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 those 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 says 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 ultramarine 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
fishing 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 rôle 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 up-flow 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....