are in actual nature—it is no figure of
-speech, the single tentacle of the mooncalf herd is profoundly modified
-for clawing, lifting, guiding, the rest of them no more than necessary
-subordinate appendages to these important parts. Some, who I suppose
-deal with bell-striking mechanisms, have enormously developed auditory
-organs; some whose work lies in delicate chemical operations project a
-vast olfactory organ; others again have flat feet for treadles with
-anchylosed joints; and others—who I have been told are
-glassblowers—seem mere lung-bellows. But every one of these common
-Selenites I have seen at work is exquisitely adapted to the social need
-it meets. Fine work is done by fined-down workers, amazingly dwarfed
-and neat. Some I could hold on the palm of my hand. There is even a
-sort of turnspit Selenite, very common, whose duty and only delight it
-is to apply the motive power for various small appliances. And to rule
-over these things and order any erring tendency there might be in some
-aberrant natures are the most muscular beings I have seen in the moon,
-a sort of lunar police, who must have been trained from their earliest
-years to give a perfect respect and obedience to the swollen heads.
-
-“The making of these various sorts of operative must be a very curious
-and interesting process. I am very much in the dark about it, but quite
-recently I came upon a number of young Selenites confined in jars from
-which only the fore-limbs protruded, who were being compressed to
-become machine-minders of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this
-highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by
-irritants and nourished by injection, while the rest of the body is
-starved. Phi-oo, unless I misunderstood him, explained that in the
-earlier stages these queer little creatures are apt to display signs of
-suffering in their various cramped situations, but they easily become
-indurated to their lot; and he took me on to where a number of
-flexible-minded messengers were being drawn out and broken in. It is
-quite unreasonable, I know, but such glimpses of the educational
-methods of these beings affect me disagreeably. I hope, however, that
-may pass off, and I may be able to see more of this aspect of their
-wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand-tentacle sticking
-out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost
-possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course it is really in
-the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving
-children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.
-
-“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 short cut hither, instead of
-going down the spiral, and by the quays to 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.)
-
-“‘_No!_’ exclaimed Phi-oo. ‘Him—worker—no work to do. Get little drink
-then—make sleep—till we him want. What good him wake, eh? No want him
-walking about.’
-
-“‘There’s another!’ cried I.
-
-“And indeed all that huge extent of mushroom ground was, I found,
-peppered with these prostrate figures sleeping under an opiate until
-the moon had need of them. There were scores of them of all sorts, and
-we were able to turn over some of them, and examine them more precisely
-than I had been able to do previously. They breathed noisily at my
-doing so, but did not wake. One, I remember very distinctly: he left a
-strong impression, I think, because some trick of the light and of his
-attitude was strongly suggestive of a drawn-up human figure. His
-fore-limbs were long, delicate tentacles—he was some kind of refined
-manipulator—and the pose of his slumber suggested a submissive
-suffering. No doubt it was a mistake for me to interpret his expression
-in that way, but I did. And as Phi-oo rolled him over into the darkness
-among the livid fleshiness again I felt a distinctly unpleasant
-sensation, although as he rolled the insect in him was confessed.
-
-“It simply illustrates the unthinking way in which one acquires habits
-of feeling. To drug the worker one does not want and toss him aside is
-surely far better than to expel him from his factory to wander starving
-in the streets. In every complicated social community there is
-necessarily a certain intermittency of employment for all specialised
-labour, and in this way the trouble of an ‘unemployed’ problem is
-altogether anticipated. And yet, so unreasonable are even
-scientifically trained minds, I still do not like the memory of those
-prostrate forms amidst those quiet, luminous arcades of fleshy growth,
-and I avoid that short cut in spite of the inconveniences of the
-longer, more noisy, and more crowded alternative.
-
-“My alternative route takes me round by a huge, shadowy cavern, very
-crowded and clamorous, and here it is I see peering out of the
-hexagonal openings of a sort of honeycomb wall, or parading a large
-open space behind, or selecting the toys and amulets made to please
-them by the dainty-tentacled jewellers who work in kennels below, the
-mothers of the moon world—the queen bees, as it were, of the hive. They
-are noble-looking beings, fantastically and sometimes quite beautifully
-adorned, with a proud carriage, and, save for their mouths, almost
-microscopic heads.
