The First Men in the Moon

I.

Mr. Bedford Meets Mr. Cavor at Lympne

As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the

blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of

astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr.

Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. It might have

been any one. I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself

removed from the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences. I had

gone to Lympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place in

the world. “Here, at any rate,” said I, “I shall find peace and a

chance to work!”

And this book is the sequel. So utterly at variance is destiny with all

the little plans of men. I may perhaps mention here that very recently

I had come an ugly cropper in certain business enterprises. Sitting now

surrounded by all the circumstances of wealth, there is a luxury in

admitting my extremity. I can admit, even, that to a certain extent my

disasters were conceivably of my own making. It may be there are

directions in which I have some capacity, but the conduct of business

operations is not among these. But in those days I was young, and my

youth among other objectionable forms took that of a pride in my

capacity for affairs. I am young still in years, but the things that

have happened to me have rubbed something of the youth from my mind.

Whether they have brought any wisdom to light below it is a more

doubtful matter.

It is scarcely necessary to go into the details of the speculations

that landed me at Lympne, in Kent. Nowadays even about business

transactions there is a strong spice of adventure. I took risks. In

these things there is invariably a certain amount of give and take, and

it fell to me finally to do the giving reluctantly enough. Even when I

had got out of everything, one cantankerous creditor saw fit to be

malignant. Perhaps you have met that flaming sense of outraged virtue,

or perhaps you have only felt it. He ran me hard. It seemed to me, at

last, that there was nothing for it but to write a play, unless I

wanted to drudge for my living as a clerk. I have a certain

imagination, and luxurious tastes, and I meant to make a vigorous fight

for it before that fate overtook me. In addition to my belief in my

powers as a business man, I had always in those days had an idea that I

was equal to writing a very good play. It is not, I believe, a very

uncommon persuasion. I knew there is nothing a man can do outside

legitimate business transactions that has such opulent possibilities,

and very probably that biased my opinion. I had, indeed, got into the

habit of regarding this unwritten drama as a convenient little reserve

put by for a rainy day. That rainy day had come, and I set to work.

I soon discovered that writing a play was a longer business than I had

supposed; at first I had reckoned ten days for it, and it was to have a

_pied-à-terre_ while it was in hand that I came to Lympne. I reckoned

myself lucky in getting that little bungalow. I got it on a three

years’ agreement. I put in a few sticks of furniture, and while the

play was in hand I did my own cooking. My cooking would have shocked

Mrs. Bond. And yet, you know, it had flavour. I had a coffee-pot, a

sauce-pan for eggs, and one for potatoes, and a frying-pan for sausages

and bacon—such was the simple apparatus of my comfort. One cannot

always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.

For the rest I laid in an eighteen-gallon cask of beer on credit, and a

trustful baker came each day. It was not, perhaps, in the style of

Sybaris, but I have had worse times. I was a little sorry for the

baker, who was a very decent man indeed, but even for him I hoped.

Certainly if any one wants solitude, the place is Lympne. It is in the

clay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea

cliff and stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea. In very

wet weather the place is almost inaccessible, and I have heard that at

times the postman used to traverse the more succulent portions of his

route with boards upon his feet. I never saw him doing so, but I can

quite imagine it. Outside the doors of the few cottages and houses that

make up the present village big birch besoms are stuck, to wipe off the

worst of the clay, which will give some idea of the texture of the

district. I doubt if the place would be there at all, if it were not a

fading memory of things gone for ever. It was the big port of England

in Roman times, Portus Lemanis, and now the sea is four miles away. All

down the steep hill are boulders and masses of Roman brickwork, and

from it old Watling Street, still paved in places, starts like an arrow

to the north. I used to stand on the hill and think of it all, the

galleys and legions, the captives and officials, the women and traders,

the speculators like myself, all the swarm and tumult that came

clanking in and out of the harbour. And now just a few lumps of rubble

on a grassy slope, and a sheep or two—and I. And where the port had

been were the levels of the marsh, sweeping round in a broad curve to

distant Dungeness, and dotted here and there with tree clumps and the

church towers of old mediæval towns that are following Lemanis now

towards extinction.

That outlook on the marsh was, indeed, one of the finest views I have

ever seen. I suppose Dungeness was fifteen miles away; it lay like a

raft on the sea, and farther westward were the hills by Hastings under

the setting sun. Sometimes they hung close and clear, sometimes they

were faded and low, and often the drift of the weather took them clean

out of sight. And all the nearer parts of the marsh were laced and lit

by ditches and canals.

The window at which I worked looked over the skyline of this crest, and

it was from this window that I first set eyes on Cavor. It was just as

I was struggling with my scenario, holding down my mind to the sheer

hard work of it, and naturally enough he arrested my attention.

The sun had set, the sky was a vivid tranquillity of green and yellow,

and against that he came out black—the oddest little figure.

He was a short, round-bodied, thin-legged little man, with a jerky

quality in his motions; he had seen fit to clothe his extraordinary

mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat, and cycling knickerbockers and

stockings. Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he

never played cricket. It was a fortuitous concurrence of garments,

arising I know not how. He gesticulated with his hands and arms, and

jerked his head about and buzzed. He buzzed like something electric.

You never heard such buzzing. And ever and again he cleared his throat

with a most extraordinary noise.

There had been rain, and that spasmodic walk of his was enhanced by the

extreme slipperiness of the footpath. Exactly as he came against the

sun he stopped, pulled out a watch, hesitated. Then with a sort of

convulsive gesture he turned and retreated with every manifestation of

haste, no longer gesticulating, but going with ample strides that

showed the relatively large size of his feet—they were, I remember,

grotesquely exaggerated in size by adhesive clay—to the best possible

advantage.

This occurred on the first day of my sojourn, when my play-writing

energy was at its height and I regarded the incident simply as an

annoying distraction—the waste of five minutes. I returned to my

scenario. But when next evening the apparition was repeated with

remarkable precision, and again the next evening, and indeed every

evening when rain was not falling, concentration upon the scenario

became a considerable effort. “Confound the man,” I said, “one would

think he was learning to be a marionette!” and for several evenings I

cursed him pretty heartily. Then my annoyance gave way to amazement and

curiosity. Why on earth should a man do this thing? On the fourteenth

evening I could stand it no longer, and so soon as he appeared I opened

the french window, crossed the verandah, and directed myself to the

point where he invariably stopped.

He had his watch out as I came up to him. He had a chubby, rubicund

face with reddish brown eyes—previously I had seen him only against the

light. “One moment, sir,” said I as he turned. He stared. “One moment,”

he said, “certainly. Or if you wish to speak to me for longer, and it

is not asking too much—your moment is up—would it trouble you to

accompany me?”

“Not in the least,” said I, placing myself beside him.

“My habits are regular. My time for intercourse—limited.”

“This, I presume, is your time for exercise?”

“It is. I come here to enjoy the sunset.”

“You don’t.”

“Sir?”

“You never look at it.”

“Never look at it?”

“No. I’ve watched you thirteen nights, and not once have you looked at

the sunset—not once.”

He knitted his brows like one who encounters a problem.

“Well, I enjoy the sunlight—the atmosphere—I go along this path,

through that gate”—he jerked his head over his shoulder—“and round—”

“You don’t. You never have been. It’s all nonsense. There isn’t a way.

To-night for instance—”

“Oh! to-night! Let me see. Ah! I just glanced at my watch, saw that I

had already been out just three minutes over the precise half-hour,

decided there was not time to go round, turned—”

“You always do.”

He looked at me—reflected. “Perhaps I do, now I come to think of it.

But what was it you wanted to speak to me about?”

“Why, this!”

“This?”

“Yes. Why do you do it? Every night you come making a noise—”

“Making a noise?”

“Like this.” I imitated his buzzing noise. He looked at me, and it was

evident the buzzing awakened distaste. “Do I do _that?_” he asked.

“Every blessed evening.”

“I had no idea.”

He stopped dead. He regarded me gravely. “Can it be,” he said, “that I

have formed a Habit?”

“Well, it looks like it. Doesn’t it?”

He pulled down his lower lip between finger and thumb. He regarded a

puddle at his feet.

“My mind is much occupied,” he said. “And you want to know _why!_ Well,

sir, I can assure you that not only do I not know why I do these

things, but I did not even know I did them. Come to think, it is just

as you say; I never _have_ been beyond that field.... And these things

annoy you?”

For some reason I was beginning to relent towards him. “Not _annoy_,” I

said. “But—imagine yourself writing a play!”

“I couldn’t.”

“Well, anything that needs concentration.”

“Ah!” he said, “of course,” and meditated. His expression became so

eloquent of distress, that I relented still more. After all, there is a

touch of aggression in demanding of a man you don’t know why he hums on

a public footpath.

“You see,” he said weakly, “it’s a habit.”

“Oh, I recognise that.”

“I must stop it.”

“But not if it puts you out. After all, I had no business—it’s

something of a liberty.”

“Not at all, sir,” he said, “not at all. I am greatly indebted to you.

I should guard myself against these things. In future I will. Could I

trouble you—once again? That noise?”

“Something like this,” I said. “Zuzzoo, zuzzoo. But really, you know—”

“I am greatly obliged to you. In fact, I know I am getting absurdly

absent-minded. You are quite justified, sir—perfectly justified.

Indeed, I am indebted to you. The thing shall end. And now, sir, I have

already brought you farther than I should have done.”

“I do hope my impertinence—”

“Not at all, sir, not at all.”

We regarded each other for a moment. I raised my hat and wished him a

good evening. He responded convulsively, and so we went our ways.

At the stile I looked back at his receding figure. His bearing had

changed remarkably, he seemed limp, shrunken. The contrast with his

former gesticulating, zuzzoing self took me in some absurd way as

pathetic. I watched him out of sight. Then wishing very heartily I had

kept to my own business, I returned to my bungalow and my play.

The next evening I saw nothing of him, nor the next. But he was very

much in my mind, and it had occurred to me that as a sentimental comic

character he might serve a useful purpose in the development of my

plot. The third day he called upon me.

For a time I was puzzled to think what had brought him. He made

indifferent conversation in the most formal way, then abruptly he came

to business. He wanted to buy me out of my bungalow.

“You see,” he said, “I don’t blame you in the least, but you’ve

destroyed a habit, and it disorganises my day. I’ve walked past here

for years—years. No doubt I’ve hummed.... You’ve made all that

impossible!”

I suggested he might try some other direction.

“No. There is no other direction. This is the only one. I’ve inquired.

And now—every afternoon at four—I come to a dead wall.”

“But, my dear sir, if the thing is so important to you—”

“It’s vital. You see, I’m—I’m an investigator—I am engaged in a

scientific research. I live—” he paused and seemed to think. “Just over

there,” he said, and pointed suddenly dangerously near my eye. “The

house with white chimneys you see just over the trees. And my

circumstances are abnormal—abnormal. I am on the point of completing

one of the most important—demonstrations—I can assure you one of _the

most important_ demonstrations that have ever been made. It requires

constant thought, constant mental ease and activity. And the afternoon

was my brightest time!—effervescing with new ideas—new points of view.”

“But why not come by still?”

“It would be all different. I should be self-conscious. I should think

of you at your play—watching me irritated—instead of thinking of my

work. No! I must have the bungalow.”

I meditated. Naturally, I wanted to think the matter over thoroughly

before anything decisive was said. I was generally ready enough for

business in those days, and selling always attracted me; but in the

first place it was not my bungalow, and even if I sold it to him at a

good price I might get inconvenienced in the delivery of goods if the

current owner got wind of the transaction, and in the second I was,

well—undischarged. It was clearly a business that required delicate

handling. Moreover, the possibility of his being in pursuit of some

valuable invention also interested me. It occurred to me that I would

like to know more of this research, not with any dishonest intention,

but simply with an idea that to know what it was would be a relief from

play-writing. I threw out feelers.

He was quite willing to supply information. Indeed, once he was fairly

under way the conversation became a monologue. He talked like a man

long pent up, who has had it over with himself again and again. He

talked for nearly an hour, and I must confess I found it a pretty stiff

bit of listening. But through it all there was the undertone of

satisfaction one feels when one is neglecting work one has set oneself.

During that first interview I gathered very little of the drift of his

work. Half his words were technicalities entirely strange to me, and he

illustrated one or two points with what he was pleased to call

elementary mathematics, computing on an envelope with a copying-ink

pencil, in a manner that made it hard even to seem to understand.

“Yes,” I said, “yes. Go on!” Nevertheless I made out enough to convince

me that he was no mere crank playing at discoveries. In spite of his

crank-like appearance there was a force about him that made that

impossible. Whatever it was, it was a thing with mechanical

possibilities. He told me of a work-shed he had, and of three

assistants—originally jobbing carpenters—whom he had trained. Now, from

the work-shed to the patent office is clearly only one step. He invited

me to see those things. I accepted readily, and took care, by a remark

or so, to underline that. The proposed transfer of the bungalow

remained very conveniently in suspense.

At last he rose to depart, with an apology for the length of his call.

Talking over his work was, he said, a pleasure enjoyed only too rarely.

It was not often he found such an intelligent listener as myself, he

mingled very little with professional scientific men.

“So much pettiness,” he explained; “so much intrigue! And really, when

one has an idea—a novel, fertilising idea—I don’t want to be

uncharitable, but—”

I am a man who believes in impulses. I made what was perhaps a rash

proposition. But you must remember, that I had been alone, play-writing

in Lympne, for fourteen days, and my compunction for his ruined walk

still hung about me. “Why not,” said I, “make this your new habit? In

the place of the one I spoilt? At least, until we can settle about the

bungalow. What you want is to turn over your work in your mind. That

you have always done during your afternoon walk. Unfortunately that’s

over—you can’t get things back as they were. But why not come and talk

about your work to me; use me as a sort of wall against which you may

throw your thoughts and catch them again? It’s certain I don’t know

enough to steal your ideas myself—and I know no scientific men—”

I stopped. He was considering. Evidently the thing attracted him. “But

I’m afraid I should bore you,” he said.

“You think I’m too dull?”

“Oh, no; but technicalities—”

“Anyhow, you’ve interested me immensely this afternoon.”

“Of course it _would_ be a great help to me. Nothing clears up one’s

ideas so much as explaining them. Hitherto—”

“My dear sir, say no more.”

“But really can you spare the time?”

“There is no rest like change of occupation,” I said, with profound

conviction.

The affair was over. On my verandah steps he turned. “I am already

greatly indebted to you,” he said.

I made an interrogative noise.

“You have completely cured me of that ridiculous habit of humming,” he

explained.

I think I said I was glad to be of any service to him, and he turned

away.

Immediately the train of thought that our conversation had suggested

must have resumed its sway. His arms began to wave in their former

fashion. The faint echo of “zuzzoo” came back to me on the breeze....

Well, after all, that was not my affair....

He came the next day, and again the next day after that, and delivered

two lectures on physics to our mutual satisfaction. He talked with an

air of being extremely lucid about the “ether” and “tubes of force,”

and “gravitational potential,” and things like that, and I sat in my

other folding-chair and said, “Yes,” “Go on,” “I follow you,” to keep

him going. It was tremendously difficult stuff, but I do not think he

ever suspected how much I did not understand him. There were moments

when I doubted whether I was well employed, but at any rate I was

resting from that confounded play. Now and then things gleamed on me

clearly for a space, only to vanish just when I thought I had hold of

them. Sometimes my attention failed altogether, and I would give it up

and sit and stare at him, wondering whether, after all, it would not be

better to use him as a central figure in a good farce and let all this

other stuff slide. And then, perhaps, I would catch on again for a bit.

At the earliest opportunity I went to see his house. It was large and

carelessly furnished; there were no servants other than his three

assistants, and his dietary and private life were characterised by a

philosophical simplicity. He was a water-drinker, a vegetarian, and all

those logical disciplinary things. But the sight of his equipment

settled many doubts. It looked like business from cellar to attic—an

amazing little place to find in an out-of-the-way village. The

ground-floor rooms contained benches and apparatus, the bakehouse and

scullery boiler had developed into respectable furnaces, dynamos

occupied the cellar, and there was a gasometer in the garden. He showed

it to me with all the confiding zest of a man who has been living too

much alone. His seclusion was overflowing now in an excess of

confidence, and I had the good luck to be the recipient.

The three assistants were creditable specimens of the class of

“handy-men” from which they came. Conscientious if unintelligent,

strong, civil, and willing. One, Spargus, who did the cooking and all

the metal work, had been a sailor; a second, Gibbs, was a joiner; and

the third was an ex-jobbing gardener, and now general assistant. They

were the merest labourers. All the intelligent work was done by Cavor.

Theirs was the darkest ignorance compared even with my muddled

impression.

And now, as to the nature of these inquiries. Here, unhappily, comes a

grave difficulty. I am no scientific expert, and if I were to attempt

to set forth in the highly scientific language of Mr. Cavor the aim to

which his experiments tended, I am afraid I should confuse not only the

reader but myself, and almost certainly I should make some blunder that

would bring upon me the mockery of every up-to-date student of

mathematical physics in the country. The best thing I can do therefore

is, I think to give my impressions in my own inexact language, without

any attempt to wear a garment of knowledge to which I have no claim.

The object of Mr. Cavor’s search was a substance that should be

“opaque”—he used some other word I have forgotten, but “opaque” conveys

the idea—to “all forms of radiant energy.” “Radiant energy,” he made me

understand, was anything like light or heat, or those Röntgen Rays

there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the electric waves of

Marconi, or gravitation. All these things, he said, _radiate_ out from

centres, and act on bodies at a distance, whence comes the term

“radiant energy.” Now almost all substances are opaque to some form or

other of radiant energy. Glass, for example, is transparent to light,

but much less so to heat, so that it is useful as a fire-screen; and

alum is transparent to light, but blocks heat completely. A solution of

iodine in carbon bisulphide, on the other hand, completely blocks

light, but is quite transparent to heat. It will hide a fire from you,

but permit all its warmth to reach you. Metals are not only opaque to

light and heat, but also to electrical energy, which passes through

both iodine solution and glass almost as though they were not

interposed. And so on.

Now all known substances are “transparent” to gravitation. You can use

screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical

influence of the sun, or the warmth of the earth from anything; you can

screen things by sheets of metal from Marconi’s rays, but nothing will

cut off the gravitational attraction of the sun or the gravitational

attraction of the earth. Yet why there should be nothing is hard to

say. Cavor did not see why such a substance should not exist, and

certainly I could not tell him. I had never thought of such a

possibility before. He showed me by calculations on paper, which Lord

Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson, or any

of those great scientific people might have understood, but which

simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such a

substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It was

an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me at

the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. “Yes,” I said to

it all, “yes; go on!” Suffice it for this story that he believed he

might be able to manufacture this possible substance opaque to

gravitation out of a complicated alloy of metals and something new—a

new element, I fancy—called, I believe, _helium_, which was sent to him

from London in sealed stone jars. Doubt has been thrown upon this

detail, but I am almost certain it was _helium_ he had sent him in

sealed stone jars. It was certainly something very gaseous and thin. If

only I had taken notes...

But then, how was I to foresee the necessity of taking notes?

Any one with the merest germ of an imagination will understand the

extraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathise a

little with the emotion I felt as this understanding emerged from the

haze of abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself. Comic relief

in a play indeed! It was some time before I would believe that I had

interpreted him aright, and I was very careful not to ask questions

that would have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstanding

into which he dropped his daily exposition. But no one reading the

story of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren

narrative it will be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction

that this astonishing substance was positively going to be made.

I do not recall that I gave my play an hour’s consecutive work at any

time after my visit to his house. My imagination had other things to

do. There seemed no limit to the possibilities of the stuff; whichever

way I tried I came on miracles and revolutions. For example, if one

wanted to lift a weight, however enormous, one had only to get a sheet

of this substance beneath it, and one might lift it with a straw. My

first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns and

ironclads, and all the material and methods of war, and from that to

shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable form of human

industry. The chance that had brought me into the very birth-chamber of

this new time—it was an epoch, no less—was one of those chances that

come once in a thousand years. The thing unrolled, it expanded and

expanded. Among other things I saw in it my redemption as a business

man. I saw a parent company, and daughter companies, applications to

right of us, applications to left, rings and trusts, privileges, and

concessions spreading and spreading, until one vast, stupendous

Cavorite company ran and ruled the world.

And I was in it!

I took my line straight away. I knew I was staking everything, but I

jumped there and then.

“We’re on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented,” I

said, and put the accent on “we.” “If you want to keep me out of this,

you’ll have to do it with a gun. I’m coming down to be your fourth

labourer to-morrow.”

He seemed surprised at my enthusiasm, but not a bit suspicious or

hostile. Rather, he was self-depreciatory. He looked at me doubtfully.

“But do you really think—?” he said. “And your play! How about that

play?”

“It’s vanished!” I cried. “My dear sir, don’t you see what you’ve got?

Don’t you see what you’re going to do?”

That was merely a rhetorical turn, but positively, he didn’t. At first

I could not believe it. He had not had the beginning of the inkling of

an idea. This astonishing little man had been working on purely

theoretical grounds the whole time! When he said it was “the most

important” research the world had ever seen, he simply meant it squared

up so many theories, settled so much that was in doubt; he had troubled

no more about the application of the stuff he was going to turn out

than if he had been a machine that makes guns. This was a possible

substance, and he was going to make it! _V’la tout_, as the Frenchman

says.

