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....