-
-“Of the condition of the moon sexes, marrying and giving in marriage,
-and of birth and so forth among the Selenites, I have as yet been able
-to learn very little. With the steady progress of Phi-oo in English,
-however, my ignorance will no doubt as steadily disappear. I am of
-opinion that, as with the ants and bees, there is a large majority of
-the members in this community of the neuter sex. Of course on earth in
-our cities there are now many who never live that life of parentage
-which is the natural life of man. Here, as with the ants, this thing
-has become a normal condition of the race, and the whole of such
-replacement as is necessary falls upon this special and by no means
-numerous class of matrons, the mothers of the moon-world, large and
-stately beings beautifully fitted to bear the larval Selenite. Unless I
-misunderstand an explanation of Phi-oo’s, they are absolutely incapable
-of cherishing the young they bring into the moon; periods of foolish
-indulgence alternate with moods of aggressive violence, and as soon as
-possible the little creatures, who are quite soft and flabby and pale
-coloured, are transferred to the charge of celibate females, women
-‘workers’ as it were, who in some cases possess brains of almost
-masculine dimensions.”
-
-Just at this point, unhappily, this message broke off. Fragmentary and
-tantalising as the matter constituting this chapter is, it does
-nevertheless give a vague, broad impression of an altogether strange
-and wonderful world—a world with which our own may have to reckon we
-know not how speedily. This intermittent trickle of messages, this
-whispering of a record needle in the stillness of the mountain slopes,
-is the first warning of such a change in human conditions as mankind
-has scarcely imagined heretofore. In that satellite of ours there are
-new elements, new appliances, traditions, an overwhelming avalanche of
-new ideas, a strange race with whom we must inevitably struggle for
-mastery—gold as common as iron or wood...
-
-
-
-
-XXV.
-The Grand Lunar
-
-
-The penultimate message describes, with occasionally elaborate detail,
-the encounter between Cavor and the Grand Lunar, who is the ruler or
-master of the moon. Cavor seems to have sent most of it without
-interference, but to have been interrupted in the concluding portion.
-The second came after an interval of a week.
-
-The first message begins: “At last I am able to resume this—” it then
-becomes illegible for a space, and after a time resumed in
-mid-sentence.
-
-The missing words of the following sentence are probably “the crowd.”
-There follows quite clearly: “grew ever denser as we drew near the
-palace of the Grand Lunar—if I may call a series of excavations a
-palace. Everywhere faces stared at me—blank, chitinous gapes and masks,
-eyes peering over tremendous olfactory developments, eyes beneath
-monstrous forehead plates; and undergrowth of smaller creatures dodged
-and yelped, and helmet faces poised on sinuous, long-jointed necks
-appeared craning over shoulders and beneath armpits. Keeping a welcome
-space about me marched a cordon of stolid, scuttle-headed guards, who
-had joined us on our leaving the boat in which we had come along the
-channels of the Central Sea. The quick-eyed artist with the little
-brain joined us also, and a thick bunch of lean porter-insects swayed
-and struggled under the multitude of conveniences that were considered
-essential to my state. I was carried in a litter during the final stage
-of our journey. This litter was made of some very ductile metal that
-looked dark to me, meshed and woven, and with bars of paler metal, and
-about me as I advanced there grouped itself a long and complicated
-procession.
-
-“In front, after the manner of heralds, marched four trumpet-faced
-creatures making a devastating bray; and then came squat,
-resolute-moving ushers before and behind, and on either hand a galaxy
-of learned heads, a sort of animated encyclopedia, who were, Phi-oo
-explained, to stand about the Grand Lunar for purposes of reference.
-(Not a thing in lunar science, not a point of view or method of
-thinking, that these wonderful beings did not carry in their heads!)
-Followed guards and porters, and then Phi-oo’s shivering brain borne
-also on a litter. Then came Tsi-puff in a slightly less important
-litter; then myself on a litter of greater elegance than any other, and
-surrounded by my food and drink attendants. More trumpeters came next,
-splitting the ear with vehement outcries, and then several big brains,
-special correspondents one might well call them, or historiographers,
-charged with the task of observing and remembering every detail of this
-epoch-making interview. A company of attendants, bearing and dragging
-banners and masses of scented fungus and curious symbols, vanished in
-the darkness behind. The way was lined by ushers and officers in
-caparisons that gleamed like steel, and beyond their line, so far as my
-eyes could pierce the gloom, the heads of that enormous crowd extended.