Beyond that, he was childish! If he made it, it would go down to

posterity as Cavorite or Cavorine, and he would be made an F.R.S., and

his portrait given away as a scientific worthy with _Nature_, and

things like that. And that was all he saw! He would have dropped this

bombshell into the world as though he had discovered a new species of

gnat, if it had not happened that I had come along. And there it would

have lain and fizzled, like one or two other little things these

scientific people have lit and dropped about us.

When I realised this, it was I did the talking, and Cavor who said, “Go

on!” I jumped up. I paced the room, gesticulating like a boy of twenty.

I tried to make him understand his duties and responsibilities in the

matter—_our_ duties and responsibilities in the matter. I assured him

we might make wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we

fancied, we might own and order the whole world. I told him of

companies and patents, and the case for secret processes. All these

things seemed to take him much as his mathematics had taken me. A look

of perplexity came into his ruddy little face. He stammered something

about indifference to wealth, but I brushed all that aside. He had got

to be rich, and it was no good his stammering. I gave him to understand

the sort of man I was, and that I had had very considerable business

experience. I did not tell him I was an undischarged bankrupt at the

time, because that was temporary, but I think I reconciled my evident

poverty with my financial claims. And quite insensibly, in the way such

projects grow, the understanding of a Cavorite monopoly grew up between

us. He was to make the stuff, and I was to make the boom.

I stuck like a leech to the “we”—“you” and “I” didn’t exist for me.

His idea was that the profits I spoke of might go to endow research,

but that, of course, was a matter we had to settle later. “That’s all

right,” I shouted, “that’s all right.” The great point, as I insisted,

was to get the thing done.

“Here is a substance,” I cried, “no home, no factory, no fortress, no

ship can dare to be without—more universally applicable even than a

patent medicine. There isn’t a solitary aspect of it, not one of its

ten thousand possible uses that will not make us rich, Cavor, beyond

the dreams of avarice!”

“No!” he said. “I begin to see. It’s extraordinary how one gets new

points of view by talking over things!”

“And as it happens you have just talked to the right man!”

“I suppose no one,” he said, “is absolutely _averse_ to enormous

wealth. Of course there is one thing—”

He paused. I stood still.

“It is just possible, you know, that we may not be able to make it

after all! It may be one of those things that are a theoretical

possibility, but a practical absurdity. Or when we make it, there may

be some little hitch!”

“We’ll tackle the hitch when it comes,” said I.

II.

The First Making of Cavorite

But Cavor’s fears were groundless, so far as the actual making was

concerned. On the 14th of October, 1899, this incredible substance was

made!

Oddly enough, it was made at last by accident, when Mr. Cavor least

expected it. He had fused together a number of metals and certain other

things—I wish I knew the particulars now!—and he intended to leave the

mixture a week and then allow it to cool slowly. Unless he had

miscalculated, the last stage in the combination would occur when the

stuff sank to a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But it chanced

that, unknown to Cavor, dissension had arisen about the furnace

tending. Gibbs, who had previously seen to this, had suddenly attempted

to shift it to the man who had been a gardener, on the score that coal

was soil, being dug, and therefore could not possibly fall within the

province of a joiner; the man who had been a jobbing gardener alleged,

however, that coal was a metallic or ore-like substance, let alone that

he was cook. But Spargus insisted on Gibbs doing the coaling, seeing

that he was a joiner and that coal is notoriously fossil wood.

Consequently Gibbs ceased to replenish the furnace, and no one else did

so, and Cavor was too much immersed in certain interesting problems

concerning a Cavorite flying machine (neglecting the resistance of the

air and one or two other points) to perceive that anything was wrong.

And the premature birth of his invention took place just as he was

coming across the field to my bungalow for our afternoon talk and tea.

I remember the occasion with extreme vividness. The water was boiling,

and everything was prepared, and the sound of his “zuzzoo” had brought

me out upon the verandah. His active little figure was black against

the autumnal sunset, and to the right the chimneys of his house just

rose above a gloriously tinted group of trees. Remoter rose the Wealden

Hills, faint and blue, while to the left the hazy marsh spread out

spacious and serene. And then—

The chimneys jerked heavenward, smashing into a string of bricks as

they rose, and the roof and a miscellany of furniture followed. Then

overtaking them came a huge white flame. The trees about the building

swayed and whirled and tore themselves to pieces, that sprang towards

the flare. My ears were smitten with a clap of thunder that left me

deaf on one side for life, and all about me windows smashed, unheeded.

I took three steps from the verandah towards Cavor’s house, and even as

I did so came the wind.

Instantly my coat tails were over my head, and I was progressing in

great leaps and bounds, and quite against my will, towards him. In the

same moment the discoverer was seized, whirled about, and flew through

the screaming air. I saw one of my chimney pots hit the ground within

six yards of me, leap a score of feet, and so hurry in great strides

towards the focus of the disturbance. Cavor, kicking and flapping, came

down again, rolled over and over on the ground for a space, struggled

up and was lifted and borne forward at an enormous velocity, vanishing

at last among the labouring, lashing trees that writhed about his

house.

A mass of smoke and ashes, and a square of bluish shining substance

rushed up towards the zenith. A large fragment of fencing came sailing

past me, dropped edgeways, hit the ground and fell flat, and then the

worst was over. The aerial commotion fell swiftly until it was a mere

strong gale, and I became once more aware that I had breath and feet.

By leaning back against the wind I managed to stop, and could collect

such wits as still remained to me.

In that instant the whole face of the world had changed. The tranquil

sunset had vanished, the sky was dark with scurrying clouds, everything

was flattened and swaying with the gale. I glanced back to see if my

bungalow was still in a general way standing, then staggered forwards

towards the trees amongst which Cavor had vanished, and through whose

tall and leaf-denuded branches shone the flames of his burning house.

I entered the copse, dashing from one tree to another and clinging to

them, and for a space I sought him in vain. Then amidst a heap of

smashed branches and fencing that had banked itself against a portion

of his garden wall I perceived something stir. I made a run for this,

but before I reached it a brown object separated itself, rose on two

muddy legs, and protruded two drooping, bleeding hands. Some tattered

ends of garment fluttered out from its middle portion and streamed

before the wind.

For a moment I did not recognise this earthy lump, and then I saw that

it was Cavor, caked in the mud in which he had rolled. He leant forward

against the wind, rubbing the dirt from his eyes and mouth.

He extended a muddy lump of hand, and staggered a pace towards me. His

face worked with emotion, little lumps of mud kept falling from it. He

looked as damaged and pitiful as any living creature I have ever seen,

and his remark therefore amazed me exceedingly.

“Gratulate me,” he gasped; “gratulate me!”

“Congratulate you!” said I. “Good heavens! What for?”

“I’ve done it.”

“You _have_. What on earth caused that explosion?”

A gust of wind blew his words away. I understood him to say that it

wasn’t an explosion at all. The wind hurled me into collision with him,

and we stood clinging to one another.

“Try and get back—to my bungalow,” I bawled in his ear. He did not hear

me, and shouted something about “three martyrs—science,” and also

something about “not much good.” At the time he laboured under the

impression that his three attendants had perished in the whirlwind.

Happily this was incorrect. Directly he had left for my bungalow they

had gone off to the public-house in Lympne to discuss the question of

the furnaces over some trivial refreshment.

I repeated my suggestion of getting back to my bungalow, and this time

he understood. We clung arm-in-arm and started, and managed at last to

reach the shelter of as much roof as was left to me. For a space we sat

in arm-chairs and panted. All the windows were broken, and the lighter

articles of furniture were in great disorder, but no irrevocable damage

was done. Happily the kitchen door had stood the pressure upon it, so

that all my crockery and cooking materials had survived. The oil stove

was still burning, and I put on the water to boil again for tea. And

that prepared, I could turn on Cavor for his explanation.

“Quite correct,” he insisted; “quite correct. I’ve done it, and it’s

all right.”

“But,” I protested. “All right! Why, there can’t be a rick standing, or

a fence or a thatched roof undamaged for twenty miles round....”

“It’s all right—_really_. I didn’t, of course, foresee this little

upset. My mind was preoccupied with another problem, and I’m apt to

disregard these practical side issues. But it’s all right—”

“My dear sir,” I cried, “don’t you see you’ve done thousands of pounds’

worth of damage?”

“There, I throw myself on your discretion. I’m not a practical man, of

course, but don’t you think they will regard it as a cyclone?”

“But the explosion—”

“It was _not_ an explosion. It’s perfectly simple. Only, as I say, I’m

apt to overlook these little things. It’s that zuzzoo business on a

larger scale. Inadvertently I made this substance of mine, this

Cavorite, in a thin, wide sheet....”

He paused. “You are quite clear that the stuff is opaque to

gravitation, that it cuts off things from gravitating towards each

other?”

“Yes,” said I. “Yes.”

“Well, so soon as it reached a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit,

and the process of its manufacture was complete, the air above it, the

portions of roof and ceiling and floor above it ceased to have weight.

I suppose you know—everybody knows nowadays—that, as a usual thing, the

air _has_ weight, that it presses on everything at the surface of the

earth, presses in all directions, with a pressure of fourteen and a

half pounds to the square inch?”

“I know that,” said I. “Go on.”

“I know that too,” he remarked. “Only this shows you how useless

knowledge is unless you apply it. You see, over our Cavorite this

ceased to be the case, the air there ceased to exert any pressure, and

the air round it and not over the Cavorite was exerting a pressure of

fourteen pounds and a half to the square inch upon this suddenly

weightless air. Ah! you begin to see! The air all about the Cavorite

crushed in upon the air above it with irresistible force. The air above

the Cavorite was forced upward violently, the air that rushed in to

replace it immediately lost weight, ceased to exert any pressure,

followed suit, blew the ceiling through and the roof off....

“You perceive,” he said, “it formed a sort of atmospheric fountain, a

kind of chimney in the atmosphere. And if the Cavorite itself hadn’t

been loose and so got sucked up the chimney, does it occur to you what

would have happened?”

I thought. “I suppose,” I said, “the air would be rushing up and up

over that infernal piece of stuff now.”

“Precisely,” he said. “A huge fountain—”

“Spouting into space! Good heavens! Why, it would have squirted all the

atmosphere of the earth away! It would have robbed the world of air! It

would have been the death of all mankind! That little lump of stuff!”

“Not exactly into space,” said Cavor, “but as bad—practically. It would

have whipped the air off the world as one peels a banana, and flung it

thousands of miles. It would have dropped back again, of course—but on

an asphyxiated world! From our point of view very little better than if

it never came back!”

I stared. As yet I was too amazed to realise how all my expectations

had been upset. “What do you mean to do now?” I asked.

“In the first place if I may borrow a garden trowel I will remove some

of this earth with which I am encased, and then if I may avail myself

of your domestic conveniences I will have a bath. This done, we will

converse more at leisure. It will be wise, I think”—he laid a muddy

hand on my arm—“if nothing were said of this affair beyond ourselves. I

know I have caused great damage—probably even dwelling-houses may be

ruined here and there upon the country-side. But on the other hand, I

cannot possibly pay for the damage I have done, and if the real cause

of this is published, it will lead only to heartburning and the

obstruction of my work. One cannot foresee _everything_, you know, and

I cannot consent for one moment to add the burthen of practical

considerations to my theorising. Later on, when you have come in with

your practical mind, and Cavorite is floated—floated _is_ the word,

isn’t it?—and it has realised all you anticipate for it, we may set

matters right with these persons. But not now—not now. If no other

explanation is offered, people, in the present unsatisfactory state of

meteorological science, will ascribe all this to a cyclone; there might

be a public subscription, and as my house has collapsed and been burnt,

I should in that case receive a considerable share in the compensation,

which would be extremely helpful to the prosecution of our researches.

But if it is known that _I_ caused this, there will be no public

subscription, and everybody will be put out. Practically I should never

get a chance of working in peace again. My three assistants may or may

not have perished. That is a detail. If they have, it is no great loss;

they were more zealous than able, and this premature event must be

largely due to their joint neglect of the furnace. If they have not

perished, I doubt if they have the intelligence to explain the affair.

They will accept the cyclone story. And if during the temporary

unfitness of my house for occupation, I may lodge in one of the

untenanted rooms of this bungalow of yours—”

He paused and regarded me.

A man of such possibilities, I reflected, is no ordinary guest to

entertain.

“Perhaps,” said I, rising to my feet, “we had better begin by looking

for a trowel,” and I led the way to the scattered vestiges of the

greenhouse.

And while he was having his bath I considered the entire question

alone. It was clear there were drawbacks to Mr. Cavor’s society I had

not foreseen. The absentmindedness that had just escaped depopulating

the terrestrial globe, might at any moment result in some other grave

inconvenience. On the other hand I was young, my affairs were in a

mess, and I was in just the mood for reckless adventure—with a chance

of something good at the end of it. I had quite settled in my mind that

I was to have half at least in that aspect of the affair. Fortunately I

held my bungalow, as I have already explained, on a three-year

agreement, without being responsible for repairs; and my furniture,

such as there was of it, had been hastily purchased, was unpaid for,

insured, and altogether devoid of associations. In the end I decided to

keep on with him, and see the business through.

Certainly the aspect of things had changed very greatly. I no longer

doubted at all the enormous possibilities of the substance, but I began

to have doubts about the gun-carriage and the patent boots. We set to

work at once to reconstruct his laboratory and proceed with our

experiments. Cavor talked more on my level than he had ever done

before, when it came to the question of how we should make the stuff

next.

“Of course we must make it again,” he said, with a sort of glee I had

not expected in him, “of course we must make it again. We have caught a

Tartar, perhaps, but we have left the theoretical behind us for good

and all. If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours,

we will. But—there _must_ be risks! There must be. In experimental work

there always are. And here, as a practical man, _you_ must come in. For

my own part it seems to me we might make it edgeways, perhaps, and very

thin. Yet I don’t know. I have a certain dim perception of another

method. I can hardly explain it yet. But curiously enough it came into

my mind, while I was rolling over and over in the mud before the wind,

and very doubtful how the whole adventure was to end, as being

absolutely the thing I ought to have done.”

Even with my aid we found some little difficulty, and meanwhile we kept

at work restoring the laboratory. There was plenty to do before it

became absolutely necessary to decide upon the precise form and method

of our second attempt. Our only hitch was the strike of the three

labourers, who objected to my activity as a foreman. But that matter we

compromised after two days’ delay.

III.

The Building of the sphere

I remember the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his idea

of the sphere. He had had intimations of it before, but at the time it

seemed to come to him in a rush. We were returning to the bungalow for

tea, and on the way he fell humming. Suddenly he shouted, “That’s it!

That finishes it! A sort of roller blind!”

“Finishes what?” I asked.

“Space—anywhere! The moon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean? Why—it must be a sphere! That’s what I mean!”

I saw I was out of it, and for a time I let him talk in his own

fashion. I hadn’t the ghost of an idea then of his drift. But after he

had taken tea he made it clear to me.

“It’s like this,” he said. “Last time I ran this stuff that cuts things

off from gravitation into a flat tank with an overlap that held it

down. And directly it had cooled and the manufacture was completed all

that uproar happened, nothing above it weighed anything, the air went

squirting up, the house squirted up, and if the stuff itself hadn’t

squirted up too, I don’t know what would have happened! But suppose the

substance is loose, and quite free to go up?”

“It will go up at once!”

“Exactly. With no more disturbance than firing a big gun.”

“But what good will that do?”

“I’m going up with it!”

I put down my teacup and stared at him.

“Imagine a sphere,” he explained, “large enough to hold two people and

their luggage. It will be made of steel lined with thick glass; it will

contain a proper store of solidified air, concentrated food, water

distilling apparatus, and so forth. And enamelled, as it were, on the

outer steel—”

“Cavorite?”

“Yes.”

“But how will you get inside?”

“There was a similar problem about a dumpling.”

“Yes, I know. But how?”

“That’s perfectly easy. An air-tight manhole is all that is needed.

That, of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have

to be a valve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, without

much loss of air.”

“Like Jules Verne’s thing in _A Trip to the Moon_.”

But Cavor was not a reader of fiction.

“I begin to see,” I said slowly. “And you could get in and screw

yourself up while the Cavorite was warm, and as soon as it cooled it

would become impervious to gravitation, and off you would fly—”

“At a tangent.”

“You would go off in a straight line—” I stopped abruptly. “What is to

prevent the thing travelling in a straight line into space for ever?” I

asked. “You’re not safe to get anywhere, and if you do—how will you get

back?”

“I’ve just thought of that,” said Cavor. “That’s what I meant when I

said the thing is finished. The inner glass sphere can be air-tight,

and, except for the manhole, continuous, and the steel sphere can be

made in sections, each section capable of rolling up after the fashion

of a roller blind. These can easily be worked by springs, and released

and checked by electricity conveyed by platinum wires fused through the

glass. All that is merely a question of detail. So you see, that except

for the thickness of the blind rollers, the Cavorite exterior of the

sphere will consist of windows or blinds, whichever you like to call

them. Well, when all these windows or blinds are shut, no light, no

heat, no gravitation, no radiant energy of any sort will get at the

inside of the sphere, it will fly on through space in a straight line,

as you say. But open a window, imagine one of the windows open. Then at

once any heavy body that chances to be in that direction will attract

us—”

I sat taking it in.

“You see?” he said.

“Oh, I _see_.”

“Practically we shall be able to tack about in space just as we wish.

Get attracted by this and that.”

“Oh, yes. _That’s_ clear enough. Only—”

“Well?”

“I don’t quite see what we shall do it for! It’s really only jumping

off the world and back again.”

“Surely! For example, one might go to the moon.”

“And when one got there? What would you find?”

“We should see—Oh! consider the new knowledge.”

“Is there air there?”

“There may be.”

“It’s a fine idea,” I said, “but it strikes me as a large order all the

same. The moon! I’d much rather try some smaller things first.”

“They’re out of the question, because of the air difficulty.”

“Why not apply that idea of spring blinds—Cavorite blinds in strong

steel cases—to lifting weights?”

“It wouldn’t work,” he insisted. “After all, to go into outer space is

not so much worse, if at all, than a polar expedition. Men go on polar

expeditions.”

“Not business men. And besides, they get paid for polar expeditions.

And if anything goes wrong there are relief parties. But this—it’s just

firing ourselves off the world for nothing.”

“Call it prospecting.”

“You’ll have to call it that.... One might make a book of it perhaps,”

I said.

“I have no doubt there will be minerals,” said Cavor.

“For example?”

“Oh! sulphur, ores, gold perhaps, possibly new elements.”

“Cost of carriage,” I said. “You know you’re _not_ a practical man. The

moon’s a quarter of a million miles away.”

“It seems to me it wouldn’t cost much to cart any weight anywhere if

you packed it in a Cavorite case.”

I had not thought of that. “Delivered free on head of purchaser, eh?”

“It isn’t as though we were confined to the moon.”

“You mean?”

“There’s Mars—clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating sense

of lightness. It might be pleasant to go there.”

“Is there air on Mars?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Seems as though you might run it as a sanatorium. By the way, how far

is Mars?”

“Two hundred million miles at present,” said Cavor airily; “and you go

close by the sun.”

My imagination was picking itself up again. “After all,” I said,

“there’s something in these things. There’s travel—”

An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly I saw,

as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite liners

and spheres _de luxe_. “Rights of pre-emption,” came floating into my

head—planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old Spanish

monopoly in American gold. It wasn’t as though it was just this planet

or that—it was all of them. I stared at Cavor’s rubicund face, and

suddenly my imagination was leaping and dancing. I stood up, I walked

up and down; my tongue was unloosened.

“I’m beginning to take it in,” I said; “I’m beginning to take it in.”

The transition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any

time at all. “But this is tremendous!” I cried. “This is Imperial! I

haven’t been dreaming of this sort of thing.”

Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement

had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. We

behaved like men inspired. We _were_ men inspired.

“We’ll settle all that!” he said in answer to some incidental

difficulty that had pulled me up. “We’ll soon settle that! We’ll start

the drawings for mouldings this very night.”

“We’ll start them now,” I responded, and we hurried off to the

laboratory to begin upon this work forthwith.

I was like a child in Wonderland all that night. The dawn found us both

still at work—we kept our electric light going heedless of the day. I

remember now exactly how these drawings looked. I shaded and tinted

while Cavor drew—smudged and haste-marked they were in every line, but

wonderfully correct. We got out the orders for the steel blinds and

frames we needed from that night’s work, and the glass sphere was

designed within a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and our

old routine altogether. We worked, and we slept and ate when we could

work no longer for hunger and fatigue. Our enthusiasm infected even our

three men, though they had no idea what the sphere was for. Through

those days the man Gibbs gave up walking, and went everywhere, even

across the room, at a sort of fussy run.

And it grew—the sphere. December passed, January—I spent a day with a

broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to

laboratory—February, March. By the end of March the completion was in

sight. In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case; we

had our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the crane

we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell. All the bars and blinds

of the steel shell—it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral,

with a roller blind to each facet—had arrived by February, and the

lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made by March,

the metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its

manufacture, and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars

and blinds. It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines of

Cavor’s first inspiration in working out the scheme. When the bolting

together of the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the rough

roof of the temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and build

a furnace about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which the

paste is heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium, would be

accomplished when it was already on the sphere.

And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were to

take—compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders

containing reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid

and waste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium

peroxide, water condensers, and so forth. I remember the little heap

they made in the corner—tins, and rolls, and boxes—convincingly

matter-of-fact.