-
-“I will own that I am still by no means indurated to the peculiar
-effect of the Selenite appearance, and to find myself, as it were,
-adrift on this broad sea of excited entomology was by no means
-agreeable. Just for a space I had something very like what I should
-imagine people mean when they speak of the ‘horrors.’ It had come to me
-before in these lunar caverns, when on occasion I have found myself
-weaponless and with an undefended back, amidst a crowd of these
-Selenites, but never quite so vividly. It is, of course, as absolutely
-irrational a feeling as one could well have, and I hope gradually to
-subdue it. But just for a moment, as I swept forward into the welter of
-the vast crowd, it was only by gripping my litter tightly and summoning
-all my will-power that I succeeded in avoiding an outcry or some such
-manifestation. It lasted perhaps three minutes; then I had myself in
-hand again.
-
-“We ascended the spiral of a vertical way for some time, and then
-passed through a series of huge halls dome-roofed and elaborately
-decorated. The approach to the Grand Lunar was certainly contrived to
-give one a vivid impression of his greatness. Each cavern one entered
-seemed greater and more boldly arched than its predecessor. This effect
-of progressive size was enhanced by a thin haze of faintly
-phosphorescent blue incense that thickened as one advanced, and robbed
-even the nearer figures of clearness. I seemed to advance continually
-to something larger, dimmer, and less material.
-
-“I must confess that all this multitude made me feel extremely shabby
-and unworthy. I was unshaven and unkempt; I had brought no razor; I had
-a coarse beard over my mouth. On earth I have always been inclined to
-despise any attention to my person beyond a proper care for
-cleanliness; but under the exceptional circumstances in which I found
-myself, representing, as I did, my planet and my kind, and depending
-very largely upon the attractiveness of my appearance for a proper
-reception, I could have given much for something a little more artistic
-and dignified than the husks I wore. I had been so serene in the belief
-that the moon was uninhabited as to overlook such precautions
-altogether. As it was I was dressed in a flannel jacket,
-knickerbockers, and golfing stockings, stained with every sort of dirt
-the moon offered, slippers (of which the left heel was wanting), and a
-blanket, through a hole in which I thrust my head. (These clothes,
-indeed, I still wear.) Sharp bristles are anything but an improvement
-to my cast of features, and there was an unmended tear at the knee of
-my knickerbockers that showed conspicuously as I squatted in my litter;
-my right stocking, too, persisted in getting about my ankle. I am fully
-alive to the injustice my appearance did humanity, and if by any
-expedient I could have improvised something a little out of the way and
-imposing I would have done so. But I could hit upon nothing. I did what
-I could with my blanket—folding it somewhat after the fashion of a
-toga, and for the rest I sat as upright as the swaying of my litter
-permitted.
-
-“Imagine the largest hall you have ever been in, imperfectly lit with
-blue light and obscured by a grey-blue fog, surging with metallic or
-livid-grey creatures of such a mad diversity as I have hinted. Imagine
-this hall to end in an open archway beyond which is a still larger
-hall, and beyond this yet another and still larger one, and so on. At
-the end of the vista, dimly seen, a flight of steps, like the steps of
-Ara Coeli at Rome, ascend out of sight. Higher and higher these steps
-appear to go as one draws nearer their base. But at last I came under a
-huge archway and beheld the summit of these steps, and upon it the
-Grand Lunar exalted on his throne.
-
-“He was seated in what was relatively a blaze of incandescent blue.
-This, and the darkness about him gave him an effect of floating in a
-blue-black void. He seemed a small, self-luminous cloud at first,
-brooding on his sombre throne; his brain case must have measured many
-yards in diameter. For some reason that I cannot fathom a number of
-blue search-lights radiated from behind the throne on which he sat, and
-immediately encircling him was a halo. About him, and little and
-indistinct in this glow, a number of body-servants sustained and
-supported him, and overshadowed and standing in a huge semicircle
-beneath him were his intellectual subordinates, his remembrancers and
-computators and searchers and servants, and all the distinguished
-insects of the court of the moon. Still lower stood ushers and
-messengers, and then all down the countless steps of the throne were
-guards, and at the base, enormous, various, indistinct, vanishing at
-last into an absolute black, a vast swaying multitude of the minor
-dignitaries of the moon. Their feet made a perpetual scraping whisper
-on the rocky floor, as their limbs moved with a rustling murmur.
-
-“As I entered the penultimate hall the music rose and expanded into an
-imperial magnificence of sound, and the shrieks of the news-bearers
-died away....
-
-“I entered the last and greatest hall....
-
-“My procession opened out like a fan. My ushers and guards went right
-and left, and the three litters bearing myself and Phi-oo and Tsi-puff
-marched across a shiny darkness of floor to the foot of the giant
-stairs. Then began a vast throbbing hum, that mingled with the music.
-The two Selenites dismounted, but I was bidden remain seated—I imagine
-as a special honour. The music ceased, but not that humming, and by a
-simultaneous movement of ten thousand respectful heads my attention was
-directed to the enhaloed supreme intelligence that hovered above me.
-
-“At first as I peered into the radiating glow this quintessential brain
-looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with dim,
-undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within. Then beneath
-its enormity and just above the edge of the throne one saw with a start
-minute elfin eyes peering out of the glow. No face, but eyes, as if
-they peered through holes. At first I could see no more than these two
-staring little eyes, and then below I distinguished the little dwarfed
-body and its insect-jointed limbs shrivelled and white. The eyes stared
-down at me with a strange intensity, and the lower part of the swollen
-globe was wrinkled. Ineffectual-looking little hand-tentacles steadied
-this shape on the throne....
-
-“It was great. It was pitiful. One forgot the hall and the crowd.
-
-“I ascended the staircase by jerks. It seemed to me that this darkly
-glowing brain case above us spread over me, and took more and more of
-the whole effect into itself as I drew nearer. The tiers of attendants
-and helpers grouped about their master seemed to dwindle and fade into
-the night. I saw that shadowy attendants were busy spraying that great
-brain with a cooling spray, and patting and sustaining it. For my own
-part, I sat gripping my swaying litter and staring at the Grand Lunar,
-unable to turn my gaze aside. And at last, as I reached a little
-landing that was separated only by ten steps or so from the supreme
-seat, the woven splendour of the music reached a climax and ceased, and
-I was left naked, as it were, in that vastness, beneath the still
-scrutiny of the Grand Lunar’s eyes.
-
-“He was scrutinising the first man he had ever seen....
-
-“My eyes dropped at last from his greatness to the ant figures in the
-blue mist about him, and then down the steps to the massed Selenites,
-still and expectant in their thousands, packed on the floor below. Once
-again an unreasonable horror reached out towards me.... And passed.
-
-“After the pause came the salutation. I was assisted from my litter,
-and stood awkwardly while a number of curious and no doubt deeply
-symbolical gestures were vicariously performed for me by two slender
-officials. The encyclopaedic galaxy of the learned that had accompanied
-me to the entrance of the last hall appeared two steps above me and
-left and right of me, in readiness for the Grand Lunar’s need, and
-Phi-oo’s pale brain placed itself about half-way up to the throne in
-such a position as to communicate easily between us without turning his
-back on either the Grand Lunar or myself. Tsi-puff took up a position
-behind him. Dexterous ushers sidled sideways towards me, keeping a full
-face to the Presence. I seated myself Turkish fashion, and Phi-oo and
-Tsi-puff also knelt down above me. There came a pause. The eyes of the
-nearer court went from me to the Grand Lunar and came back to me, and a
-hissing and piping of expectation passed across the hidden multitudes
-below and ceased.
-
-“That humming ceased.
-
-“For the first and last time in my experience the moon was silent.
-
-“I became aware of a faint wheezy noise. The Grand Lunar was addressing
-me. It was like the rubbing of a finger upon a pane of glass.
-
-“I watched him attentively for a time, and then glanced at the alert
-Phi-oo. I felt amidst these slender beings ridiculously thick and
-fleshy and solid; my head all jaw and black hair. My eyes went back to
-the Grand Lunar. He had ceased; his attendants were busy, and his
-shining superficies was glistening and running with cooling spray.