It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking. But one day,

when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me. I had been

bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by these

possessions dead beat. Everything seemed dull and incredible.

“But look here, Cavor,” I said. “After all! What’s it all for?”

He smiled. “The thing now is to go.”

“The moon,” I reflected. “But what do you expect? I thought the moon

was a dead world.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“We’re going to see.”

“_Are_ we?” I said, and stared before me.

“You are tired,” he remarked. “You’d better take a walk this

afternoon.”

“No,” I said obstinately; “I’m going to finish this brickwork.”

And I did, and insured myself a night of insomnia. I don’t think I have

ever had such a night. I had some bad times before my business

collapse, but the very worst of those was sweet slumber compared to

this infinity of aching wakefulness. I was suddenly in the most

enormous funk at the thing we were going to do.

I do not remember before that night thinking at all of the risks we

were running. Now they came like that array of spectres that once

beleaguered Prague, and camped around me. The strangeness of what we

were about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like a

man awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundings.

I lay, eyes wide open, and the sphere seemed to get more flimsy and

feeble, and Cavor more unreal and fantastic, and the whole enterprise

madder and madder every moment.

I got out of bed and wandered about. I sat at the window and stared at

the immensity of space. Between the stars was the void, the

unfathomable darkness! I tried to recall the fragmentary knowledge of

astronomy I had gained in my irregular reading, but it was all too

vague to furnish any idea of the things we might expect. At last I got

back to bed and snatched some moments of sleep—moments of nightmare

rather—in which I fell and fell and fell for evermore into the abyss of

the sky.

I astonished Cavor at breakfast. I told him shortly, “I’m not coming

with you in the sphere.”

I met all his protests with a sullen persistence. “The thing’s too

mad,” I said, “and I won’t come. The thing’s too mad.”

I would not go with him to the laboratory. I fretted about my bungalow

for a time, and then took hat and stick and set out alone, I knew not

whither. It chanced to be a glorious morning: a warm wind and deep blue

sky, the first green of spring abroad, and multitudes of birds singing.

I lunched on beef and beer in a little public-house near Elham, and

startled the landlord by remarking _apropos_ of the weather, “A man who

leaves the world when days of this sort are about is a fool!”

“That’s what I says when I heerd on it!” said the landlord, and I found

that for one poor soul at least this world had proved excessive, and

there had been a throat-cutting. I went on with a new twist to my

thoughts.

In the afternoon I had a pleasant sleep in a sunny place, and went on

my way refreshed.

I came to a comfortable-looking inn near Canterbury. It was bright with

creepers, and the landlady was a clean old woman and took my eye. I

found I had just enough money to pay for my lodging with her. I decided

to stop the night there. She was a talkative body, and among many other

particulars I learnt she had never been to London. “Canterbury’s as far

as ever I been,” she said. “I’m not one of your gad-about sort.”

“How would you like a trip to the moon?” I cried.

“I never did hold with them ballooneys,” she said evidently under the

impression that this was a common excursion enough. “I wouldn’t go up

in one—not for ever so.”

This struck me as being funny. After I had supped I sat on a bench by

the door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brickmaking,

and motor cars, and the cricket of last year. And in the sky a faint

new crescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over the

sun.

The next day I returned to Cavor. “I am coming,” I said. “I’ve been a

little out of order, that’s all.”

That was the only time I felt any serious doubt our enterprise. Nerves

purely! After that I worked a little more carefully, and took a trudge

for an hour every day. And at last, save for the heating in the

furnace, our labours were at an end.

IV.

Inside the Sphere

“Go on,” said Cavor, as I sat across the edge of the manhole, and

looked down into the black interior of the sphere. We two were alone.

It was evening, the sun had set, and the stillness of the twilight was

upon everything.

I drew my other leg inside and slid down the smooth glass to the bottom

of the sphere, then turned to take the cans of food and other

impedimenta from Cavor. The interior was warm, the thermometer stood at

eighty, and as we should lose little or none of this by radiation, we

were dressed in shoes and thin flannels. We had, however, a bundle of

thick woollen clothing and several thick blankets to guard against

mischance.

By Cavor’s direction I placed the packages, the cylinders of oxygen,

and so forth, loosely about my feet, and soon we had everything in. He

walked about the roofless shed for a time seeking anything we had

overlooked, and then crawled in after me. I noted something in his

hand.

“What have you got there?” I asked.

“Haven’t you brought anything to read?”

“Good Lord! No.”

“I forgot to tell you. There are uncertainties— The voyage may last— We

may be weeks!”

“But—”

“We shall be floating in this sphere with absolutely no occupation.”

“I wish I’d known—”

He peered out of the manhole. “Look!” he said. “There’s something

there!”

“Is there time?”

“We shall be an hour.”

I looked out. It was an old number of _Tit-Bits_ that one of the men

must have brought. Farther away in the corner I saw a torn _Lloyd’s

News_. I scrambled back into the sphere with these things. “What have

you got?” I said.

I took the book from his hand and read, “The Works of William

Shakespeare”.

He coloured slightly. “My education has been so purely scientific—” he

said apologetically.

“Never read him?”

“Never.”

“He knew a little, you know—in an irregular sort of way.”

“Precisely what I am told,” said Cavor.

I assisted him to screw in the glass cover of the manhole, and then he

pressed a stud to close the corresponding blind in the outer case. The

little oblong of twilight vanished. We were in darkness. For a time

neither of us spoke. Although our case would not be impervious to

sound, everything was very still. I perceived there was nothing to grip

when the shock of our start should come, and I realised that I should

be uncomfortable for want of a chair.

“Why have we no chairs?” I asked.

“I’ve settled all that,” said Cavor. “We won’t need them.”

“Why not?”

“You will see,” he said, in the tone of a man who refuses to talk.

I became silent. Suddenly it had come to me clear and vivid that I was

a fool to be inside that sphere. Even now, I asked myself, is to too

late to withdraw? The world outside the sphere, I knew, would be cold

and inhospitable enough for me—for weeks I had been living on subsidies

from Cavor—but after all, would it be as cold as the infinite zero, as

inhospitable as empty space? If it had not been for the appearance of

cowardice, I believe that even then I should have made him let me out.

But I hesitated on that score, and hesitated, and grew fretful and

angry, and the time passed.

There came a little jerk, a noise like champagne being uncorked in

another room, and a faint whistling sound. For just one instant I had a

sense of enormous tension, a transient conviction that my feet were

pressing downward with a force of countless tons. It lasted for an

infinitesimal time.

But it stirred me to action. “Cavor!” I said into the darkness, “my

nerve’s in rags. I don’t think—”

I stopped. He made no answer.

“Confound it!” I cried; “I’m a fool! What business have I here? I’m not

coming, Cavor. The thing’s too risky. I’m getting out.”

“You can’t,” he said.

“Can’t! We’ll soon see about that!”

He made no answer for ten seconds. “It’s too late for us to quarrel

now, Bedford,” he said. “That little jerk was the start. Already we are

flying as swiftly as a bullet up into the gulf of space.”

“I—” I said, and then it didn’t seem to matter what happened. For a

time I was, as it were, stunned; I had nothing to say. It was just as

if I had never heard of this idea of leaving the world before. Then I

perceived an unaccountable change in my bodily sensations. It was a

feeling of lightness, of unreality. Coupled with that was a queer

sensation in the head, an apoplectic effect almost, and a thumping of

blood vessels at the ears. Neither of these feelings diminished as time

went on, but at last I got so used to them that I experienced no

inconvenience.

I heard a click, and a little glow lamp came into being.

I saw Cavor’s face, as white as I felt my own to be. We regarded one

another in silence. The transparent blackness of the glass behind him

made him seem as though he floated in a void.

“Well, we’re committed,” I said at last.

“Yes,” he said, “we’re committed.”

“Don’t move,” he exclaimed, at some suggestion of a gesture. “Let your

muscles keep quite lax—as if you were in bed. We are in a little

universe of our own. Look at those things!”

He pointed to the loose cases and bundles that had been lying on the

blankets in the bottom of the sphere. I was astonished to see that they

were floating now nearly a foot from the spherical wall. Then I saw

from his shadow that Cavor was no longer leaning against the glass. I

thrust out my hand behind me, and found that I too was suspended in

space, clear of the glass.

I did not cry out nor gesticulate, but fear came upon me. It was like

being held and lifted by something—you know not what. The mere touch of

my hand against the glass moved me rapidly. I understood what had

happened, but that did not prevent my being afraid. We were cut off

from all exterior gravitation, only the attraction of objects within

our sphere had effect. Consequently everything that was not fixed to

the glass was falling—slowly because of the slightness of our

masses—towards the centre of gravity of our little world, which seemed

to be somewhere about the middle of the sphere, but rather nearer to

myself than Cavor, on account of my greater weight.

“We must turn round,” said Cavor, “and float back to back, with the

things between us.”

It was the strangest sensation conceivable, floating thus loosely in

space, at first indeed horribly strange, and when the horror passed,

not disagreeable at all, exceeding restful; indeed, the nearest thing

in earthly experience to it that I know is lying on a very thick, soft

feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I

had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at

starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were

disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like

the beginning of a dream.

V.

The Journey to the Moon

Presently Cavor extinguished the light. He said we had not overmuch

energy stored, and that what we had we must economise for reading. For

a time, whether it was long or short I do not know, there was nothing

but blank darkness.

A question floated up out of the void. “How are we pointing?” I said.

“What is our direction?”

“We are flying away from the earth at a tangent, and as the moon is

near her third quarter we are going somewhere towards her. I will open

a blind—”

Came a click, and then a window in the outer case yawned open. The sky

outside was as black as the darkness within the sphere, but the shape

of the open window was marked by an infinite number of stars.

Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine

its appearance when the vague, half luminous veil of our air has been

withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors

that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise

the meaning of the hosts of heaven!

Stranger things we were presently to see, but that airless, star-dusted

sky! Of all things, I think that will be one of the last I shall

forget.

The little window vanished with a click, another beside it snapped open

and instantly closed, and then a third, and for a moment I had to close

my eyes because of the blinding splendour of the waning moon.

For a space I had to stare at Cavor and the white-lit things about me

to season my eyes to light again, before I could turn them towards that

pallid glare.

Four windows were open in order that the gravitation of the moon might

act upon all the substances in our sphere. I found I was no longer

floating freely in space, but that my feet were resting on the glass in

the direction of the moon. The blankets and cases of provisions were

also creeping slowly down the glass, and presently came to rest so as

to block out a portion of the view. It seemed to me, of course, that I

looked “down” when I looked at the moon. On earth “down” means

earthward, the way things fall, and “up” the reverse direction. Now the

pull of gravitation was towards the moon, and for all I knew to the

contrary our earth was overhead. And, of course, when all the Cavorite

blinds were closed, “down” was towards the centre of our sphere, and

“up” towards its outer wall.

It was curiously unlike earthly experience, too, to have the light

coming _up_ to one. On earth light falls from above, or comes slanting

down sideways, but here it came from beneath our feet, and to see our

shadows we had to look up.

At first it gave me a sort of vertigo to stand only on thick glass and

look down upon the moon through hundreds of thousands of miles of

vacant space; but this sickness passed very speedily. And then—the

splendour of the sight!

The reader may imagine it best if he will lie on the ground some warm

summer’s night and look between his upraised feet at the moon, but for

some reason, probably because the absence of air made it so much more

luminous, the moon seemed already considerably larger than it does from

earth. The minutest details of its surface were acutely clear. And

since we did not see it through air, its outline was bright and sharp,

there was no glow or halo about it, and the star-dust that covered the

sky came right to its very margin, and marked the outline of its

unilluminated part. And as I stood and stared at the moon between my

feet, that perception of the impossible that had been with me off and

on ever since our start, returned again with tenfold conviction.

“Cavor,” I said, “this takes me queerly. Those companies we were going

to run, and all that about minerals?”

“Well?”

“I don’t see ‘em here.”

“No,” said Cavor; “but you’ll get over all that.”

“I suppose I’m made to turn right side up again. Still, _this_— For a

moment I could half believe there never was a world.”

“That copy of _Lloyd’s News_ might help you.”

I stared at the paper for a moment, then held it above the level of my

face, and found I could read it quite easily. I struck a column of mean

little advertisements. “A gentleman of private means is willing to lend

money,” I read. I knew that gentleman. Then somebody eccentric wanted

to sell a Cutaway bicycle, “quite new and cost £15,” for five pounds;

and a lady in distress wished to dispose of some fish knives and forks,

“a wedding present,” at a great sacrifice. No doubt some simple soul

was sagely examining these knives and forks, and another triumphantly

riding off on that bicycle, and a third trustfully consulting that

benevolent gentleman of means even as I read. I laughed, and let the

paper drift from my hand.

“Are we visible from the earth?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I knew some one who was rather interested in astronomy. It occurred to

me that it would be rather odd if—my friend—chanced to be looking

through some telescope.”

“It would need the most powerful telescope on earth even now to see us

as the minutest speck.”

For a time I stared in silence at the moon.

“It’s a world,” I said; “one feels that infinitely more than one ever

did on earth. People perhaps—”

“People!” he exclaimed. “_No!_ Banish all that! Think yourself a sort

of ultra-arctic voyager exploring the desolate places of space. Look at

it!”

He waved his hand at the shining whiteness below. “It’s dead—dead! Vast

extinct volcanoes, lava wildernesses, tumbled wastes of snow, or frozen

carbonic acid, or frozen air, and everywhere landslip seams and cracks

and gulfs. Nothing happens. Men have watched this planet systematically

with telescopes for over two hundred years. How much change do you

think they have seen?”

“None.”

“They have traced two indisputable landslips, a doubtful crack, and one

slight periodic change of colour, and that’s all.”

“I didn’t know they’d traced even that.”

“Oh, yes. But as for people—!”

“By the way,” I asked, “how small a thing will the biggest telescopes

show upon the moon?”

“One could see a fair-sized church. One could certainly see any towns

or buildings, or anything like the handiwork of men. There might

perhaps be insects, something in the way of ants, for example, so that

they could hide in deep burrows from the lunar light, or some new sort

of creatures having no earthly parallel. That is the most probable

thing, if we are to find life there at all. Think of the difference in

conditions! Life must fit itself to a day as long as fourteen earthly

days, a cloudless sun-blaze of fourteen days, and then a night of equal

length, growing ever colder and colder under these cold, sharp stars.

In that night there must be cold, the ultimate cold, absolute zero,

273° C. below the earthly freezing point. Whatever life there is must

hibernate through _that_, and rise again each day.”

He mused. “One can imagine something worm-like,” he said, “taking its

air solid as an earth-worm swallows earth, or thick-skinned monsters—”

“By the bye,” I said, “why didn’t we bring a gun?”

He did not answer that question. “No,” he concluded, “we just have to

go. We shall see when we get there.”

I remembered something. “Of course, there’s my minerals, anyhow,” I

said; “whatever the conditions may be.”

Presently he told me he wished to alter our course a little by letting

the earth tug at us for a moment. He was going to open one earthward

blind for thirty seconds. He warned me that it would make my head swim,

and advised me to extend my hands against the glass to break my fall. I

did as he directed, and thrust my feet against the bales of food cases

and air cylinders to prevent their falling upon me. Then with a click

the window flew open. I fell clumsily upon hands and face, and saw for

a moment between my black extended fingers our mother earth—a planet in

a downward sky.

We were still very near—Cavor told me the distance was perhaps eight

hundred miles and the huge terrestrial disc filled all heaven. But

already it was plain to see that the world was a globe. The land below

us was in twilight and vague, but westward the vast grey stretches of

the Atlantic shone like molten silver under the receding day. I think I

recognised the cloud-dimmed coast-lines of France and Spain and the

south of England, and then, with a click, the shutter closed again, and

I found myself in a state of extraordinary confusion sliding slowly

over the smooth glass.

When at last things settled themselves in my mind again, it seemed

quite beyond question that the moon was “down” and under my feet, and

that the earth was somewhere away on the level of the horizon—the earth

that had been “down” to me and my kindred since the beginning of

things.

So slight were the exertions required of us, so easy did the practical

annihilation of our weight make all we had to do, that the necessity

for taking refreshment did not occur to us for nearly six hours (by

Cavor’s chronometer) after our start. I was amazed at that lapse of

time. Even then I was satisfied with very little. Cavor examined the

apparatus for absorbing carbonic acid and water, and pronounced it to

be in satisfactory order, our consumption of oxygen having been

extraordinarily slight. And our talk being exhausted for the time, and

there being nothing further for us to do, we gave way to a curious

drowsiness that had come upon us, and spreading our blankets on the

bottom of the sphere in such a manner as to shut out most of the

moonlight, wished each other good-night, and almost immediately fell

asleep.

And so, sleeping, and sometimes talking and reading a little, and at

times eating, although without any keenness of appetite,[1] but for the

most part in a sort of quiescence that was neither waking nor slumber,

we fell through a space of time that had neither night nor day in it,

silently, softly, and swiftly down towards the moon.

[1] It is a curious thing, that while we were in the sphere we felt

not the slightest desire for food, nor did we feel the want of it when

we abstained. At first we forced our appetites, but afterwards we

fasted completely. Altogether we did not consume one-hundredth part of

the compressed provisions we had brought with us. The amount of

carbonic acid we breathed was also unnaturally low, but why this was,

I am quite unable to explain.

VI.

The Landing on the Moon

I remember how one day Cavor suddenly opened six of our shutters and

blinded me so that I cried aloud at him. The whole area was moon, a

stupendous scimitar of white dawn with its edge hacked out by notches

of darkness, the crescent shore of an ebbing tide of darkness, out of

which peaks and pinnacles came glittering into the blaze of the sun. I

take it the reader has seen pictures or photographs of the moon and

that I need not describe the broader features of that landscape, those

spacious ring-like ranges vaster than any terrestrial mountains, their

summits shining in the day, their shadows harsh and deep, the grey

disordered plains, the ridges, hills, and craterlets, all passing at

last from a blazing illumination into a common mystery of black.

Athwart this world we were flying scarcely a hundred miles above its

crests and pinnacles. And now we could see, what no eye on earth will

ever see, that under the blaze of the day the harsh outlines of the

rocks and ravines of the plains and crater floor grew grey and

indistinct under a thickening haze, that the white of their lit

surfaces broke into lumps and patches, and broke again and shrank and

vanished, and that here and there strange tints of brown and olive grew

and spread.

But little time we had for watching then. For now we had come to the

real danger of our journey. We had to drop ever closer to the moon as

we spun about it, to slacken our pace and watch our chance, until at

last we could dare to drop upon its surface.

For Cavor that was a time of intense exertion; for me it was an anxious

inactivity. I seemed perpetually to be getting out of his way. He leapt

about the sphere from point to point with an agility that would have

been impossible on earth. He was perpetually opening and closing the

Cavorite windows, making calculations, consulting his chronometer by

means of the glow lamp during those last eventful hours. For a long

time we had all our windows closed and hung silently in darkness

hurling through space.

Then he was feeling for the shutter studs, and suddenly four windows

were open. I staggered and covered my eyes, drenched and scorched and

blinded by the unaccustomed splendour of the sun beneath my feet. Then

again the shutters snapped, leaving my brain spinning in a darkness

that pressed against the eyes. And after that I floated in another

vast, black silence.

Then Cavor switched on the electric light, and told me he proposed to

bind all our luggage together with the blankets about it, against the

concussion of our descent. We did this with our windows closed, because

in that way our goods arranged themselves naturally at the centre of

the sphere. That too was a strange business; we two men floating loose

in that spherical space, and packing and pulling ropes. Imagine it if

you can! No up nor down, and every effort resulting in unexpected

movements. Now I would be pressed against the glass with the full force

of Cavor’s thrust, now I would be kicking helplessly in a void. Now the

star of the electric light would be overhead, now under foot. Now

Cavor’s feet would float up before my eyes, and now we would be

crossways to each other. But at last our goods were safely bound

together in a big soft bale, all except two blankets with head holes

that we were to wrap about ourselves.

Then for a flash Cavor opened a window moonward, and we saw that we

were dropping towards a huge central crater with a number of minor

craters grouped in a sort of cross about it. And then again Cavor flung

our little sphere open to the scorching, blinding sun. I think he was

using the sun’s attraction as a brake. “Cover yourself with a blanket,”

he cried, thrusting himself from me, and for a moment I did not

understand.

Then I hauled the blanket from beneath my feet and got it about me and

over my head and eyes. Abruptly he closed the shutters again, snapped

one open again and closed it, then suddenly began snapping them all

open, each safely into its steel roller. There came a jar, and then we

were rolling over and over, bumping against the glass and against the

big bale of our luggage, and clutching at each other, and outside some

white substance splashed as if we were rolling down a slope of snow....

Over, clutch, bump, clutch, bump, over....

Came a thud, and I was half buried under the bale of our possessions,

and for a space everything was still. Then I could hear Cavor puffing

and grunting, and the snapping of a shutter in its sash. I made an

effort, thrust back our blanket-wrapped luggage, and emerged from

beneath it. Our open windows were just visible as a deeper black set

with stars.

We were still alive, and we were lying in the darkness of the shadow of

the wall of the great crater into which we had fallen.

We sat getting our breath again, and feeling the bruises on our limbs.

I don’t think either of us had had a very clear expectation of such

rough handling as we had received. I struggled painfully to my feet.

“And now,” said I, “to look at the landscape of the moon! But—! It’s

tremendously dark, Cavor!”

The glass was dewy, and as I spoke I wiped at it with my blanket.