-
-“Phi-oo meditated through an interval. He consulted Tsi-puff. Then he
-began piping his recognisable English—at first a little nervously, so
-that he was not very clear.
-
-“‘M’m—the Grand Lunar—wished to say—wishes to say—he gathers you
-are—m’m—men—that you are a man from the planet earth. He wishes to say
-that he welcomes you—welcomes you—and wishes to learn—learn, if I may
-use the word—the state of your world, and the reason why you came to
-this.’
-
-“He paused. I was about to reply when he resumed. He proceeded to
-remarks of which the drift was not very clear, though I am inclined to
-think they were intended to be complimentary. He told me that the earth
-was to the moon what the sun is to the earth, and that the Selenites
-desired very greatly to learn about the earth and men. He then told me
-no doubt in compliment also, the relative magnitude and diameter of
-earth and moon, and the perpetual wonder and speculation with which the
-Selenites had regarded our planet. I meditated with downcast eyes, and
-decided to reply that men too had wondered what might lie in the moon,
-and had judged it dead, little recking of such magnificence as I had
-seen that day. The Grand Lunar, in token of recognition, caused his
-long blue rays to rotate in a very confusing manner, and all about the
-great hall ran the pipings and whisperings and rustlings of the report
-of what I had said. He then proceeded to put to Phi-oo a number of
-inquiries which were easier to answer.
-
-“He understood, he explained, that we lived on the surface of the
-earth, that our air and sea were outside the globe; the latter part,
-indeed, he already knew from his astronomical specialists. He was very
-anxious to have more detailed information of what he called this
-extraordinary state of affairs, for from the solidity of the earth
-there had always been a disposition to regard it as uninhabitable. He
-endeavoured first to ascertain the extremes of temperature to which we
-earth beings were exposed, and he was deeply interested by my
-descriptive treatment of clouds and rain. His imagination was assisted
-by the fact that the lunar atmosphere in the outer galleries of the
-night side is not infrequently very foggy. He seemed inclined to marvel
-that we did not find the sunlight too intense for our eyes, and was
-interested in my attempt to explain that the sky was tempered to a
-bluish colour through the refraction of the air, though I doubt if he
-clearly understood that. I explained how the iris of the human eyes can
-contract the pupil and save the delicate internal structure from the
-excess of sunlight, and was allowed to approach within a few feet of
-the Presence in order that this structure might be seen. This led to a
-comparison of the lunar and terrestrial eyes. The former is not only
-excessively sensitive to such light as men can see, but it can also
-_see_ heat, and every difference in temperature within the moon renders
-objects visible to it.
-
-“The iris was quite a new organ to the Grand Lunar. For a time he
-amused himself by flashing his rays into my face and watching my pupils
-contract. As a consequence, I was dazzled and blinded for some little
-time....
-
-“But in spite of that discomfort I found something reassuring by
-insensible degrees in the rationality of this business of question and
-answer. I could shut my eyes, think of my answer, and almost forget
-that the the Grand Lunar has no face....
-
-“When I had descended again to my proper place the Grand Lunar asked
-how we sheltered ourselves from heat and storms, and I expounded to him
-the arts of building and furnishing. Here we wandered into
-misunderstandings and cross-purposes, due largely, I must admit, to the
-looseness of my expressions. For a long time I had great difficulty in
-making him understand the nature of a house. To him and his attendant
-Selenites it seemed, no doubt, the most whimsical thing in the world
-that men should build houses when they might descend into excavations,
-and an additional complication was introduced by the attempt I made to
-explain that men had originally begun their homes in caves, and that
-they were now taking their railways and many establishments beneath the
-surface. Here I think a desire for intellectual completeness betrayed
-me. There was also a considerable tangle due to an equally unwise
-attempt on my part to explain about mines. Dismissing this topic at
-last in an incomplete state, the Grand Lunar inquired what we did with
-the interior of our globe.
-
-“A tide of twittering and piping swept into the remotest corners of
-that great assembly when it was at last made clear that we men know
-absolutely nothing of the contents of the world upon which the
-immemorial generations of our ancestors had been evolved. Three times
-had I to repeat that of all the 4000 miles of distance between the
-earth and its centre men knew only to the depth of a mile, and that
-very vaguely. I understood the Grand Lunar to ask why had I come to the
-moon seeing we had scarcely touched our own planet yet, but he did not
-trouble me at that time to proceed to an explanation, being too anxious
-to pursue the details of this mad inversion of all his ideas.
-
-“He reverted to the question of weather, and I tried to describe the
-perpetually changing sky, and snow, and frost and hurricanes. ‘But when
-the night comes,’ he asked, ‘is it not cold?’
-
-“I told him it was colder than by day.
-
-“‘And does not your atmosphere freeze?’
-
-“I told him not; that it was never cold enough for that, because our
-nights were so short.
-
-“‘Not even liquefy?’
-
-“I was about to say ‘No,’ but then it occurred to me that one part at
-least of our atmosphere, the water vapour of it, does sometimes liquefy
-and form dew, and sometimes freeze and form frost—a process perfectly
-analogous to the freezing of all the external atmosphere of the moon
-during its longer night. I made myself clear on this point, and from
-that the Grand Lunar went on to speak with me of sleep. For the need of
-sleep that comes so regularly every twenty-four hours to all things is
-part also of our earthly inheritance. On the moon they rest only at
-rare intervals, and after exceptional exertions. Then I tried to
-describe to him the soft splendours of a summer night, and from that I
-passed to a description of those animals that prowl by night and sleep
-by day. I told him of lions and tigers, and here it seemed as though we
-had come to a deadlock. For, save in their waters, there are no
-creatures in the moon not absolutely domestic and subject to his will,
-and so it has been for immemorial years. They have monstrous water
-creatures, but no evil beasts, and the idea of anything strong and
-large existing ‘outside’ in the night is very difficult for them....”
-
-[The record is here too broken to transcribe for the space of perhaps
-twenty words or more.]
-
-“He talked with his attendants, as I suppose, upon the strange
-superficiality and unreasonableness of (man) who lives on the mere
-surface of a world, a creature of waves and winds, and all the chances
-of space, who cannot even unite to overcome the beasts that prey upon
-his kind, and yet who dares to invade another planet. During this aside
-I sat thinking, and then at his desire I told him of the different
-sorts of men. He searched me with questions. ‘And for all sorts of work
-you have the same sort of men. But who thinks? Who governs?’
-
-“I gave him an outline of the democratic method.
-
-“When I had done he ordered cooling sprays upon his brow, and then
-requested me to repeat my explanation conceiving something had
-miscarried.
-
-“‘Do they not do different things, then?’ said Phi-oo.
-
-“Some, I admitted, were thinkers and some officials; some hunted, some
-were mechanics, some artists, some toilers. ‘But _all_ rule,’ I said.
-
-“‘And have they not different shapes to fit them to their different
-duties?’
-
-“‘None that you can see,’ I said, ‘except perhaps, for clothes. Their
-minds perhaps differ a little,’ I reflected.
-
-“‘Their minds must differ a great deal,’ said the Grand Lunar, ‘or they
-would all want to do the same things.’
-
-“In order to bring myself into a closer harmony with his
-preconceptions, I said that his surmise was right. ‘It was all hidden
-in the brain,’ I said; but the difference was there. Perhaps if one
-could see the minds and souls of men they would be as varied and
-unequal as the Selenites. There were great men and small men, men who
-could reach out far and wide, men who could go swiftly; noisy,
-trumpet-minded men, and men who could remember without thinking....’”
-[The record is indistinct for three words.]
-
-“He interrupted me to recall me to my previous statements. ‘But you
-said all men rule?’ he pressed.
-
-“‘To a certain extent,’ I said, and made, I fear, a denser fog with my
-explanation.
-
-“He reached out to a salient fact. ‘Do you mean,’ asked, ‘that there is
-no Grand Earthly?’
-
-“I thought of several people, but assured him finally there was none. I
-explained that such autocrats and emperors as we had tried upon earth
-had usually ended in drink, or vice, or violence, and that the large
-and influential section of the people of the earth to which I belonged,
-the Anglo-Saxons, did not mean to try that sort of thing again. At
-which the Grand Lunar was even more amazed.