“We’re half an hour or so beyond the day,” he said. “We must wait.”

It was impossible to distinguish anything. We might have been in a

sphere of steel for all that we could see. My rubbing with the blanket

simply smeared the glass, and as fast as I wiped it, it became opaque

again with freshly condensed moisture mixed with an increasing quantity

of blanket hairs. Of course I ought not to have used the blanket. In my

efforts to clear the glass I slipped upon the damp surface, and hurt my

shin against one of the oxygen cylinders that protruded from our bale.

The thing was exasperating—it was absurd. Here we were just arrived

upon the moon, amidst we knew not what wonders, and all we could see

was the grey and streaming wall of the bubble in which we had come.

“Confound it!” I said, “but at this rate we might have stopped at

home;” and I squatted on the bale and shivered, and drew my blanket

closer about me.

Abruptly the moisture turned to spangles and fronds of frost. “Can you

reach the electric heater,” said Cavor. “Yes—that black knob. Or we

shall freeze.”

I did not wait to be told twice. “And now,” said I, “what are we to

do?”

“Wait,” he said.

“Wait?”

“Of course. We shall have to wait until our air gets warm again, and

then this glass will clear. We can’t do anything till then. It’s night

here yet; we must wait for the day to overtake us. Meanwhile, don’t you

feel hungry?”

For a space I did not answer him, but sat fretting. I turned

reluctantly from the smeared puzzle of the glass and stared at his

face. “Yes,” I said, “I am hungry. I feel somehow enormously

disappointed. I had expected—I don’t know what I had expected, but not

this.”

I summoned my philosophy, and rearranging my blanket about me sat down

on the bale again and began my first meal on the moon. I don’t think I

finished it—I forget. Presently, first in patches, then running rapidly

together into wider spaces, came the clearing of the glass, came the

drawing of the misty veil that hid the moon world from our eyes.

We peered out upon the landscape of the moon.

VII.

Sunrise on the Moon

As we saw it first it was the wildest and most desolate of scenes. We

were in an enormous amphitheatre, a vast circular plain, the floor of

the giant crater. Its cliff-like walls closed us in on every side. From

the westward the light of the unseen sun fell upon them, reaching to

the very foot of the cliff, and showed a disordered escarpment of drab

and greyish rock, lined here and there with banks and crevices of snow.

This was perhaps a dozen miles away, but at first no intervening

atmosphere diminished in the slightest the minutely detailed brilliancy

with which these things glared at us. They stood out clear and dazzling

against a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthly

eyes rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousness

of the sky.

The eastward cliff was at first merely a starless selvedge to the

starry dome. No rosy flush, no creeping pallor, announced the

commencing day. Only the Corona, the Zodiacal light, a huge

cone-shaped, luminous haze, pointing up towards the splendour of the

morning star, warned us of the imminent nearness of the sun.

Whatever light was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs. It

showed a huge undulating plain, cold and grey, a grey that deepened

eastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow.

Innumerable rounded grey summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy

substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity,

gave us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall. These

hummocks looked like snow. At the time I thought they were snow. But

they were not—they were mounds and masses of frozen air.

So it was at first; and then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came the

lunar day.

The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at

its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots

towards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the

touch of the dawn a reek of grey vapour poured upward from the crater

floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of grey, thicker and

broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming

like a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs

were no more than refracted glare beyond.

“It is air,” said Cavor. “It must be air—or it would not rise like

this—at the mere touch of a sun-beam. And at this pace....”

He peered upwards. “Look!” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“In the sky. Already. On the blackness—a little touch of blue. See! The

stars seem larger. And the little ones and all those dim nebulosities

we saw in empty space—they are hidden!”

Swiftly, steadily, the day approached us. Grey summit after grey summit

was overtaken by the blaze, and turned to a smoking white intensity. At

last there was nothing to the west of us but a bank of surging fog, the

tumultuous advance and ascent of cloudy haze. The distant cliff had

receded farther and farther, had loomed and changed through the whirl,

and foundered and vanished at last in its confusion.

Nearer came that steaming advance, nearer and nearer, coming as fast as

the shadow of a cloud before the south-west wind. About us rose a thin

anticipatory haze.

Cavor gripped my arm. “What?” I said.

“Look! The sunrise! The sun!”

He turned me about and pointed to the brow of the eastward cliff,

looming above the haze about us, scarce lighter than the darkness of

the sky. But now its line was marked by strange reddish shapes, tongues

of vermilion flame that writhed and danced. I fancied it must be

spirals of vapour that had caught the light and made this crest of

fiery tongues against the sky, but indeed it was the solar prominences

I saw, a crown of fire about the sun that is forever hidden from

earthly eyes by our atmospheric veil.

And then—the sun!

Steadily, inevitably came a brilliant line, came a thin edge of

intolerable effulgence that took a circular shape, became a bow, became

a blazing sceptre, and hurled a shaft of heat at us as though it was a

spear.

It seemed verily to stab my eyes! I cried aloud and turned about

blinded, groping for my blanket beneath the bale.

And with that incandescence came a sound, the first sound that had

reached us from without since we left the earth, a hissing and

rustling, the stormy trailing of the aerial garment of the advancing

day. And with the coming of the sound and the light the sphere lurched,

and blinded and dazzled we staggered helplessly against each other. It

lurched again, and the hissing grew louder. I had shut my eyes

perforce, I was making clumsy efforts to cover my head with my blanket,

and this second lurch sent me helplessly off my feet. I fell against

the bale, and opening my eyes had a momentary glimpse of the air just

outside our glass. It was running—it was boiling—like snow into which a

white-hot rod is thrust. What had been solid air had suddenly at the

touch of the sun become a paste, a mud, a slushy liquefaction, that

hissed and bubbled into gas.

There came a still more violent whirl of the sphere and we had clutched

one another. In another moment we were spun about again. Round we went

and over, and then I was on all fours. The lunar dawn had hold of us.

It meant to show us little men what the moon could do with us.

I caught a second glimpse of things without, puffs of vapour, half

liquid slush, excavated, sliding, falling, sliding. We dropped into

darkness. I went down with Cavor’s knees in my chest. Then he seemed to

fly away from me, and for a moment I lay with all the breath out of my

body staring upward. A toppling crag of the melting stuff had splashed

over us, buried us, and now it thinned and boiled off us. I saw the

bubbles dancing on the glass above. I heard Cavor exclaiming feebly.

Then some huge landslip in the thawing air had caught us, and

spluttering expostulation, we began to roll down a slope, rolling

faster and faster, leaping crevasses and rebounding from banks, faster

and faster, westward into the white-hot boiling tumult of the lunar

day.

Clutching at one another we spun about, pitched this way and that, our

bale of packages leaping at us, pounding at us. We collided, we

gripped, we were torn asunder—our heads met, and the whole universe

burst into fiery darts and stars! On the earth we should have smashed

one another a dozen times, but on the moon, luckily for us, our weight

was only one-sixth of what it is terrestrially, and we fell very

mercifully. I recall a sensation of utter sickness, a feeling as if my

brain were upside down within my skull, and then—

Something was at work upon my face, some thin feelers worried my ears.

Then I discovered the brilliance of the landscape around was mitigated

by blue spectacles. Cavor bent over me, and I saw his face upside down,

his eyes also protected by tinted goggles. His breath came irregularly,

and his lip was bleeding from a bruise. “Better?” he said, wiping the

blood with the back of his hand.

Everything seemed swaying for a space, but that was simply my

giddiness. I perceived that he had closed some of the shutters in the

outer sphere to save me—from the direct blaze of the sun. I was aware

that everything about us was very brilliant.

“Lord!” I gasped. “But this—”

I craned my neck to see. I perceived there was a blinding glare

outside, an utter change from the gloomy darkness of our first

impressions. “Have I been insensible long?” I asked.

“I don’t know—the chronometer is broken. Some little time.... My dear

chap! I have been afraid...”

I lay for a space taking this in. I saw his face still bore evidences

of emotion. For a while I said nothing. I passed an inquisitive hand

over my contusions, and surveyed his face for similar damages. The back

of my right hand had suffered most, and was skinless and raw. My

forehead was bruised and had bled. He handed me a little measure with

some of the restorative—I forget the name of it—he had brought with us.

After a time I felt a little better. I began to stretch my limbs

carefully. Soon I could talk.

“It wouldn’t have done,” I said, as though there had been no interval.

“No! it _wouldn’t_.”

He thought, his hands hanging over his knees. He peered through the

glass and then stared at me. “Good Lord!” he said. “_No!_”

“What has happened?” I asked after a pause. “Have we jumped to the

tropics?”

“It was as I expected. This air has evaporated—if it is air. At any

rate, it has evaporated, and the surface of the moon is showing. We are

lying on a bank of earthy rock. Here and there bare soil is exposed. A

queer sort of soil!”

It occurred to him that it was unnecessary to explain. He assisted me

into a sitting position, and I could see with my own eyes.

VIII.

A Lunar Morning

The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of scenery had

altogether disappeared. The glare of the sun had taken upon itself a

faint tinge of amber; the shadows upon the cliff of the crater wall

were deeply purple. To the eastward a dark bank of fog still crouched

and sheltered from the sunrise, but to the westward the sky was blue

and clear. I began to realise the length of my insensibility.

We were no longer in a void. An atmosphere had arisen about us. The

outline of things had gained in character, had grown acute and varied;

save for a shadowed space of white substance here and there, white

substance that was no longer air but snow, the arctic appearance had

gone altogether. Everywhere broad rusty brown spaces of bare and

tumbled earth spread to the blaze of the sun. Here and there at the

edge of the snowdrifts were transient little pools and eddies of water,

the only things stirring in that expanse of barrenness. The sunlight

inundated the upper two blinds of our sphere and turned our climate to

high summer, but our feet were still in shadow, and the sphere was

lying upon a drift of snow.

And scattered here and there upon the slope, and emphasised by little

white threads of unthawed snow upon their shady sides, were shapes like

sticks, dry twisted sticks of the same rusty hue as the rock upon which

they lay. That caught one’s thoughts sharply. Sticks! On a lifeless

world? Then as my eye grew more accustomed to the texture of their

substance, I perceived that almost all this surface had a fibrous

texture, like the carpet of brown needles one finds beneath the shade

of pine trees.

“Cavor!” I said.

“Yes.”

“It may be a dead world now—but once—”

Something arrested my attention. I had discovered among these needles a

number of little round objects. And it seemed to me that one of these

had moved. “Cavor,” I whispered.

“What?”

But I did not answer at once. I stared incredulous. For an instant I

could not believe my eyes. I gave an inarticulate cry. I gripped his

arm. I pointed. “Look!” I cried, finding my tongue. “There! Yes! And

there!”

His eyes followed my pointing finger. “Eh?” he said.

How can I describe the thing I saw? It is so petty a thing to state,

and yet it seemed so wonderful, so pregnant with emotion. I have said

that amidst the stick-like litter were these rounded bodies, these

little oval bodies that might have passed as very small pebbles. And

now first one and then another had stirred, had rolled over and

cracked, and down the crack of each of them showed a minute line of

yellowish green, thrusting outward to meet the hot encouragement of the

newly-risen sun. For a moment that was all, and then there stirred, and

burst a third!

“It is a seed,” said Cavor. And then I heard him whisper very softly,

“_Life!_”

“Life!” And immediately it poured upon us that our vast journey had not

been made in vain, that we had come to no arid waste of minerals, but

to a world that lived and moved! We watched intensely. I remember I

kept rubbing the glass before me with my sleeve, jealous of the

faintest suspicion of mist.

The picture was clear and vivid only in the middle of the field. All

about that centre the dead fibres and seeds were magnified and

distorted by the curvature of the glass. But we could see enough! One

after another all down the sunlit slope these miraculous little brown

bodies burst and gaped apart, like seed-pods, like the husks of fruits;

opened eager mouths that drank in the heat and light pouring in a

cascade from the newly-risen sun.

Every moment more of these seed coats ruptured, and even as they did so

the swelling pioneers overflowed their rent-distended seed-cases, and

passed into the second stage of growth. With a steady assurance, a

swift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward to

the earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. In a little

while the whole slope was dotted with minute plantlets standing at

attention in the blaze of the sun.

They did not stand for long. The bundle-like buds swelled and strained

and opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips,

spreading a whorl of tiny, spiky, brownish leaves, that lengthened

rapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement was slower

than any animal’s, swifter than any plant’s I have ever seen before.

How can I suggest it to you—the way that growth went on? The leaf tips

grew so that they moved onward even while we looked at them. The brown

seed-case shrivelled and was absorbed with an equal rapidity. Have you

ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand and watched

the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon plants grew

like that.

In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of these

plants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a second

whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a

lifeless stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-green

herbage of bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their

growing.

I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the

eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed

and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this

fringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a

cactus, and swelling visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills with

air.

Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distended form

was rising over the scrub. But here the light fell upon its sleek

sides, and I could see that its colour was a vivid orange hue. It rose

as one watched it; if one looked away from it for a minute and then

back, its outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congested branches

until in a little time it rose a coralline shape of many feet in

height. Compared with such a growth the terrestrial puff-ball, which

will sometimes swell a foot in diameter in a single night, would be a

hopeless laggard. But then the puff-ball grows against a gravitational

pull six times that of the moon. Beyond, out of gullies and flats that

had been hidden from us, but not from the quickening sun, over reefs

and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spiky and fleshy

vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously to take

advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit and seed

again and die. It was like a miracle, that growth. So, one must

imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the

desolation of the new-made earth.

Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, the

stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of

vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes. Conceive it

all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem

watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, wherever there

was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow. And to have the picture of

our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we saw it all

through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are distorted by a

lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very bright there,

and towards the edges magnified and unreal.

IX.

Prospecting Begins

We ceased to gaze. We turned to each other, the same thought, the same

question in our eyes. For these plants to grow, there must be some air,

however attenuated, air that we also should be able to breathe.

“The manhole?” I said.

“Yes!” said Cavor, “if it is air we see!”

“In a little while,” I said, “these plants will be as high as we are.

Suppose—suppose after all— Is it certain? How do you know that stuff

_is_ air? It may be nitrogen—it may be carbonic acid even!”

“That’s easy,” he said, and set about proving it. He produced a big

piece of crumpled paper from the bale, lit it, and thrust it hastily

through the man-hole valve. I bent forward and peered down through the

thick glass for its appearance outside, that little flame on whose

evidence depended so much!

I saw the paper drop out and lie lightly upon the snow. The pink flame

of its burning vanished. For an instant it seemed to be extinguished.

And then I saw a little blue tongue upon the edge of it that trembled,

and crept, and spread!

Quietly the whole sheet, save where it lay in immediate contact with

the snow, charred and shrivelled and sent up a quivering thread of

smoke. There was no doubt left to me; the atmosphere of the moon was

either pure oxygen or air, and capable therefore—unless its tenuity was

excessive—of supporting our alien life. We might emerge—and live!

I sat down with my legs on either side of the manhole and prepared to

unscrew it, but Cavor stopped me. “There is first a little precaution,”

he said. He pointed out that although it was certainly an oxygenated

atmosphere outside, it might still be so rarefied as to cause us grave

injury. He reminded me of mountain sickness, and of the bleeding that

often afflicts aeronauts who have ascended too swiftly, and he spent

some time in the preparation of a sickly-tasting drink which he

insisted on my sharing. It made me feel a little numb, but otherwise

had no effect on me. Then he permitted me to begin unscrewing.

Presently the glass stopper of the manhole was so far undone that the

denser air within our sphere began to escape along the thread of the

screw, singing as a kettle sings before it boils. Thereupon he made me

desist. It speedily became evident that the pressure outside was very

much less than it was within. How much less it was we had no means of

telling.

I sat grasping the stopper with both hands, ready to close it again if,

in spite of our intense hope, the lunar atmosphere should after all

prove too rarefied for us, and Cavor sat with a cylinder of compressed

oxygen at hand to restore our pressure. We looked at one another in

silence, and then at the fantastic vegetation that swayed and grew

visibly and noiselessly without. And ever that shrill piping continued.

My blood-vessels began to throb in my ears, and the sound of Cavor’s

movements diminished. I noted how still everything had become, because

of the thinning of the air.

As our air sizzled out from the screw the moisture of it condensed in

little puffs.

Presently I experienced a peculiar shortness of breath that lasted

indeed during the whole of the time of our exposure to the moon’s

exterior atmosphere, and a rather unpleasant sensation about the ears

and finger-nails and the back of the throat grew upon my attention, and

presently passed off again.

But then came vertigo and nausea that abruptly changed the quality of

my courage. I gave the lid of the manhole half a turn and made a hasty

explanation to Cavor; but now he was the more sanguine. He answered me

in a voice that seemed extraordinarily small and remote, because of the

thinness of the air that carried the sound. He recommended a nip of

brandy, and set me the example, and presently I felt better. I turned

the manhole stopper back again. The throbbing in my ears grew louder,

and then I remarked that the piping note of the outrush had ceased. For

a time I could not be sure that it had ceased.

“Well?” said Cavor, in the ghost of a voice.

“Well?” said I.

“Shall we go on?”

I thought. “Is this all?”

“If you can stand it.”

By way of answer I went on unscrewing. I lifted the circular operculum

from its place and laid it carefully on the bale. A flake or so of snow

whirled and vanished as that thin and unfamiliar air took possession of

our sphere. I knelt, and then seated myself at the edge of the manhole,

peering over it. Beneath, within a yard of my face, lay the untrodden

snow of the moon.

There came a little pause. Our eyes met.

“It doesn’t distress your lungs too much?” said Cavor.

“No,” I said. “I can stand this.”

He stretched out his hand for his blanket, thrust his head through its

central hole, and wrapped it about him. He sat down on the edge of the

manhole, he let his feet drop until they were within six inches of the

lunar ground. He hesitated for a moment, then thrust himself forward,

dropped these intervening inches, and stood upon the untrodden soil of

the moon.

As he stepped forward he was refracted grotesquely by the edge of the

glass. He stood for a moment looking this way and that. Then he drew

himself together and leapt.

The glass distorted everything, but it seemed to me even then to be an

extremely big leap. He had at one bound become remote. He seemed twenty

or thirty feet off. He was standing high upon a rocky mass and

gesticulating back to me. Perhaps he was shouting—but the sound did not

reach me. But how the deuce had he done this? I felt like a man who has

just seen a new conjuring trick.

In a puzzled state of mind I too dropped through the manhole. I stood

up. Just in front of me the snowdrift had fallen away and made a sort

of ditch. I made a step and jumped.

I found myself flying through the air, saw the rock on which he stood

coming to meet me, clutched it and clung in a state of infinite

amazement.

I gasped a painful laugh. I was tremendously confused. Cavor bent down

and shouted in piping tones for me to be careful.

I had forgotten that on the moon, with only an eighth part of the

earth’s mass and a quarter of its diameter, my weight was barely a

sixth what it was on earth. But now that fact insisted on being

remembered.

“We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now,” he said.

With a guarded effort I raised myself to the top, and moving as

cautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blaze

of the sun. The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirty

feet away.

As far as the eye could see over the enormous disorder of rocks that

formed the crater floor, the same bristling scrub that surrounded us

was starting into life, diversified here and there by bulging masses of

a cactus form, and scarlet and purple lichens that grew so fast they

seemed to crawl over the rocks. The whole area of the crater seemed to

me then to be one similar wilderness up to the very foot of the

surrounding cliff.

This cliff was apparently bare of vegetation save at its base, and with

buttresses and terraces and platforms that did not very greatly attract

our attention at the time. It was many miles away from us in every

direction; we seemed to be almost at the centre of the crater, and we

saw it through a certain haziness that drove before the wind. For there

was even a wind now in the thin air, a swift yet weak wind that chilled

exceedingly but exerted little pressure. It was blowing round the

crater, as it seemed, to the hot illuminated side from the foggy

darkness under the sunward wall. It was difficult to look into this

eastward fog; we had to peer with half-closed eyes beneath the shade of

our hands, because of the fierce intensity of the motionless sun.

“It seems to be deserted,” said Cavor, “absolutely desolate.”

I looked about me again. I retained even then a clinging hope of some

quasi-human evidence, some pinnacle of building, some house or engine,

but everywhere one looked spread the tumbled rocks in peaks and crests,

and the darting scrub and those bulging cacti that swelled and swelled,

a flat negation as it seemed of all such hope.

“It looks as though these plants had it to themselves,” I said. “I see

no trace of any other creature.”

“No insects—no birds, no! Not a trace, not a scrap nor particle of

animal life. If there was—what would they do in the night? ... No;

there’s just these plants alone.”

I shaded my eyes with my hand. “It’s like the landscape of a dream.

These things are less like earthly land plants than the things one

imagines among the rocks at the bottom of the sea. Look at that yonder!

One might imagine it a lizard changed into a plant. And the glare!”

“This is only the fresh morning,” said Cavor.

He sighed and looked about him. “This is no world for men,” he said.

“And yet in a way—it appeals.”

He became silent for a time, then commenced his meditative humming.

I started at a gentle touch, and found a thin sheet of livid lichen

lapping over my shoe. I kicked at it and it fell to powder, and each

speck began to grow.

I heard Cavor exclaim sharply, and perceived that one of the fixed

bayonets of the scrub had pricked him. He hesitated, his eyes sought

among the rocks about us. A sudden blaze of pink had crept up a ragged

pillar of crag. It was a most extraordinary pink, a livid magenta.