-
-“‘But how do you keep even such wisdom as you have?’ he asked; and I
-explained to him the way we helped our limited [A word omitted here,
-probably “brains.”] with libraries of books. I explained to him how our
-science was growing by the united labours of innumerable little men,
-and on that he made no comment save that it was evident we had mastered
-much in spite of our social savagery, or we could not have come to the
-moon. Yet the contrast was very marked. With knowledge the Selenites
-grew and changed; mankind stored their knowledge about them and
-remained brutes—equipped. He said this...” [Here there is a short piece
-of the record indistinct.]
-
-“He then caused me to describe how we went about this earth of ours,
-and I described to him our railways and ships. For a time he could not
-understand that we had had the use of steam only one hundred years, but
-when he did he was clearly amazed. (I may mention as a singular thing,
-that the Selenites use years to count by, just as we do on earth,
-though I can make nothing of their numeral system. That, however, does
-not matter, because Phi-oo understands ours.) From that I went on to
-tell him that mankind had dwelt in cities only for nine or ten thousand
-years, and that we were still not united in one brotherhood, but under
-many different forms of government. This astonished the Grand Lunar
-very much, when it was made clear to him. At first he thought we
-referred merely to administrative areas.
-
-“‘Our States and Empires are still the rawest sketches of what order
-will some day be,’ I said, and so I came to tell him....” [At this
-point a length of record that probably represents thirty or forty words
-is totally illegible.]
-
-“The Grand Lunar was greatly impressed by the folly of men in clinging
-to the inconvenience of diverse tongues. ‘They want to communicate, and
-yet not to communicate,’ he said, and then for a long time he
-questioned me closely concerning war.
-
-“He was at first perplexed and incredulous. ‘You mean to say,’ he
-asked, seeking confirmation, ‘that you run about over the surface of
-your world—this world, whose riches you have scarcely begun to
-scrape—killing one another for beasts to eat?’
-
-“I told him that was perfectly correct.
-
-“He asked for particulars to assist his imagination.
-
-“‘But do not ships and your poor little cities get injured?’ he asked,
-and I found the waste of property and conveniences seemed to impress
-him almost as much as the killing. ‘Tell me more,’ said the Grand
-Lunar; ‘make me see pictures. I cannot conceive these things.’
-
-“And so, for a space, though something loath, I told him the story of
-earthly War.
-
-“I told him of the first orders and ceremonies of war, of warnings and
-ultimatums, and the marshalling and marching of troops. I gave him an
-idea of manoeuvres and positions and battle joined. I told him of
-sieges and assaults, of starvation and hardship in trenches, and of
-sentinels freezing in the snow. I told him of routs and surprises, and
-desperate last stands and faint hopes, and the pitiless pursuit of
-fugitives and the dead upon the field. I told, too, of the past, of
-invasions and massacres, of the Huns and Tartars, and the wars of
-Mahomet and the Caliphs, and of the Crusades. And as I went on, and
-Phi-oo translated, the Selenites cooed and murmured in a steadily
-intensified emotion.
-
-“I told them an ironclad could fire a shot of a ton twelve miles, and
-go through 20 feet of iron—and how we could steer torpedoes under
-water. I went on to describe a Maxim gun in action, and what I could
-imagine of the Battle of Colenso. The Grand Lunar was so incredulous
-that he interrupted the translation of what I had said in order to have
-my verification of my account. They particularly doubted my description
-of the men cheering and rejoicing as they went into battle.
-
-“‘But surely they do not like it!’ translated Phi-oo.
-
-“I assured them men of my race considered battle the most glorious
-experience of life, at which the whole assembly was stricken with
-amazement.
-
-“‘But what good is this war?’ asked the Grand Lunar, sticking to his
-theme.
-
-“‘Oh! as for _good_!’ said I; ‘it thins the population!’
-
-“‘But why should there be a need—?’
-
-“There came a pause, the cooling sprays impinged upon his brow, and
-then he spoke again.”