“Look!” said I, turning, and behold Cavor had vanished.

For an instant I stood transfixed. Then I made a hasty step to look

over the verge of the rock. But in my surprise at his disappearance I

forgot once more that we were on the moon. The thrust of my foot that I

made in striding would have carried me a yard on earth; on the moon it

carried me six—a good five yards over the edge. For the moment the

thing had something of the effect of those nightmares when one falls

and falls. For while one falls sixteen feet in the first second of a

fall on earth, on the moon one falls two, and with only a sixth of

one’s weight. I fell, or rather I jumped down, about ten yards I

suppose. It seemed to take quite a long time, five or six seconds, I

should think. I floated through the air and fell like a feather,

knee-deep in a snow-drift in the bottom of a gully of blue-grey,

white-veined rock.

I looked about me. “Cavor!” I cried; but no Cavor was visible.

“Cavor!” I cried louder, and the rocks echoed me.

I turned fiercely to the rocks and clambered to the summit of them.

“Cavor!” I cried. My voice sounded like the voice of a lost lamb.

The sphere, too, was not in sight, and for a moment a horrible feeling

of desolation pinched my heart.

Then I saw him. He was laughing and gesticulating to attract my

attention. He was on a bare patch of rock twenty or thirty yards away.

I could not hear his voice, but “jump” said his gestures. I hesitated,

the distance seemed enormous. Yet I reflected that surely I must be

able to clear a greater distance than Cavor.

I made a step back, gathered myself together, and leapt with all my

might. I seemed to shoot right up in the air as though I should never

come down.

It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare, to go

flying off in this fashion. I realised my leap had been altogether too

violent. I flew clean over Cavor’s head and beheld a spiky confusion in

a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp of alarm. I put out my

hands and straightened my legs.

I hit a huge fungoid bulk that burst all about me, scattering a mass of

orange spores in every direction, and covering me with orange powder. I

rolled over spluttering, and came to rest convulsed with breathless

laughter.

I became aware of Cavor’s little round face peering over a bristling

hedge. He shouted some faded inquiry. “Eh?” I tried to shout, but could

not do so for want of breath. He made his way towards me, coming

gingerly among the bushes.

“We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “This moon has no discipline.

She’ll let us smash ourselves.”

He helped me to my feet. “You exerted yourself too much,” he said,

dabbing at the yellow stuff with his hand to remove it from my

garments.

I stood passive and panting, allowing him to beat off the jelly from my

knees and elbows and lecture me upon my misfortunes. “We don’t quite

allow for the gravitation. Our muscles are scarcely educated yet. We

must practise a little, when you have got your breath.”

I pulled two or three little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a time

on a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feeling

of personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learner

of cycling on earth.

It suddenly occurred to Cavor that the cold air in the gully, after the

brightness of the sun, might give me a fever. So we clambered back into

the sunlight. We found that beyond a few abrasions I had received no

serious injuries from my tumble, and at Cavor’s suggestion we were

presently looking round for some safe and easy landing-place for my

next leap. We chose a rocky slab some ten yards off, separated from us

by a little thicket of olive-green spikes.

“Imagine it there!” said Cavor, who was assuming the airs of a trainer,

and he pointed to a spot about four feet from my toes. This leap I

managed without difficulty, and I must confess I found a certain

satisfaction in Cavor’s falling short by a foot or so and tasting the

spikes of the scrub. “One has to be careful, you see,” he said, pulling

out his thorns, and with that he ceased to be my mentor and became my

fellow-learner in the art of lunar locomotion.

We chose a still easier jump and did it without difficulty, and then

leapt back again, and to and fro several times, accustoming our muscles

to the new standard. I could never have believed had I not experienced

it, how rapid that adaptation would be. In a very little time indeed,

certainly after fewer than thirty leaps, we could judge the effort

necessary for a distance with almost terrestrial assurance.

And all this time the lunar plants were growing around us, higher and

denser and more entangled, every moment thicker and taller, spiked

plants, green cactus masses, fungi, fleshy and lichenous things,

strangest radiate and sinuous shapes. But we were so intent upon our

leaping, that for a time we gave no heed to their unfaltering

expansion.

An extraordinary elation had taken possession of us. Partly, I think,

it was our sense of release from the confinement of the sphere. Mainly,

however, the thin sweetness of the air, which I am certain contained a

much larger proportion of oxygen than our terrestrial atmosphere. In

spite of the strange quality of all about us, I felt as adventurous and

experimental as a cockney would do placed for the first time among

mountains and I do not think it occurred to either of us, face to face

though we were with the unknown, to be very greatly afraid.

We were bitten by a spirit of enterprise. We selected a lichenous kopje

perhaps fifteen yards away, and landed neatly on its summit one after

the other. “Good!” we cried to each other; “good!” and Cavor made three

steps and went off to a tempting slope of snow a good twenty yards and

more beyond. I stood for a moment struck by the grotesque effect of his

soaring figure—his dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little round

body, his arms and his knicker-bockered legs tucked up tightly—against

the weird spaciousness of the lunar scene. A gust of laughter seized

me, and then I stepped off to follow. Plump! I dropped beside him.

We made a few gargantuan strides, leapt three or four times more, and

sat down at last in a lichenous hollow. Our lungs were painful. We sat

holding our sides and recovering our breath, looking appreciation to

one another. Cavor panted something about “amazing sensations.” And

then came a thought into my head. For the moment it did not seem a

particularly appalling thought, simply a natural question arising out

of the situation.

“By the way,” I said, “where exactly is the sphere?”

Cavor looked at me. “Eh?”

The full meaning of what we were saying struck me sharply.

“Cavor!” I cried, laying a hand on his arm, “where is the sphere?”

X.

Lost Men in the Moon

His face caught something of my dismay. He stood up and stared about

him at the scrub that fenced us in and rose about us, straining upward

in a passion of growth. He put a dubious hand to his lips. He spoke

with a sudden lack of assurance. “I think,” he said slowly, “we left it

... somewhere ... about _there_.”

He pointed a hesitating finger that wavered in an arc.

“I’m not sure.” His look of consternation deepened. “Anyhow,” he said,

with his eyes on me, “it can’t be far.”

We had both stood up. We made unmeaning ejaculations, our eyes sought

in the twining, thickening jungle round about us.

All about us on the sunlit slopes frothed and swayed the darting

shrubs, the swelling cactus, the creeping lichens, and wherever the

shade remained the snow-drifts lingered. North, south, east, and west

spread an identical monotony of unfamiliar forms. And somewhere, buried

already among this tangled confusion, was our sphere, our home, our

only provision, our only hope of escape from this fantastic wilderness

of ephemeral growths into which we had come.

“I think after all,” he said, pointing suddenly, “it might be over

there.”

“No,” I said. “We have turned in a curve. See! here is the mark of my

heels. It’s clear the thing must be more to the eastward, much more.

No—the sphere must be over there.”

“I _think_,” said Cavor, “I kept the sun upon my right all the time.”

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

We stared into one another’s eyes. The area of the crater had become

enormously vast to our imaginations, the growing thickets already

impenetrably dense.

“Good heavens! What fools we have been!”

“It’s evident that we must find it again,” said Cavor, “and that soon.

The sun grows stronger. We should be fainting with the heat already if

it wasn’t so dry. And ... I’m hungry.”

I stared at him. I had not suspected this aspect of the matter before.

But it came to me at once—a positive craving. “Yes,” I said with

emphasis. “I am hungry too.”

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

the sphere.”

As calmly as possible we surveyed the interminable reefs and thickets

that formed the floor of the crater, each of us weighing in silence the

chances of our finding the sphere before we were overtaken by heat and

hunger.

“It can’t be fifty yards from here,” said Cavor, with indecisive

gestures. “The only thing is to beat round about until we come upon

it.”

“That is all we can do,” I said, without any alacrity to begin our

hunt. “I wish this confounded spike bush did not grow so fast!”

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

I stared about me in the vain hope of recognising some knoll or shrub

that had been near the sphere. But everywhere was a confusing sameness,

everywhere the aspiring bushes, the distending fungi, the dwindling

snow banks, steadily and inevitably changed. The sun scorched and

stung, the faintness of an unaccountable hunger mingled with our

infinite perplexity. And even as we stood there, confused and lost

amidst unprecedented things, we became aware for the first time of a

sound upon the moon other than the air of the growing plants, the faint

sighing of the wind, or those that we ourselves had made.

Boom.... Boom.... Boom.

It came from beneath our feet, a sound in the earth. We seemed to hear

it with our feet as much as with our ears. Its dull resonance was

muffled by distance, thick with the quality of intervening substance.

No sound that I can imagine could have astonished us more, or have

changed more completely the quality of things about us. For this sound,

rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed to us as though it could be nothing

but the striking of some gigantic buried clock.

Boom.... Boom.... Boom.

Sound suggestive of still cloisters, of sleepless nights in crowded

cities, of vigils and the awaited hour, of all that is orderly and

methodical in life, booming out pregnant and mysterious in this

fantastic desert! To the eye everything was unchanged: the desolation

of bushes and cacti waving silently in the wind, stretched unbroken to

the distant cliffs, the still dark sky was empty overhead, and the hot

sun hung and burned. And through it all, a warning, a threat, throbbed

this enigma of sound.

Boom.... Boom.... Boom....

We questioned one another in faint and faded voices.

“A clock?”

“Like a clock!”

“What is it?”

“What can it be?”

“Count,” was Cavor’s belated suggestion, and at that word the striking

ceased.

The silence, the rhythmic disappointment of the silence, came as a

fresh shock. For a moment one could doubt whether one had ever heard a

sound. Or whether it might not still be going on. Had I indeed heard a

sound?

I felt the pressure of Cavor’s hand upon my arm. He spoke in an

undertone, as though he feared to wake some sleeping thing. “Let us

keep together,” he whispered, “and look for the sphere. We must get

back to the sphere. This is beyond our understanding.”

“Which way shall we go?”

He hesitated. An intense persuasion of presences, of unseen things

about us and near us, dominated our minds. What could they be? Where

could they be? Was this arid desolation, alternately frozen and

scorched, only the outer rind and mask of some subterranean world? And

if so, what sort of world? What sort of inhabitants might it not

presently disgorge upon us?

And then, stabbing the aching stillness as vivid and sudden as an

unexpected thunderclap, came a clang and rattle as though great gates

of metal had suddenly been flung apart.

It arrested our steps. We stood gaping helplessly. Then Cavor stole

towards me.

“I do not understand!” he whispered close to my face. He waved his hand

vaguely skyward, the vague suggestion of still vaguer thoughts.

“A hiding-place! If anything came...”

I looked about us. I nodded my head in assent to him.

We started off, moving stealthily with the most exaggerated precautions

against noise. We went towards a thicket of scrub. A clangour like

hammers flung about a boiler hastened our steps. “We must crawl,”

whispered Cavor.

The lower leaves of the bayonet plants, already overshadowed by the

newer ones above, were beginning to wilt and shrivel so that we could

thrust our way in among the thickening stems without serious injury. A

stab in the face or arm we did not heed. At the heart of the thicket I

stopped, and stared panting into Cavor’s face.

“Subterranean,” he whispered. “Below.”

“They may come out.”

“We must find the sphere!”

“Yes,” I said; “but how?”

“Crawl till we come to it.”

“But if we don’t?”

“Keep hidden. See what they are like.”

“We will keep together,” said I.

He thought. “Which way shall we go?”

“We must take our chance.”

We peered this way and that. Then very circumspectly, we began to crawl

through the lower jungle, making, so far as we could judge, a circuit,

halting now at every waving fungus, at every sound, intent only on the

sphere from which we had so foolishly emerged. Ever and again from out

of the earth beneath us came concussions, beatings, strange,

inexplicable, mechanical sounds; and once, and then again, we thought

we heard something, a faint rattle and tumult, borne to us through the

air. But fearful as we were we dared essay no vantage-point to survey

the crater. For long we saw nothing of the beings whose sounds were so

abundant and insistent. But for the faintness of our hunger and the

drying of our throats that crawling would have had the quality of a

very vivid dream. It was so absolutely unreal. The only element with

any touch of reality was these sounds.

Picture it to yourself! About us the dream-like jungle, with the silent

bayonet leaves darting overhead, and the silent, vivid, sun-splashed

lichens under our hands and knees, waving with the vigour of their

growth as a carpet waves when the wind gets beneath it. Ever and again

one of the bladder fungi, bulging and distending under the sun, loomed

upon us. Ever and again some novel shape in vivid colour obtruded. The

very cells that built up these plants were as large as my thumb, like

beads of coloured glass. And all these things were saturated in the

unmitigated glare of the sun, were seen against a sky that was bluish

black and spangled still, in spite of the sunlight, with a few

surviving stars. Strange! the very forms and texture of the stones were

strange. It was all strange, the feeling of one’s body was

unprecedented, every other movement ended in a surprise. The breath

sucked thin in one’s throat, the blood flowed through one’s ears in a

throbbing tide—thud, thud, thud, thud....

And ever and again came gusts of turmoil, hammering, the clanging and

throb of machinery, and presently—the bellowing of great beasts!

XI.

The Mooncalf Pastures

So we two poor terrestrial castaways, lost in that wild-growing moon

jungle, crawled in terror before the sounds that had come upon us. We

crawled, as it seemed, a long time before we saw either Selenite or

mooncalf, though we heard the bellowing and gruntulous noises of these

latter continually drawing nearer to us. We crawled through stony

ravines, over snow slopes, amidst fungi that ripped like thin bladders

at our thrust, emitting a watery humour, over a perfect pavement of

things like puff-balls, and beneath interminable thickets of scrub. And

ever more helplessly our eyes sought for our abandoned sphere. The

noise of the mooncalves would at times be a vast flat calf-like sound,

at times it rose to an amazed and wrathy bellowing, and again it would

become a clogged bestial sound, as though these unseen creatures had

sought to eat and bellow at the same time.

Our first view was but an inadequate transitory glimpse, yet none the

less disturbing because it was incomplete. Cavor was crawling in front

at the time, and he first was aware of their proximity. He stopped

dead, arresting me with a single gesture.

A crackling and smashing of the scrub appeared to be advancing directly

upon us, and then, as we squatted close and endeavoured to judge of the

nearness and direction of this noise, there came a terrific bellow

behind us, so close and vehement that the tops of the bayonet scrub

bent before it, and one felt the breath of it hot and moist. And,

turning about, we saw indistinctly through a crowd of swaying stems the

mooncalf’s shining sides, and the long line of its back loomed out

against the sky.

Of course it is hard for me now to say how much I saw at that time,

because my impressions were corrected by subsequent observation. First

of all impressions was its enormous size; the girth of its body was

some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two hundred. Its sides rose and

fell with its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic, flabby

body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated white,

dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw

nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the

almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering

omnivorous mouth, its little nostrils, and tight shut eyes. (For the

mooncalf invariably shuts its eyes in the presence of the sun.) We had

a glimpse of a vast red pit as it opened its mouth to bleat and bellow

again; we had a breath from the pit, and then the monster heeled over

like a ship, dragged forward along the ground, creasing all its

leathery skin, rolled again, and so wallowed past us, smashing a path

amidst the scrub, and was speedily hidden from our eyes by the dense

interlacings beyond. Another appeared more distantly, and then another,

and then, as though he was guiding these animated lumps of provender to

their pasture, a Selenite came momentarily into ken. My grip upon

Cavor’s foot became convulsive at the sight of him, and we remained

motionless and peering long after he had passed out of our range.

By contrast with the mooncalves he seemed a trivial being, a mere ant,

scarcely five feet high. He was wearing garments of some leathery

substance, so that no portion of his actual body appeared, but of this,

of course, we were entirely ignorant. He presented himself, therefore,

as a compact, bristling creature, having much of the quality of a

complicated insect, with whip-like tentacles and a clanging arm

projecting from his shining cylindrical body case. The form of his head

was hidden by his enormous many-spiked helmet—we discovered afterwards

that he used the spikes for prodding refractory mooncalves—and a pair

of goggles of darkened glass, set very much at the side, gave a

bird-like quality to the metallic apparatus that covered his face. His

arms did not project beyond his body case, and he carried himself upon

short legs that, wrapped though they were in warm coverings, seemed to

our terrestrial eyes inordinately flimsy. They had very short thighs,

very long shanks, and little feet.

In spite of his heavy-looking clothing, he was progressing with what

would be, from the terrestrial point of view, very considerable

strides, and his clanging arm was busy. The quality of his motion

during the instant of his passing suggested haste and a certain anger,

and soon after we had lost sight of him we heard the bellow of a

mooncalf change abruptly into a short, sharp squeal followed by the

scuffle of its acceleration. And gradually that bellowing receded, and

then came to an end, as if the pastures sought had been attained.

We listened. For a space the moon world was still. But it was some time

before we resumed our crawling search for the vanished sphere.

When next we saw mooncalves they were some little distance away from us

in a place of tumbled rocks. The less vertical surfaces of the rocks

were thick with a speckled green plant growing in dense mossy clumps,

upon which these creatures were browsing. We stopped at the edge of the

reeds amidst which we were crawling at the sight of them, peering out

at them and looking round for a second glimpse of a Selenite. They lay

against their food like stupendous slugs, huge, greasy hulls, eating

greedily and noisily, with a sort of sobbing avidity. They seemed

monsters of mere fatness, clumsy and overwhelmed to a degree that would

make a Smithfield ox seem a model of agility. Their busy, writhing,

chewing mouths, and eyes closed, together with the appetising sound of

their munching, made up an effect of animal enjoyment that was

singularly stimulating to our empty frames.

“Hogs!” said Cavor, with unusual passion. “Disgusting hogs!” and after

one glare of angry envy crawled off through the bushes to our right. I

stayed long enough to see that the speckled plant was quite hopeless

for human nourishment, then crawled after him, nibbling a quill of it

between my teeth.

Presently we were arrested again by the proximity of a Selenite, and

this time we were able to observe him more exactly. Now we could see

that the Selenite covering was indeed clothing, and not a sort of

crustacean integument. He was quite similar in his costume to the

former one we had glimpsed, except that ends of something like wadding

were protruding from his neck, and he stood on a promontory of rock and

moved his head this way and that, as though he was surveying the

crater. We lay quite still, fearing to attract his attention if we

moved, and after a time he turned about and disappeared.

We came upon another drove of mooncalves bellowing up a ravine, and

then we passed over a place of sounds, sounds of beating machinery as

if some huge hall of industry came near the surface there. And while

these sounds were still about us we came to the edge of a great open

space, perhaps two hundred yards in diameter, and perfectly level. Save

for a few lichens that advanced from its margin this space was bare,

and presented a powdery surface of a dusty yellow colour. We were

afraid to strike out across this space, but as it presented less

obstruction to our crawling than the scrub, we went down upon it and

began very circumspectly to skirt its edge.

For a little while the noises from below ceased and everything, save

for the faint stir of the growing vegetation, was very still. Then

abruptly there began an uproar, louder, more vehement, and nearer than

any we had so far heard. Of a certainty it came from below.

Instinctively we crouched as flat as we could, ready for a prompt

plunge into the thicket beside us. Each knock and throb seemed to

vibrate through our bodies. Louder grew this throbbing and beating, and

that irregular vibration increased until the whole moon world seemed to

be jerking and pulsing.

“Cover,” whispered Cavor, and I turned towards the bushes.

At that instant came a thud like the thud of a gun, and then a thing

happened—it still haunts me in my dreams. I had turned my head to look

at Cavor’s face, and thrust out my hand in front of me as I did so. And

my hand met nothing! I plunged suddenly into a bottomless hole!

My chest hit something hard, and I found myself with my chin on the

edge of an unfathomable abyss that had suddenly opened beneath me, my

hand extended stiffly into the void. The whole of that flat circular

area was no more than a gigantic lid, that was now sliding sideways

from off the pit it had covered into a slot prepared for it.

Had it not been for Cavor I think I should have remained rigid, hanging

over this margin and staring into the enormous gulf below, until at

last the edges of the slot scraped me off and hurled me into its

depths. But Cavor had not received the shock that had paralysed me. He

had been a little distance from the edge when the lid had first opened,

and perceiving the peril that held me helpless, gripped my legs and

pulled me backward. I came into a sitting position, crawled away from

the edge for a space on all fours, then staggered up and ran after him

across the thundering, quivering sheet of metal. It seemed to be

swinging open with a steadily accelerated velocity, and the bushes in

front of me shifted sideways as I ran.

I was none too soon. Cavor’s back vanished amidst the bristling

thicket, and as I scrambled up after him, the monstrous valve came into

its position with a clang. For a long time we lay panting, not daring

to approach the pit.

But at last very cautiously and bit by bit we crept into a position

from which we could peer down. The bushes about us creaked and waved

with the force of a breeze that was blowing down the shaft. We could

see nothing at first except smooth vertical walls descending at last

into an impenetrable black. And then very gradually we became aware of

a number of very faint and little lights going to and fro.

For a time that stupendous gulf of mystery held us so that we forgot

even our sphere. In time, as we grew more accustomed to the darkness,

we could make out very small, dim, elusive shapes moving about among

those needle-point illuminations. We peered amazed and incredulous,

understanding so little that we could find no words to say. We could

distinguish nothing that would give us a clue to the meaning of the

faint shapes we saw.

“What can it be?” I asked; “what can it be?”

“The engineering!... They must live in these caverns during the night,

and come out during the day.”

“Cavor!” I said. “Can they be—_that_—it was something like—men?”

“_That_ was not a man.”

“We dare risk nothing!”

“We dare do nothing until we find the sphere!”

“We _can_ do nothing until we find the sphere.”

He assented with a groan and stirred himself to move. He stared about

him for a space, sighed, and indicated a direction. We struck out

through the jungle. For a time we crawled resolutely, then with

diminishing vigour. Presently among great shapes of flabby purple there

came a noise of trampling and cries about us. We lay close, and for a

long time the sounds went to and fro and very near. But this time we

saw nothing. I tried to whisper to Cavor that I could hardly go without

food much longer, but my mouth had become too dry for whispering.

“Cavor,” I said, “I must have food.”

He turned a face full of dismay towards me. “It’s a case for holding

out,” he said.

“But I _must_,” I said, “and look at my lips!”

“I’ve been thirsty some time.”

“If only some of that snow had remained!”

“It’s clean gone! We’re driving from arctic to tropical at the rate of

a degree a minute....”

I gnawed my hand.

“The sphere!” he said. “There is nothing for it but the sphere.”

We roused ourselves to another spurt of crawling. My mind ran entirely

on edible things, on the hissing profundity of summer drinks, more

particularly I craved for beer. I was haunted by the memory of a

sixteen gallon cask that had swaggered in my Lympne cellar. I thought

of the adjacent larder, and especially of steak and kidney pie—tender

steak and plenty of kidney, and rich, thick gravy between. Ever and

again I was seized with fits of hungry yawning. We came to flat places

overgrown with fleshy red things, monstrous coralline growths; as we

pushed against them they snapped and broke. I noted the quality of the

broken surfaces. The confounded stuff certainly looked of a biteable

texture. Then it seemed to me that it smelt rather well.

I picked up a fragment and sniffed at it.

“Cavor,” I said in a hoarse undertone.

He glanced at me with his face screwed up. “Don’t,” he said. I put down

the fragment, and we crawled on through this tempting fleshiness for a

space.

“Cavor,” I asked, “why _not?_”

“Poison,” I heard him say, but he did not look round.

We crawled some way before I decided.

“I’ll chance it,” said I.

He made a belated gesture to prevent me. I stuffed my mouth full. He

crouched watching my face, his own twisted into the oddest expression.

“It’s good,” I said.

“O Lord!” he cried.

He watched me munch, his face wrinkled between desire and disapproval,

then suddenly succumbed to appetite and began to tear off huge

mouthfuls. For a time we did nothing but eat.

The stuff was not unlike a terrestrial mushroom, only it was much laxer

in texture, and, as one swallowed it, it warmed the throat. At first we

experienced a mere mechanical satisfaction in eating; then our blood

began to run warmer, and we tingled at the lips and fingers, and then

new and slightly irrelevant ideas came bubbling up in our minds.

“It’s good,” said I. “Infernally good! What a home for our surplus

population! Our poor surplus population,” and I broke off another large

portion. It filled me with a curiously benevolent satisfaction that

there was such good food in the moon. The depression of my hunger gave

way to an irrational exhilaration. The dread and discomfort in which I

had been living vanished entirely. I perceived the moon no longer as a

planet from which I most earnestly desired the means of escape, but as

a possible refuge from human destitution. I think I forgot the

Selenites, the mooncalves, the lid, and the noises completely so soon

as I had eaten that fungus.

Cavor replied to my third repetition of my “surplus population” remark

with similar words of approval. I felt that my head swam, but I put

this down to the stimulating effect of food after a long fast.

“Ess’lent discov’ry yours, Cavor,” said I. “Se’nd on’y to the ‘tato.”

“Whajer mean?” asked Cavor. “‘Scovery of the moon—se’nd on’y to the

tato?”

I looked at him, shocked at his suddenly hoarse voice, and by the

badness of his articulation. It occurred to me in a flash that he was

intoxicated, possibly by the fungus. It also occurred to me that he

erred in imagining that he had discovered the moon; he had not

discovered it, he had only reached it. I tried to lay my hand on his

arm and explain this to him, but the issue was too subtle for his

brain. It was also unexpectedly difficult to express. After a momentary

attempt to understand me—I remember wondering if the fungus had made my

eyes as fishy as his—he set off upon some observations on his own

account.

“We are,” he announced with a solemn hiccup, “the creashurs o’ what we

eat and drink.”

He repeated this, and as I was now in one of my subtle moods, I

determined to dispute it. Possibly I wandered a little from the point.

But Cavor certainly did not attend at all properly. He stood up as well

as he could, putting a hand on my head to steady himself, which was

disrespectful, and stood staring about him, quite devoid now of any

fear of the moon beings.

I tried to point out that this was dangerous for some reason that was

not perfectly clear to me, but the word “dangerous” had somehow got

mixed with “indiscreet,” and came out rather more like “injurious” than

either; and after an attempt to disentangle them, I resumed my

argument, addressing myself principally to the unfamiliar but attentive

coralline growths on either side. I felt that it was necessary to clear

up this confusion between the moon and a potato at once—I wandered into

a long parenthesis on the importance of precision of definition in

argument. I did my best to ignore the fact that my bodily sensations

were no longer agreeable.

In some way that I have now forgotten, my mind was led back to projects

of colonisation. “We must annex this moon,” I said. “There must be no

shilly-shally. This is part of the White Man’s Burthen. Cavor—we

are—_hic_—Satap—mean Satraps! Nempire Cæsar never dreamt. B’in all the

newspapers. Cavorecia. Bedfordecia. Bedfordecia—hic—Limited.

Mean—unlimited! Practically.”

Certainly I was intoxicated.

I embarked upon an argument to show the infinite benefits our arrival

would confer on the moon. I involved myself in a rather difficult proof

that the arrival of Columbus was, on the whole, beneficial to America.

I found I had forgotten the line of argument I had intended to pursue,

and continued to repeat “sim’lar to C’lumbus,” to fill up time.

From that point my memory of the action of that abominable fungus

becomes confused. I remember vaguely that we declared our intention of

standing no nonsense from any confounded insects, that we decided it

ill became men to hide shamefully upon a mere satellite, that we

equipped ourselves with huge armfuls of the fungus—whether for missile

purposes or not I do not know—and, heedless of the stabs of the bayonet

scrub, we started forth into the sunshine.

Almost immediately we must have come upon the Selenites. There were six

of them, and they were marching in single file over a rocky place,

making the most remarkable piping and whining sounds. They all seemed

to become aware of us at once, all instantly became silent and

motionless, like animals, with their faces turned towards us.

For a moment I was sobered.

“Insects,” murmured Cavor, “insects! And they think I’m going to crawl

about on my stomach—on my vertebrated stomach!

“Stomach,” he repeated slowly, as though he chewed the indignity.

Then suddenly, with a sort of fury, he made three vast strides and

leapt towards them. He leapt badly; he made a series of somersaults in

the air, whirled right over them, and vanished with an enormous splash

amidst the cactus bladders. What the Selenites made of this amazing,

and to my mind undignified irruption from another planet, I have no

means of guessing. I seem to remember the sight of their backs as they

ran in all directions, but I am not sure. All these last incidents

before oblivion came are vague and faint in my mind. I know I made a

step to follow Cavor, and tripped and fell headlong among the rocks. I

was, I am certain, suddenly and vehemently ill. I seem to remember a

violent struggle and being gripped by metallic clasps....

My next clear recollection is that we were prisoners at we knew not

what depths beneath the moon’s surface; we were in darkness amidst

strange distracting noises; our bodies were covered with scratches and

bruises, and our heads racked with pain.

XII.

The Selenite’s Face

I found myself sitting crouched together in a tumultuous darkness. For

a long time I could not understand where I was, nor how I had come to

this perplexity. I thought of the cupboard into which I had been thrust

at times when I was a child, and then of a very dark and noisy bedroom

in which I had slept during an illness. But these sounds about me were

not the noises I had known, and there was a thin flavour in the air

like the wind of a stable. Then I supposed we must still be at work

upon the sphere, and that somehow I had got into the cellar of Cavor’s

house. I remembered we had finished the sphere, and fancied I must

still be in it and travelling through space.

“Cavor,” I said, “cannot we have some light?”

There came no answer.

“Cavor!” I insisted.

I was answered by a groan. “My head!” I heard him say; “my head!”

I attempted to press my hands to my brow, which ached, and discovered

they were tied together. This startled me very much. I brought them up

to my mouth and felt the cold smoothness of metal. They were chained

together. I tried to separate my legs and made out they were similarly

fastened, and also that I was fastened to the ground by a much thicker

chain about the middle of my body.

I was more frightened than I had yet been by anything in all our

strange experiences. For a time I tugged silently at my bonds. “Cavor!”

I cried out sharply. “Why am I tied? Why have you tied me hand and

foot?”

“I haven’t tied you,” he answered. “It’s the Selenites.”

The Selenites! My mind hung on that for a space. Then my memories came

back to me: the snowy desolation, the thawing of the air, the growth of

the plants, our strange hopping and crawling among the rocks and

vegetation of the crater. All the distress of our frantic search for

the sphere returned to me.... Finally the opening of the great lid that

covered the pit!

Then as I strained to trace our later movements down to our present

plight, the pain in my head became intolerable. I came to an

insurmountable barrier, an obstinate blank.

“Cavor!”

“Yes?”

“Where are we?”

“How should I know?”

“Are we dead?”

“What nonsense!”

“They’ve got us, then!”

He made no answer but a grunt. The lingering traces of the poison

seemed to make him oddly irritable.

“What do you mean to do?”

“How should I know what to do?”

“Oh, very well!” said I, and became silent. Presently, I was roused

from a stupor. “O _Lord!_” I cried; “I wish you’d stop that buzzing!”

We lapsed into silence again, listening to the dull confusion of noises

like the muffled sounds of a street or factory that filled our ears. I

could make nothing of it, my mind pursued first one rhythm and then

another, and questioned it in vain. But after a long time I became

aware of a new and sharper element, not mingling with the rest but

standing out, as it were, against that cloudy background of sound. It

was a series of relatively very little definite sounds, tappings and

rubbings, like a loose spray of ivy against a window or a bird moving

about upon a box. We listened and peered about us, but the darkness was

a velvet pall. There followed a noise like the subtle movement of the

wards of a well-oiled lock. And then there appeared before me, hanging

as it seemed in an immensity of black, a thin bright line.

“Look!” whispered Cavor very softly.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

We stared.

The thin bright line became a band, and broader and paler. It took upon

itself the quality of a bluish light falling upon a white-washed wall.

It ceased to be parallel-sided; it developed a deep indentation on one

side. I turned to remark this to Cavor, and was amazed to see his ear

in a brilliant illumination—all the rest of him in shadow. I twisted my

head round as well as my bonds would permit. “Cavor,” I said, “it’s

behind!”

His ear vanished—gave place to an eye!

Suddenly the crack that had been admitting the light broadened out, and

revealed itself as the space of an opening door. Beyond was a sapphire

vista, and in the doorway stood a grotesque outline silhouetted against

the glare.

We both made convulsive efforts to turn, and failing, sat staring over

our shoulders at this. My first impression was of some clumsy quadruped

with lowered head. Then I perceived it was the slender pinched body and

short and extremely attenuated bandy legs of a Selenite, with his head

depressed between his shoulders. He was without the helmet and body

covering they wear upon the exterior.

He was a blank, black figure to us, but instinctively our imaginations

supplied features to his very human outline. I, at least, took it

instantly that he was somewhat hunchbacked, with a high forehead and

long features.

He came forward three steps and paused for a time. His movements seemed

absolutely noiseless. Then he came forward again. He walked like a

bird, his feet fell one in front of the other. He stepped out of the

ray of light that came through the doorway, and it seemed as though he

vanished altogether in the shadow.

For a moment my eyes sought him in the wrong place, and then I

perceived him standing facing us both in the full light. Only the human

features I had attributed to him were not there at all!

Of course I ought to have expected that, only I didn’t. It came to me

as an absolute, for a moment an overwhelming shock. It seemed as though

it wasn’t a face, as though it must needs be a mask, a horror, a

deformity, that would presently be disavowed or explained. There was no

nose, and the thing had dull bulging eyes at the side—in the silhouette

I had supposed they were ears. There were no ears.... I have tried to

draw one of these heads, but I cannot. There was a mouth, downwardly

curved, like a human mouth in a face that stares ferociously....

The neck on which the head was poised was jointed in three places,

almost like the short joints in the leg of a crab. The joints of the

limbs I could not see, because of the puttee-like straps in which they

were swathed, and which formed the only clothing the being wore.

There the thing was, looking at us!

At the time my mind was taken up by the mad impossibility of the

creature. I suppose he also was amazed, and with more reason, perhaps,

for amazement than we. Only, confound him! he did not show it. We did

at least know what had brought about this meeting of incompatible

creatures. But conceive how it would seem to decent Londoners, for

example, to come upon a couple of living things, as big as men and

absolutely unlike any other earthly animals, careering about among the

sheep in Hyde Park! It must have taken him like that.

Figure us! We were bound hand and foot, fagged and filthy; our beards

two inches long, our faces scratched and bloody. Cavor you must imagine

in his knickerbockers (torn in several places by the bayonet scrub) his

Jaegar shirt and old cricket cap, his wiry hair wildly disordered, a

tail to every quarter of the heavens. In that blue light his face did

not look red but very dark, his lips and the drying blood upon my hands

seemed black. If possible I was in a worse plight than he, on account

of the yellow fungus into which I had jumped. Our jackets were

unbuttoned, and our shoes had been taken off and lay at our feet. And

we were sitting with our backs to this queer bluish light, peering at

such a monster as Durer might have invented.

Cavor broke the silence; started to speak, went hoarse, and cleared his

throat. Outside began a terrific bellowing, as if a mooncalf were in

trouble. It ended in a shriek, and everything was still again.

Presently the Selenite turned about, flickered into the shadow, stood

for a moment retrospective at the door, and then closed it on us; and

once more we were in that murmurous mystery of darkness into which we

had awakened.

XIII.

Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions

For a time neither of us spoke. To focus together all the things we had

brought upon ourselves seemed beyond my mental powers.

“They’ve got us,” I said at last.

“It was that fungus.”

“Well—if I hadn’t taken it we should have fainted and starved.”

“We might have found the sphere.”

I lost my temper at his persistence, and swore to myself. For a time we

hated one another in silence. I drummed with my fingers on the floor

between my knees, and gritted the links of my fetters together.

Presently I was forced to talk again.

“What do you make of it, anyhow?” I asked humbly.

“They are reasonable creatures—they can make things and do things.

Those lights we saw...”

He stopped. It was clear he could make nothing of it.

When he spoke again it was to confess, “After all, they are more human

than we had a right to expect. I suppose—”

He stopped irritatingly.

“Yes?”

“I suppose, anyhow—on any planet where there is an intelligent

animal—it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands, and walk

erect.”

Presently he broke away in another direction.

“We are some way in,” he said. “I mean—perhaps a couple of thousand

feet or more.”

“Why?”

“It’s cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality—it

has altogether gone. And the feeling in one’s ears and throat.”

I had not noted that, but I did now.

“The air is denser. We must be some depths—a mile even, we may

be—inside the moon.”

“We never thought of a world inside the moon.”

“No.”

“How could we?”

“We might have done. Only one gets into habits of mind.”

He thought for a time.

“_Now_,” he said, “it seems such an obvious thing.”

“Of course! The moon must be enormously cavernous, with an atmosphere

within, and at the centre of its caverns a sea.

“One knew that the moon had a lower specific gravity than the earth,

one knew that it had little air or water outside, one knew, too, that

it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that

it should be different in composition. The inference that it was

hollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact.

Kepler, of course—”

His voice had the interest now of a man who has discerned a pretty

sequence of reasoning.

“Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his _sub-volvani_ was right after all.”

“I wish you had taken the trouble to find that out before we came,” I

said.

He answered nothing, buzzing to himself softly, as he pursued his

thoughts. My temper was going.

“What do you think has become of the sphere, anyhow?” I asked.

“Lost,” he said, like a man who answers an uninteresting question.

“Among those plants?”

“Unless they find it.”

“And then?”

“How can I tell?”

“Cavor,” I said, with a sort of hysterical bitterness, “things look

bright for my Company...”

He made no answer.

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “Just think of all the trouble we took to get

into this pickle! What did we come for? What are we after? What was the

moon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. We

ought to have started the little things first. It was you proposed the

moon! Those Cavorite spring blinds! I am certain we could have worked

them for terrestrial purposes. Certain! Did you really understand what

I proposed? A steel cylinder—”

“Rubbish!” said Cavor.

We ceased to converse.

For a time Cavor kept up a broken monologue without much help from me.

“If they find it,” he began, “if they find it ... what will they do

with it? Well, that’s a question. It may be that’s _the_ question. They

won’t understand it, anyhow. If they understood that sort of thing they

would have come long since to the earth. Would they? Why shouldn’t

they? But they would have sent something—they couldn’t keep their hands

off such a possibility. No! But they will examine it. Clearly they are

intelligent and inquisitive. They will examine it—get inside it—trifle

with the studs. Off! ... That would mean the moon for us for all the

rest of our lives. Strange creatures, strange knowledge....”

“As for strange knowledge—” said I, and language failed me.

“Look here, Bedford,” said Cavor, “you came on this expedition of your

own free will.”

“You said to me, ‘Call it prospecting’.”

“There’s always risks in prospecting.”

“Especially when you do it unarmed and without thinking out every

possibility.”

“I was so taken up with the sphere. The thing rushed on us, and carried

us away.”

“Rushed on _me_, you mean.”

“Rushed on me just as much. How was I to know when I set to work on

molecular physics that the business would bring me here—of all places?”

“It’s this accursed science,” I cried. “It’s the very Devil. The

mediæval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all

wrong. You tamper with it—and it offers you gifts. And directly you

take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions

and new weapons—now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social

ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”

“Anyhow, it’s no use your quarrelling with me _now_. These

creatures—these Selenites, or whatever we choose to call them—have got

us tied hand and foot. Whatever temper you choose to go through with it

in, you will have to go through with it.... We have experiences before

us that will need all our coolness.”

He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking. “Confound

your science!” I said.

“The problem is communication. Gestures, I fear, will be different.

Pointing, for example. No creatures but men and monkeys point.”

That was too obviously wrong for me. “Pretty nearly every animal,” I

cried, “points with its eyes or nose.”

Cavor meditated over that. “Yes,” he said at last, “and we don’t.

There’s such differences—such differences!”

“One might.... But how can I tell? There is speech. The sounds they

make, a sort of fluting and piping. I don’t see how we are to imitate

that. Is it their speech, that sort of thing? They may have different

senses, different means of communication. Of course they are minds and

we are minds; there must be something in common. Who knows how far we

may not get to an understanding?”

“The things are outside us,” I said. “They’re more different from us

than the strangest animals on earth. They are a different clay. What is

the good of talking like this?”

Cavor thought. “I don’t see that. Where there are minds they will have

something _similar_—even though they have been evolved on different

planets. Of course if it was a question of instincts, if we or they are

no more than animals—”

“Well, _are_ they? They’re much more like ants on their hind legs than

human beings, and who ever got to any sort of understanding with ants?”

“But these machines and clothing! No, I don’t hold with you, Bedford.

The difference is wide—”

“It’s insurmountable.”

“The resemblance must bridge it. I remember reading once a paper by the

late Professor Galton on the possibility of communication between the

planets. Unhappily, at that time it did not seem probable that that

would be of any material benefit to me, and I fear I did not give it

the attention I should have done—in view of this state of affairs.

Yet.... Now, let me see!

“His idea was to begin with those broad truths that must underlie all

conceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The great

principles of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leading

proposition of Euclid’s, and show by construction that its truth was

known to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base

of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that if the equal sides be

produced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, or

that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal

to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our

knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a

reasonable intelligence.... Now, suppose I ... I might draw the

geometrical figure with a wet finger, or even trace it in the air....”

He fell silent. I sat meditating his words. For a time his wild hope of

communication, of interpretation, with these weird beings held me. Then

that angry despair that was a part of my exhaustion and physical misery

resumed its sway. I perceived with a sudden novel vividness the

extraordinary folly of everything I had ever done. “Ass!” I said; “oh,

ass, unutterable ass.... I seem to exist only to go about doing

preposterous things. Why did we ever leave the thing? ... Hopping about

looking for patents and concessions in the craters of the moon!... If

only we had had the sense to fasten a handkerchief to a stick to show

where we had left the sphere!”

I subsided, fuming.

“It is clear,” meditated Cavor, “they are intelligent. One can

hypothecate certain things. As they have not killed us at once, they

must have ideas of mercy. Mercy! at any rate of restraint. Possibly of

intercourse. They may meet us. And this apartment and the glimpses we

had of its guardian. These fetters! A high degree of intelligence...”

“I wish to heaven,” cried I, “I’d thought even twice! Plunge after

plunge. First one fluky start and then another. It was my confidence in

you! _Why_ didn’t I stick to my play? That was what I was equal to.

That was my world and the life I was made for. I could have finished

that play. I’m certain ... it was a good play. I had the scenario as

good as done. Then.... Conceive it! leaping to the moon!

Practically—I’ve thrown my life away! That old woman in the inn near

Canterbury had better sense.”

I looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. The darkness had given place

to that bluish light again. The door was opening, and several noiseless

Selenites were coming into the chamber. I became quite still, staring

at their grotesque faces.

Then suddenly my sense of disagreeable strangeness changed to interest.