-
-At this point a series of undulations that have been apparent as a
-perplexing complication as far back as Cavor’s description of the
-silence that fell before the first speaking of the Grand Lunar become
-confusingly predominant in the record. These undulations are evidently
-the result of radiations proceeding from a lunar source, and their
-persistent approximation to the alternating signals of Cavor is
-curiously suggestive of some operator deliberately seeking to mix them
-in with his message and render it illegible. At first they are small
-and regular, so that with a little care and the loss of very few words
-we have been able to disentangle Cavor’s message; then they become
-broad and larger, then suddenly they are irregular, with an
-irregularity that gives the effect at last of some one scribbling
-through a line of writing. For a long time nothing can be made of this
-madly zigzagging trace; then quite abruptly the interruption ceases,
-leaves a few words clear, and then resumes and continues for the rest
-of the message, completely obliterating whatever Cavor was attempting
-to transmit. Why, if this is indeed a deliberate intervention, the
-Selenites should have preferred to let Cavor go on transmitting his
-message in happy ignorance of their obliteration of its record, when it
-was clearly quite in their power and much more easy and convenient for
-them to stop his proceedings at any time, is a problem to which I can
-contribute nothing. The thing seems to have happened so, and that is
-all I can say. This last rag of his description of the Grand Lunar
-begins in mid-sentence.
-
-
-“...interrogated me very closely upon my secret. I was able in a little
-while to get to an understanding with them, and at last to elucidate
-what has been a puzzle to me ever since I realised the vastness of
-their science, namely, how it is they themselves have never discovered
-Cavorite.’ I find they know of it as a theoretical substance, but they
-have always regarded it as a practical impossibility, because for some
-reason there is no helium in the moon, and helium...”
-
-Across the last letters of helium slashes the resumption of that
-obliterating trace. Note that word “secret,” for on that, and that
-alone, I base my interpretation of the message that follows, the last
-message, as both Mr. Wendigee and myself now believe it to be, that he
-is ever likely to send us.
-
-
-
-
-XXVI.
-The Last Message Cavor sent to the Earth
-
-
-On this unsatisfactory manner the penultimate message of Cavor dies
-out. One seems to see him away there in the blue obscurity amidst his
-apparatus intently signalling us to the last, all unaware of the
-curtain of confusion that drops between us; all unaware, too, of the
-final dangers that even then must have been creeping upon him. His
-disastrous want of vulgar common sense had utterly betrayed him. He had
-talked of war, he had talked of all the strength and irrational
-violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless
-futility of conflict. He had filled the whole moon world with this
-impression of our race, and then I think it is plain that he made the
-most fatal admission that upon himself alone hung the possibility—at
-least for a long time—of any further men reaching the moon. The line
-the cold, inhuman reason of the moon would take seems plain enough to
-me, and a suspicion of it, and then perhaps some sudden sharp
-realisation of it, must have come to him. One imagines him about the
-moon with the remorse of this fatal indiscretion growing in his mind.
-During a certain time I am inclined to guess the Grand Lunar was
-deliberating the new situation, and for all that time Cavor may have
-gone as free as ever he had gone. But obstacles of some sort prevented
-his getting to his electromagnetic apparatus again after that message I
-have just given. For some days we received nothing. Perhaps he was
-having fresh audiences, and trying to evade his previous admissions.
-Who can hope to guess?
-
-And then suddenly, like a cry in the night, like a cry that is followed
-by a stillness, came the last message. It is the briefest fragment, the
-broken beginnings of two sentences.
-
-The first was: “I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know—”
-
-There was an interval of perhaps a minute. One imagines some
-interruption from without. A departure from the instrument—a dreadful
-hesitation among the looming masses of apparatus in that dim, blue-lit
-cavern—a sudden rush back to it, full of a resolve that came too late.
-Then, as if it were hastily transmitted came: “Cavorite made as
-follows: take—”
-
-There followed one word, a quite unmeaning word as it stands: “uless.”
-
-And that is all.
-
-It may be he made a hasty attempt to spell “useless” when his fate was
-close upon him. Whatever it was that was happening about that apparatus
-we cannot tell. Whatever it was we shall never, I know, receive another
-message from the moon. For my own part a vivid dream has come to my
-help, and I see, almost as plainly as though I had seen it in actual
-fact, a blue-lit shadowy dishevelled Cavor struggling in the grip of
-these insect Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly
-as they press upon him, shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last
-fighting, and being forced backwards step by step out of all speech or
-sign of his fellows, for evermore into the Unknown—into the dark, into
-that silence that has no end....
-
-
-*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1013 ***