I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls. One elemental

need at least our minds could understand in common. They were bowls of

some metal that, like our fetters, looked dark in that bluish light;

and each contained a number of whitish fragments. All the cloudy pain

and misery that oppressed me rushed together and took the shape of

hunger. I eyed these bowls wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in

dreams, at that time it seemed a small matter that at the end of the

arms that lowered one towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and

thumb, like the end of an elephant’s trunk. The stuff in the bowl was

loose in texture, and whitish brown in colour—rather like lumps of some

cold souffle, and it smelt faintly like mushrooms. From a partially

divided carcass of a mooncalf that we presently saw, I am inclined to

believe it must have been mooncalf flesh.

My hands were so tightly chained that I could barely contrive to reach

the bowl; but when they saw the effort I made, two of them dexterously

released one of the turns about my wrist. Their tentacle hands were

soft and cold to my skin. I immediately seized a mouthful of the food.

It had the same laxness in texture that all organic structures seem to

have upon the moon; it tasted rather like a gauffre or a damp meringue,

but in no way was it disagreeable. I took two other mouthfuls. “I

_wanted_—foo’!” said I, tearing off a still larger piece....

For a time we ate with an utter absence of self-consciousness. We ate

and presently drank like tramps in a soup kitchen. Never before nor

since have I been hungry to the ravenous pitch, and save that I have

had this very experience I could never have believed that, a quarter of

a million of miles out of our proper world, in utter perplexity of

soul, surrounded, watched, touched by beings more grotesque and inhuman

than the worst creations of a nightmare, it would be possible for me to

eat in utter forgetfulness of all these things. They stood about us

watching us, and ever and again making a slight elusive twittering that

stood, I suppose, in the stead of speech. I did not even shiver at

their touch. And when the first zeal of my feeding was over, I could

note that Cavor, too, had been eating with the same shameless abandon.

XIV.

Experiments in intercourse

When at last we had made an end of eating, the Selenites linked our

hands closely together again, and then untwisted the chains about our

feet and rebound them, so as to give us a limited freedom of movement.

Then they unfastened the chains about our waists. To do all this they

had to handle us freely, and ever and again one of their queer heads

came down close to my face, or a soft tentacle-hand touched my head or

neck. I don’t remember that I was afraid then or repelled by their

proximity. I think that our incurable anthropomorphism made us imagine

there were human heads inside their masks. The skin, like everything

else, looked bluish, but that was on account of the light; and it was

hard and shiny, quite in the beetle-wing fashion, not soft, or moist,

or hairy, as a vertebrated animal’s would be. Along the crest of the

head was a low ridge of whitish spines running from back to front, and

a much larger ridge curved on either side over the eyes. The Selenite

who untied me used his mouth to help his hands.

“They seem to be releasing us,” said Cavor. “Remember we are on the

moon! Make no sudden movements!”

“Are you going to try that geometry?”

“If I get a chance. But, of course, they may make an advance first.”

We remained passive, and the Selenites, having finished their

arrangements, stood back from us, and seemed to be looking at us. I say

seemed to be, because as their eyes were at the side and not in front,

one had the same difficulty in determining the direction in which they

were looking as one has in the case of a hen or a fish. They conversed

with one another in their reedy tones, that seemed to me impossible to

imitate or define. The door behind us opened wider, and, glancing over

my shoulder, I saw a vague large space beyond, in which quite a little

crowd of Selenites were standing. They seemed a curiously miscellaneous

rabble.

“Do they want us to imitate those sounds?” I asked Cavor.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“It seems to me that they are trying to make us understand something.”

“I can’t make anything of their gestures. Do you notice this one, who

is worrying with his head like a man with an uncomfortable collar?”

“Let us shake our heads at him.”

We did that, and finding it ineffectual, attempted an imitation of the

Selenites’ movements. That seemed to interest them. At any rate they

all set up the same movement. But as that seemed to lead to nothing, we

desisted at last and so did they, and fell into a piping argument among

themselves. Then one of them, shorter and very much thicker than the

others, and with a particularly wide mouth, squatted down suddenly

beside Cavor, and put his hands and feet in the same posture as Cavor’s

were bound, and then by a dexterous movement stood up.

“Cavor,” I shouted, “they want us to get up!”

He stared open-mouthed. “That’s it!” he said.

And with much heaving and grunting, because our hands were tied

together, we contrived to struggle to our feet. The Selenites made way

for our elephantine heavings, and seemed to twitter more volubly. As

soon as we were on our feet the thick-set Selenite came and patted each

of our faces with his tentacles, and walked towards the open doorway.

That also was plain enough, and we followed him. We saw that four of

the Selenites standing in the doorway were much taller than the others,

and clothed in the same manner as those we had seen in the crater,

namely, with spiked round helmets and cylindrical body-cases, and that

each of the four carried a goad with spike and guard made of that same

dull-looking metal as the bowls. These four closed about us, one on

either side of each of us, as we emerged from our chamber into the

cavern from which the light had come.

We did not get our impression of that cavern all at once. Our attention

was taken up by the movements and attitudes of the Selenites

immediately about us, and by the necessity of controlling our motion,

lest we should startle and alarm them and ourselves by some excessive

stride. In front of us was the short, thick-set being who had solved

the problem of asking us to get up, moving with gestures that seemed,

almost all of them, intelligible to us, inviting us to follow him. His

spout-like face turned from one of us to the other with a quickness

that was clearly interrogative. For a time, I say, we were taken up

with these things.

But at last the great place that formed a background to our movements

asserted itself. It became apparent that the source of much, at least,

of the tumult of sounds which had filled our ears ever since we had

recovered from the stupefaction of the fungus was a vast mass of

machinery in active movement, whose flying and whirling parts were

visible indistinctly over the heads and between the bodies of the

Selenites who walked about us. And not only did the web of sounds that

filled the air proceed from this mechanism, but also the peculiar blue

light that irradiated the whole place. We had taken it as a natural

thing that a subterranean cavern should be artificially lit, and even

now, though the fact was patent to my eyes, I did not really grasp its

import until presently the darkness came. The meaning and structure of

this huge apparatus we saw I cannot explain, because we neither of us

learnt what it was for or how it worked. One after another, big shafts

of metal flung out and up from its centre, their heads travelling in

what seemed to me to be a parabolic path; each dropped a sort of

dangling arm as it rose towards the apex of its flight and plunged down

into a vertical cylinder, forcing this down before it. About it moved

the shapes of tenders, little figures that seemed vaguely different

from the beings about us. As each of the three dangling arms of the

machine plunged down, there was a clank and then a roaring, and out of

the top of the vertical cylinder came pouring this incandescent

substance that lit the place, and ran over as milk runs over a boiling

pot, and dripped luminously into a tank of light below. It was a cold

blue light, a sort of phosphorescent glow but infinitely brighter, and

from the tanks into which it fell it ran in conduits athwart the

cavern.

Thud, thud, thud, thud, came the sweeping arms of this unintelligible

apparatus, and the light substance hissed and poured. At first the

thing seemed only reasonably large and near to us, and then I saw how

exceedingly little the Selenites upon it seemed, and I realised the

full immensity of cavern and machine. I looked from this tremendous

affair to the faces of the Selenites with a new respect. I stopped, and

Cavor stopped, and stared at this thunderous engine.

“But this is stupendous!” I said. “What can it be for?”

Cavor’s blue-lit face was full of an intelligent respect. “I can’t

dream! Surely these beings— Men could not make a thing like that! Look

at those arms, are they on connecting rods?”

The thick-set Selenite had gone some paces unheeded. He came back and

stood between us and the great machine. I avoided seeing him, because I

guessed somehow that his idea was to beckon us onward. He walked away

in the direction he wished us to go, and turned and came back, and

flicked our faces to attract our attention.

Cavor and I looked at one another.

“Cannot we show him we are interested in the machine?” I said.

“Yes,” said Cavor. “We’ll try that.” He turned to our guide and smiled,

and pointed to the machine, and pointed again, and then to his head,

and then to the machine. By some defect of reasoning he seemed to

imagine that broken English might help these gestures. “Me look ‘im,”

he said, “me think ‘im very much. Yes.”

His behaviour seemed to check the Selenites in their desire for our

progress for a moment. They faced one another, their queer heads moved,

the twittering voices came quick and liquid. Then one of them, a lean,

tall creature, with a sort of mantle added to the puttee in which the

others were dressed, twisted his elephant trunk of a hand about Cavor’s

waist, and pulled him gently to follow our guide, who again went on

ahead. Cavor resisted. “We may just as well begin explaining ourselves

now. They may think we are new animals, a new sort of mooncalf perhaps!

It is most important that we should show an intelligent interest from

the outset.”

He began to shake his head violently. “No, no,” he said, “me not come

on one minute. Me look at ‘im.”

“Isn’t there some geometrical point you might bring in _apropos_ of

that affair?” I suggested, as the Selenites conferred again.

“Possibly a parabolic—” he began.

He yelled loudly, and leaped six feet or more!

One of the four armed moon-men had pricked him with a goad!

I turned on the goad-bearer behind me with a swift threatening gesture,

and he started back. This and Cavor’s sudden shout and leap clearly

astonished all the Selenites. They receded hastily, facing us. For one

of those moments that seem to last for ever, we stood in angry protest,

with a scattered semicircle of these inhuman beings about us.

“He pricked me!” said Cavor, with a catching of the voice.

“I saw him,” I answered.

“Confound it!” I said to the Selenites; “we’re not going to stand that!

What on earth do you take us for?”

I glanced quickly right and left. Far away across the blue wilderness

of cavern I saw a number of other Selenites running towards us; broad

and slender they were, and one with a larger head than the others. The

cavern spread wide and low, and receded in every direction into

darkness. Its roof, I remember, seemed to bulge down as if with the

weight of the vast thickness of rocks that prisoned us. There was no

way out of it—no way out of it. Above, below, in every direction, was

the unknown, and these inhuman creatures, with goads and gestures,

confronting us, and we two unsupported men!

XV.

The Giddy Bridge

Just for a moment that hostile pause endured. I suppose that both we

and the Selenites did some very rapid thinking. My clearest impression

was that there was nothing to put my back against, and that we were

bound to be surrounded and killed. The overwhelming folly of our

presence there loomed over me in black, enormous reproach. Why had I

ever launched myself on this mad, inhuman expedition?

Cavor came to my side and laid his hand on my arm. His pale and

terrified face was ghastly in the blue light.

“We can’t do anything,” he said. “It’s a mistake. They don’t

understand. We must go. As they want us to go.”

I looked down at him, and then at the fresh Selenites who were coming

to help their fellows. “If I had my hands free—”

“It’s no use,” he panted.

“No.”

“We’ll go.”

And he turned about and led the way in the direction that had been

indicated for us.

I followed, trying to look as subdued as possible, and feeling at the

chains about my wrists. My blood was boiling. I noted nothing more of

that cavern, though it seemed to take a long time before we had marched

across it, or if I noted anything I forgot it as I saw it. My thoughts

were concentrated, I think, upon my chains and the Selenites, and

particularly upon the helmeted ones with the goads. At first they

marched parallel with us, and at a respectful distance, but presently

they were overtaken by three others, and then they drew nearer, until

they were within arms length again. I winced like a beaten horse as

they came near to us. The shorter, thicker Selenite marched at first on

our right flank, but presently came in front of us again.

How well the picture of that grouping has bitten into my brain; the

back of Cavor’s downcast head just in front of me, and the dejected

droop of his shoulders, and our guide’s gaping visage, perpetually

jerking about him, and the goad-bearers on either side, watchful, yet

open-mouthed—a blue monochrome. And after all, I _do_ remember one

other thing besides the purely personal affair, which is, that a sort

of gutter came presently across the floor of the cavern, and then ran

along by the side of the path of rock we followed. And it was full of

that same bright blue luminous stuff that flowed out of the great

machine. I walked close beside it, and I can testify it radiated not a

particle of heat. It was brightly shining, and yet it was neither

warmer nor colder than anything else in the cavern.

Clang, clang, clang, we passed right under the thumping levers of

another vast machine, and so came at last to a wide tunnel, in which we

could even hear the pad, pad, of our shoeless feet, and which, save for

the trickling thread of blue to the right of us, was quite unlit. The

shadows made gigantic travesties of our shapes and those of the

Selenites on the irregular wall and roof of the tunnel. Ever and again

crystals in the walls of the tunnel scintillated like gems, ever and

again the tunnel expanded into a stalactitic cavern, or gave off

branches that vanished into darkness.

We seemed to be marching down that tunnel for a long time. “Trickle,

trickle,” went the flowing light very softly, and our footfalls and

their echoes made an irregular paddle, paddle. My mind settled down to

the question of my chains. If I were to slip off one turn _so_, and

then to twist it _so_ ...

If I tried to do it very gradually, would they see I was slipping my

wrist out of the looser turn? If they did, what would they do?

“Bedford,” said Cavor, “it goes down. It keeps on going down.”

His remark roused me from my sullen pre-occupation.

“If they wanted to kill us,” he said, dropping back to come level with

me, “there is no reason why they should not have done it.”

“No,” I admitted, “that’s true.”

“They don’t understand us,” he said, “they think we are merely strange

animals, some wild sort of mooncalf birth, perhaps. It will be only

when they have observed us better that they will begin to think we have

minds—”

“When you trace those geometrical problems,” said I.

“It may be that.”

We tramped on for a space.

“You see,” said Cavor, “these may be Selenites of a lower class.”

“The infernal fools!” said I viciously, glancing at their exasperating

faces.

“If we endure what they do to us—”

“We’ve got to endure it,” said I.

“There may be others less stupid. This is the mere outer fringe of

their world. It must go down and down, cavern, passage, tunnel, down at

last to the sea—hundreds of miles below.”

His words made me think of the mile or so of rock and tunnel that might

be over our heads already. It was like a weight dropping on my

shoulders. “Away from the sun and air,” I said. “Even a mine half a

mile deep is stuffy.”

“This is not, anyhow. It’s probable—Ventilation! The air would blow

from the dark side of the moon to the sunlit, and all the carbonic acid

would well out there and feed those plants. Up this tunnel, for

example, there is quite a breeze. And what a world it must be. The

earnest we have in that shaft, and those machines—”

“And the goad,” I said. “Don’t forget the goad!”

He walked a little in front of me for a time.

“Even that goad—” he said.

“Well?”

“I was angry at the time. But—it was perhaps necessary we should get

on. They have different skins, and probably different nerves. They may

not understand our objection—just as a being from Mars might not like

our earthly habit of nudging.”

“They’d better be careful how they nudge _me_.”

“And about that geometry. After all, their way is a way of

understanding, too. They begin with the elements of life and not of

thought. Food. Compulsion. Pain. They strike at fundamentals.”

“There’s no doubt about _that_,” I said.

He went on to talk of the enormous and wonderful world into which we

were being taken. I realised slowly from his tone, that even now he was

not absolutely in despair at the prospect of going ever deeper into

this inhuman planet-burrow. His mind ran on machines and invention, to

the exclusion of a thousand dark things that beset me. It wasn’t that

he intended to make any use of these things, he simply wanted to know

them.

“After all,” he said, “this is a tremendous occasion. It is the meeting

of two worlds! What are we going to see? Think of what is below us

here.”

“We shan’t see much if the light isn’t better,” I remarked.

“This is only the outer crust. Down below— On this scale— There will be

everything. Do you notice how different they seem one from another? The

story we shall take back!”

“Some rare sort of animal,” I said, “might comfort himself in that way

while they were bringing him to the Zoo.... It doesn’t follow that we

are going to be shown all these things.”

“When they find we have reasonable minds,” said Cavor, “they will want

to learn about the earth. Even if they have no generous emotions, they

will teach in order to learn.... And the things they must know! The

unanticipated things!”

He went on to speculate on the possibility of their knowing things he

had never hoped to learn on earth, speculating in that way, with a raw

wound from that goad already in his skin! Much that he said I forget,

for my attention was drawn to the fact that the tunnel along which we

had been marching was opening out wider and wider. We seemed, from the

feeling of the air, to be going out into a huge space. But how big the

space might really be we could not tell, because it was unlit. Our

little stream of light ran in a dwindling thread and vanished far

ahead. Presently the rocky walls had vanished altogether on either

hand. There was nothing to be seen but the path in front of us and the

trickling hurrying rivulet of blue phosphorescence. The figures of

Cavor and the guiding Selenite marched before me, the sides of their

legs and heads that were towards the rivulet were clear and bright

blue, their darkened sides, now that the reflection of the tunnel wall

no longer lit them, merged indistinguishably in the darkness beyond.

And soon I perceived that we were approaching a declivity of some sort,

because the little blue stream dipped suddenly out of sight.

In another moment, as it seemed, we had reached the edge. The shining

stream gave one meander of hesitation and then rushed over. It fell to

a depth at which the sound of its descent was absolutely lost to us.

Far below was a bluish glow, a sort of blue mist—at an infinite

distance below. And the darkness the stream dropped out of became

utterly void and black, save that a thing like a plank projected from

the edge of the cliff and stretched out and faded and vanished

altogether. There was a warm air blowing up out of the gulf.

For a moment I and Cavor stood as near the edge as we dared, peering

into a blue-tinged profundity. And then our guide was pulling at my

arm.

Then he left me, and walked to the end of that plank and stepped upon

it, looking back. Then when he perceived we watched him, he turned

about and went on along it, walking as surely as though he was on firm

earth. For a moment his form was distinct, then he became a blue blur,

and then vanished into the obscurity. I became aware of some vague

shape looming darkly out of the black.

There was a pause. “Surely!—” said Cavor.

One of the other Selenites walked a few paces out upon the plank, and

turned and looked back at us unconcernedly. The others stood ready to

follow after us. Our guide’s expectant figure reappeared. He was

returning to see why we had not advanced.

“What is that beyond there?” I asked.

“I can’t see.”

“We can’t cross this at any price,” said I.

“I could not go three steps on it,” said Cavor, “even with my hands

free.”

We looked at each other’s drawn faces in blank consternation.

“They can’t know what it is to be giddy!” said Cavor.

“It’s quite impossible for us to walk that plank.”

“I don’t believe they see as we do. I’ve been watching them. I wonder

if they know this is simply blackness for us. How can we make them

understand?”

“Anyhow, we must make them understand.”

I think we said these things with a vague half hope the Selenites might

somehow understand. I knew quite clearly that all that was needed was

an explanation. Then as I saw their faces, I realised that an

explanation was impossible. Just here it was that our resemblances were

not going to bridge our differences. Well, I wasn’t going to walk the

plank, anyhow. I slipped my wrist very quickly out of the coil of chain

that was loose, and then began to twist my wrists in opposite

directions. I was standing nearest to the bridge, and as I did this two

of the Selenites laid hold of me, and pulled me gently towards it.

I shook my head violently. “No go,” I said, “no use. You don’t

understand.”

Another Selenite added his compulsion. I was forced to step forward.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Cavor; but I knew his ideas.

“Look here!” I exclaimed to the Selenites. “Steady on! It’s all very

well for you—”

I sprang round upon my heel. I burst out into curses. For one of the

armed Selenites had stabbed me behind with his goad.

I wrenched my wrists free from the little tentacles that held them. I

turned on the goad-bearer. “Confound you!” I cried. “I’ve warned you of

that. What on earth do you think I’m made of, to stick that into me? If

you touch me again—”

By way of answer he pricked me forthwith.

I heard Cavor’s voice in alarm and entreaty. Even then I think he

wanted to compromise with these creatures. “I say, Bedford,” he cried,

“I know a way!” But the sting of that second stab seemed to set free

some pent-up reserve of energy in my being. Instantly the link of the

wrist-chain snapped, and with it snapped all considerations that had

held us unresisting in the hands of these moon creatures. For that

second, at least, I was mad with fear and anger. I took no thought of

consequences. I hit straight out at the face of the thing with the

goad. The chain was twisted round my fist.

There came another of these beastly surprises of which the moon world

is full.

My mailed hand seemed to go clean through him. He smashed like—like

some softish sort of sweet with liquid in it! He broke right in! He

squelched and splashed. It was like hitting a damp toadstool. The

flimsy body went spinning a dozen yards, and fell with a flabby impact.

I was astonished. I was incredulous that any living thing could be so

flimsy. For an instant I could have believed the whole thing a dream.

Then it had become real and imminent again. Neither Cavor nor the other

Selenites seemed to have done anything from the time when I had turned

about to the time when the dead Selenite hit the ground. Every one

stood back from us two, every one alert. That arrest seemed to last at

least a second after the Selenite was down. Every one must have been

taking the thing in. I seem to remember myself standing with my arm

half retracted, trying also to take it in. “What next?” clamoured my

brain; “what next?” Then in a moment every one was moving!

I perceived we must get our chains loose, and that before we could do

this these Selenites had to be beaten off. I faced towards the group of

the three goad-bearers. Instantly one threw his goad at me. It swished

over my head, and I suppose went flying into the abyss behind.

I leaped right at him with all my might as the goad flew over me. He

turned to run as I jumped, and I bore him to the ground, came down

right upon him, and slipped upon his smashed body and fell. He seemed

to wriggle under my foot.

I came into a sitting position, and on every hand the blue backs of the

Selenites were receding into the darkness. I bent a link by main force

and untwisted the chain that had hampered me about the ankles, and

sprang to my feet, with the chain in my hand. Another goad, flung

javelin-wise, whistled by me, and I made a rush towards the darkness

out of which it had come. Then I turned back towards Cavor, who was

still standing in the light of the rivulet near the gulf convulsively

busy with his wrists, and at the same time jabbering nonsense about his

idea.

“Come on!” I cried.

“My hands!” he answered.

Then, realising that I dared not run back to him, because my

ill-calculated steps might carry me over the edge, he came shuffling

towards me, with his hands held out before him.

I gripped his chains at once to unfasten them.

“Where are they?” he panted.

“Run away. They’ll come back. They’re throwing things! Which way shall

we go?”

“By the light. To that tunnel. Eh?”

“Yes,” said I, and his hands were free.

I dropped on my knees and fell to work on his ankle bonds. Whack came

something—I know not what—and splashed the livid streamlet into drops

about us. Far away on our right a piping and whistling began.

I whipped the chain off his feet, and put it in his hand. “Hit with

that!” I said, and without waiting for an answer, set off in big bounds

along the path by which we had come. I had a nasty sort of feeling that

these things could jump out of the darkness on to my back. I heard the

impact of his leaps come following after me.

We ran in vast strides. But that running, you must understand, was an

altogether different thing from any running on earth. On earth one

leaps and almost instantly hits the ground again, but on the moon,

because of its weaker pull, one shot through the air for several

seconds before one came to earth. In spite of our violent hurry this

gave an effect of long pauses, pauses in which one might have counted

seven or eight. “Step,” and one soared off! All sorts of questions ran

through my mind: “Where are the Selenites? What will they do? Shall we

ever get to that tunnel? Is Cavor far behind? Are they likely to cut

him off?” Then whack, stride, and off again for another step.

I saw a Selenite running in front of me, his legs going exactly as a

man’s would go on earth, saw him glance over his shoulder, and heard

him shriek as he ran aside out of my way into the darkness. He was, I

think, our guide, but I am not sure. Then in another vast stride the

walls of rock had come into view on either hand, and in two more

strides I was in the tunnel, and tempering my pace to its low roof. I

went on to a bend, then stopped and turned back, and plug, plug, plug,

Cavor came into view, splashing into the stream of blue light at every

stride, and grew larger and blundered into me. We stood clutching each

other. For a moment, at least, we had shaken off our captors and were

alone.

We were both very much out of breath. We spoke in panting, broken

sentences.

“You’ve spoilt it all!” panted Cavor. “Nonsense,” I cried. “It was that

or death!”

“What are we to do?”

“Hide.”

“How can we?”

“It’s dark enough.”

“But where?”

“Up one of these side caverns.”

“And then?”

“Think.”

“Right—come on.”

We strode on, and presently came to a radiating dark cavern. Cavor was

in front. He hesitated, and chose a black mouth that seemed to promise

good hiding. He went towards it and turned.

“It’s dark,” he said.

“Your legs and feet will light us. You’re wet with that luminous

stuff.”

“But—”

A tumult of sounds, and in particular a sound like a clanging gong,

advancing up the main tunnel, became audible. It was horribly

suggestive of a tumultuous pursuit. We made a bolt for the unlit side

cavern forthwith. As we ran along it our way was lit by the irradiation

of Cavor’s legs. “It’s lucky,” I panted, “they took off our boots, or

we should fill this place with clatter.” On we rushed, taking as small

steps as we could to avoid striking the roof of the cavern. After a

time we seemed to be gaining on the uproar. It became muffled, it

dwindled, it died away.

I stopped and looked back, and I heard the pad, pad of Cavor’s feet

receding. Then he stopped also. “Bedford,” he whispered; “there’s a

sort of light in front of us.”

I looked, and at first could see nothing. Then I perceived his head and

shoulders dimly outlined against a fainter darkness. I saw, also, that

this mitigation of the darkness was not blue, as all the other light

within the moon had been, but a pallid grey, a very vague, faint white,

the daylight colour. Cavor noted this difference as soon, or sooner,

than I did, and I think, too, that it filled him with much the same

wild hope.

“Bedford,” he whispered, and his voice trembled. “That light—it is

possible—”

He did not dare to say the thing he hoped. Then came a pause. Suddenly

I knew by the sound of his feet that he was striding towards that

pallor. I followed him with a beating heart.

XVI.

Points of View

The light grew stronger as we advanced. In a little time it was nearly

as strong as the phosphorescence on Cavor’s legs. Our tunnel was

expanding into a cavern, and this new light was at the farther end of

it. I perceived something that set my hopes leaping and bounding.

“Cavor,” I said, “it comes from above! I am certain it comes from

above!”

He made no answer, but hurried on.

Indisputably it was a grey light, a silvery light.

In another moment we were beneath it. It filtered down through a chink

in the walls of the cavern, and as I stared up, drip, came a drop of

water upon my face. I started and stood aside—drip, fell another drop

quite audibly on the rocky floor.

“Cavor,” I said, “if one of us lifts the other, he can reach that

crack!”

“I’ll lift you,” he said, and incontinently hoisted me as though I was

a baby.

I thrust an arm into the crack, and just at my finger tips found a

little ledge by which I could hold. I could see the white light was

very much brighter now. I pulled myself up by two fingers with scarcely

an effort, though on earth I weigh twelve stone, reached to a still

higher corner of rock, and so got my feet on the narrow ledge. I stood

up and searched up the rocks with my fingers; the cleft broadened out

upwardly. “It’s climbable,” I said to Cavor. “Can you jump up to my

hand if I hold it down to you?”

I wedged myself between the sides of the cleft, rested knee and foot on

the ledge, and extended a hand. I could not see Cavor, but I could hear

the rustle of his movements as he crouched to spring. Then whack and he

was hanging to my arm—and no heavier than a kitten! I lugged him up

until he had a hand on my ledge, and could release me.

“Confound it!” I said, “any one could be a mountaineer on the moon;”

and so set myself in earnest to the climbing. For a few minutes I

clambered steadily, and then I looked up again. The cleft opened out

steadily, and the light was brighter. Only—

It was not daylight after all.

In another moment I could see what it was, and at the sight I could

have beaten my head against the rocks with disappointment. For I beheld

simply an irregularly sloping open space, and all over its slanting

floor stood a forest of little club-shaped fungi, each shining

gloriously with that pinkish silvery light. For a moment I stared at

their soft radiance, then sprang forward and upward among them. I

plucked up half a dozen and flung them against the rocks, and then sat

down, laughing bitterly, as Cavor’s ruddy face came into view.

“It’s phosphorescence again!” I said. “No need to hurry. Sit down and

make yourself at home.” And as he spluttered over our disappointment, I

began to lob more of these growths into the cleft.

“I thought it was daylight,” he said.

“Daylight!” cried I. “Daybreak, sunset, clouds, and windy skies! Shall

we ever see such things again?”

As I spoke, a little picture of our world seemed to rise before me,

bright and little and clear, like the background of some old Italian

picture. “The sky that changes, and the sea that changes, and the hills

and the green trees and the towns and cities shining in the sun. Think

of a wet roof at sunset, Cavor! Think of the windows of a westward

house!” He made no answer.

“Here we are burrowing in this beastly world that isn’t a world, with

its inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outside

that torrid day and that death stillness of night. And all these things

that are chasing us now, beastly men of leather—insect men, that come

out of a nightmare! After all, they’re right! What business have we

here smashing them and disturbing their world! For all we know the

whole planet is up and after us already. In a minute we may hear them

whimpering, and their gongs going. What are we to do? Where are we to

go? Here we are as comfortable as snakes from Jamrach’s loose in a

Surbiton villa!”

“It was your fault,” said Cavor.

“My fault!” I shouted. “Good Lord!”

“I had an idea!”

“Curse your ideas!”

“If we had refused to budge—”

“Under those goads?”

“Yes. They would have carried us!”

“Over that bridge?”

“Yes. They must have carried us from outside.”

“I’d rather be carried by a fly across a ceiling.”

“Good Heavens!”

I resumed my destruction of the fungi. Then suddenly I saw something

that struck me even then. “Cavor,” I said, “these chains are of gold!”

He was thinking intently, with his hands gripping his cheeks. He turned

his head slowly and stared at me, and when I had repeated my words, at

the twisted chain about his right hand. “So they are,” he said, “so

they are.” His face lost its transitory interest even as he looked. He

hesitated for a moment, then went on with his interrupted meditation. I

sat for a space puzzling over the fact that I had only just observed

this, until I considered the blue light in which we had been, and which

had taken all the colour out of the metal. And from that discovery I

also started upon a train of thought that carried me wide and far. I

forgot that I had just been asking what business we had in the moon.

Gold....

It was Cavor who spoke first. “It seems to me that there are two

courses open to us.”

“Well?”

“Either we can attempt to make our way—fight our way if necessary—out

to the exterior again, and then hunt for our sphere until we find it,

or the cold of the night comes to kill us, or else—”

He paused. “Yes?” I said, though I knew what was coming.

“We might attempt once more to establish some sort of understanding

with the minds of the people in the moon.”

“So far as I’m concerned—it’s the first.”

“I doubt.”

“I don’t.”

“You see,” said Cavor, “I do not think we can judge the Selenites by

what we have seen of them. Their central world, their civilised world

will be far below in the profounder caverns about their sea. This

region of the crust in which we are is an outlying district, a pastoral

region. At any rate, that is my interpretation. These Selenites we have

seen may be only the equivalent of cowboys and engine-tenders. Their

use of goads—in all probability mooncalf goads—the lack of imagination

they show in expecting us to be able to do just what they can do, their

indisputable brutality, all seem to point to something of that sort.

But if we endured—”

“Neither of us could endure a six-inch plank across the bottomless pit

for very long.”

“No,” said Cavor; “but then—”

“I _won’t_,” I said.

He discovered a new line of possibilities. “Well, suppose we got

ourselves into some corner, where we could defend ourselves against

these hinds and labourers. If, for example, we could hold out for a

week or so, it is probable that the news of our appearance would filter

down to the more intelligent and populous parts—”

“If they exist.”

“They must exist, or whence came those tremendous machines?”

“That’s possible, but it’s the worst of the two chances.”

“We might write up inscriptions on walls—”

“How do we know their eyes would see the sort of marks we made?”

“If we cut them—”

“That’s possible, of course.”

I took up a new thread of thought. “After all,” I said, “I suppose you

don’t think these Selenites so infinitely wiser than men.”

“They must know a lot more—or at least a lot of different things.”

“Yes, but—” I hesitated.

“I think you’ll quite admit, Cavor, that you’re rather an exceptional

man.”

“How?”

“Well, you—you’re a rather lonely man—have been, that is. You haven’t

married.”

“Never wanted to. But why—”

“And you never grew richer than you happened to be?”

“Never wanted that either.”

“You’ve just rooted after knowledge?”

“Well, a certain curiosity is natural—”

“You think so. That’s just it. You think every other mind wants to

_know_. I remember once, when I asked you why you conducted all these

researches, you said you wanted your F.R.S., and to have the stuff

called Cavorite, and things like that. You know perfectly well you

didn’t do it for that; but at the time my question took you by

surprise, and you felt you ought to have something to look like a

motive. Really you conducted researches because you _had_ to. It’s your

twist.”

“Perhaps it is—”

“It isn’t one man in a million has that twist. Most men want—well,

various things, but very few want knowledge for its own sake. _I_

don’t, I know perfectly well. Now, these Selenites seem to be a

driving, busy sort of being, but how do you know that even the most

intelligent will take an interest in us or our world? I don’t believe

they’ll even know we have a world. They never come out at night—they’d

freeze if they did. They’ve probably never seen any heavenly body at

all except the blazing sun. How are they to know there is another

world? What does it matter to them if they do? Well, even if they

_have_ had a glimpse of a few stars, or even of the earth crescent,

what of that? Why should people living _inside_ a planet trouble to

observe that sort of thing? Men wouldn’t have done it except for the

seasons and sailing; why should the moon people?...

“Well, suppose there are a few philosophers like yourself. They are

just the very Selenites who’ll never have heard of our existence.

Suppose a Selenite had dropped on the earth when you were at Lympne,

you’d have been the last man in the world to hear he had come. You

never read a newspaper! You see the chances against you. Well, it’s for

these chances we’re sitting here doing nothing while precious time is

flying. I tell you we’ve got into a fix. We’ve come unarmed, we’ve lost

our sphere, we’ve got no food, we’ve shown ourselves to the Selenites,

and made them think we’re strange, strong, dangerous animals; and

unless these Selenites are perfect fools, they’ll set about now and

hunt us till they find us, and when they find us they’ll try to take us

if they can, and kill us if they can’t, and that’s the end of the

matter. If they take us, they’ll probably kill us, through some

misunderstanding. After we’re done for, they may discuss us perhaps,

but we shan’t get much fun out of that.”

“Go on.”

“On the other hand, here’s gold knocking about like cast iron at home.

If only we can get some of it back, if only we can find our sphere

again before they do, and get back, then—”

“Yes?”

“We might put the thing on a sounder footing. Come back in a bigger

sphere with guns.”

“Good Lord!” cried Cavor, as though that was horrible.

I shied another luminous fungus down the cleft.

“Look here, Cavor,” I said, “I’ve half the voting power anyhow in this

affair, and this is a case for a practical man. I’m a practical man,

and you are not. I’m not going to trust to Selenites and geometrical

diagrams if I can help it. That’s all. Get back. Drop all this

secrecy—or most of it. And come again.”

He reflected. “When I came to the moon,” he said, “I ought to have come

alone.”

“The question before the meeting,” I said, “is how to get back to the

sphere.”

For a time we nursed our knees in silence. Then he seemed to decide for

my reasons.

“I think,” he said, “one can get data. It is clear that while the sun

is on this side of the moon the air will be blowing through this planet

sponge from the dark side hither. On this side, at any rate, the air

will be expanding and flowing out of the moon caverns into the

craters.... Very well, there’s a draught here.”

“So there is.”

“And that means that this is not a dead end; somewhere behind us this

cleft goes on and up. The draught is blowing up, and that is the way we

have to go. If we try to get up any sort of chimney or gully there is,

we shall not only get out of these passages where they are hunting for

us—”

“But suppose the gully is too narrow?”

“We’ll come down again.”

“Ssh!” I said suddenly; “what’s that?”

We listened. At first it was an indistinct murmur, and then one picked

out the clang of a gong. “They must think we are mooncalves,” said I,

“to be frightened at that.”

“They’re coming along that passage,” said Cavor.

“They must be.”

“They’ll not think of the cleft. They’ll go past.”

I listened again for a space. “This time,” I whispered, “they’re likely

to have some sort of weapon.”

Then suddenly I sprang to my feet. “Good heavens, Cavor!” I cried. “But

they _will!_ They’ll see the fungi I have been pitching down. They’ll—”

I didn’t finish my sentence. I turned about and made a leap over the

fungus tops towards the upper end of the cavity. I saw that the space

turned upward and became a draughty cleft again, ascending to

impenetrable darkness. I was about to clamber up into this, and then

with a happy inspiration turned back.

“What are you doing?” asked Cavor.

“Go on!” said I, and went back and got two of the shining fungi, and

putting one into the breast pocket of my flannel jacket, so that it

stuck out to light our climbing, went back with the other for Cavor.

The noise of the Selenites was now so loud that it seemed they must be

already beneath the cleft. But it might be they would have difficulty

in clambering in to it, or might hesitate to ascend it against our

possible resistance. At any rate, we had now the comforting knowledge

of the enormous muscular superiority our birth in another planet gave

us. In other minute I was clambering with gigantic vigour after Cavor’s

blue-lit heels.

XVII.

The Fight in the Cave of the Moon Butchers

I do not know how far we clambered before we came to the grating. It

may be we ascended only a few hundred feet, but at the time it seemed

to me we might have hauled and jammed and hopped and wedged ourselves

through a mile or more of vertical ascent. Whenever I recall that time,

there comes into my head the heavy clank of our golden chains that

followed every movement. Very soon my knuckles and knees were raw, and

I had a bruise on one cheek. After a time the first violence of our

efforts diminished, and our movements became more deliberate and less

painful. The noise of the pursuing Selenites had died away altogether.

It seemed almost as though they had not traced us up the crack after

all, in spite of the tell-tale heap of broken fungi that must have lain

beneath it. At times the cleft narrowed so much that we could scarce

squeeze up it; at others it expanded into great drusy cavities, studded

with prickly crystals or thickly beset with dull, shining fungoid

pimples. Sometimes it twisted spirally, and at other times slanted down

nearly to the horizontal direction. Ever and again there was the

intermittent drip and trickle of water by us. Once or twice it seemed

to us that small living things had rustled out of our reach, but what

they were we never saw. They may have been venomous beasts for all I

know, but they did us no harm, and we were now tuned to a pitch when a

weird creeping thing more or less mattered little. And at last, far

above, came the familiar bluish light again, and then we saw that it

filtered through a grating that barred our way.

We whispered as we pointed this out to one another, and became more and

more cautious in our ascent. Presently we were close under the grating,

and by pressing my face against its bars I could see a limited portion

of the cavern beyond. It was clearly a large space, and lit no doubt by

some rivulet of the same blue light that we had seen flow from the

beating machinery. An intermittent trickle of water dropped ever and

again between the bars near my face.

My first endeavour was naturally to see what might be upon the floor of

the cavern, but our grating lay in a depression whose rim hid all this

from our eyes. Our foiled attention then fell back upon the suggestion

of the various sounds we heard, and presently my eye caught a number of

faint shadows that played across the dim roof far overhead.

Indisputably there were several Selenites, perhaps a considerable

number, in this space, for we could hear the noises of their

intercourse, and faint sounds that I identified as their footfalls.

There was also a succession of regularly repeated sounds—chid, chid,

chid—which began and ceased, suggestive of a knife or spade hacking at

some soft substance. Then came a clank as if of chains, a whistle and a

rumble as of a truck running over a hollowed place, and then again that

chid, chid, chid resumed. The shadows told of shapes that moved quickly

and rhythmically, in agreement with that regular sound, and rested when

it ceased.

We put our heads close together, and began to discuss these things in

noiseless whispers.

“They are occupied,” I said, “they are occupied in some way.”

“Yes.”

“They’re not seeking us, or thinking of us.”

“Perhaps they have not heard of us.”

“Those others are hunting about below. If suddenly we appeared here—”

We looked at one another.

“There might be a chance to parley,” said Cavor.

“No,” I said. “Not as we are.”

For a space we remained, each occupied by his own thoughts.

Chid, chid, chid went the chipping, and the shadows moved to and fro.

I looked at the grating. “It’s flimsy,” I said. “We might bend two of

the bars and crawl through.”

We wasted a little time in vague discussion. Then I took one of the

bars in both hands, and got my feet up against the rock until they were

almost on a level with my head, and so thrust against the bar. It bent

so suddenly that I almost slipped. I clambered about and bent the

adjacent bar in the opposite direction, and then took the luminous

fungus from my pocket and dropped it down the fissure.

“Don’t do anything hastily,” whispered Cavor, as I twisted myself up

through the opening I had enlarged. I had a glimpse of busy figures as

I came through the grating, and immediately bent down, so that the rim

of the depression in which the grating lay hid me from their eyes, and

so lay flat, signalling advice to Cavor as he also prepared to come

through. Presently we were side by side in the depression, peering over

the edge at the cavern and its occupants.

It was a much larger cavern than we had supposed from our first glimpse

of it, and we looked up from the lowest portion of its sloping floor.

It widened out as it receded from us, and its roof came down and hid

the remoter portion altogether. And lying in a line along its length,

vanishing at last far away in that tremendous perspective, were a

number of huge shapes, huge pallid hulls, upon which the Selenites were

busy. At first they seemed big white cylinders of vague import. Then I

noted the heads upon them lying towards us, eyeless and skinless like

the heads of sheep at a butcher’s, and perceived they were the

carcasses of mooncalves being cut up, much as the crew of a whaler

might cut up a moored whale. They were cutting off the flesh in strips,

and on some of the farther trunks the white ribs were showing. It was

the sound of their hatchets that made that chid, chid, chid. Some way

away a thing like a trolley cable, drawn and loaded with chunks of lax

meat, was running up the slope of the cavern floor. This enormous long

avenue of hulls that were destined to be food gave us a sense of the

vast populousness of the moon world second only to the effect of our

first glimpse down the shaft.

It seemed to me at first that the Selenites must be standing on

trestle-supported planks,[2] and then I saw that the planks and

supports and the hatchets were really of the same leaden hue as my

fetters had seemed before white light came to bear on them. A number of

very thick-looking crowbars lay about the floor, and had apparently

assisted to turn the dead mooncalf over on its side. They were perhaps

six feet long, with shaped handles, very tempting-looking weapons. The

whole place was lit by three transverse streams of the blue fluid.

[2] I do not remember seeing any wooden things on the moon; doors,

tables, everything corresponding to our terrestrial joinery was made

of metal, and I believe for the most part of gold, which as a metal

would, of course, naturally recommend itself—other things being

equal—on account of the ease in working it, and its toughness and

durability.

We lay for a long time noting all these things in silence. “Well?” said

Cavor at last.

I crouched over and turned to him. I had come upon a brilliant idea.

“Unless they lowered those bodies by a crane,” I said, “we must be

nearer the surface than I thought.”

“Why?”

“The mooncalf doesn’t hop, and it hasn’t got wings.”

He peered over the edge of the hollow again. “I wonder now—” he began.

“After all, we have never gone far from the surface—”

I stopped him by a grip on his arm. I had heard a noise from the cleft

below us!

We twisted ourselves about, and lay as still as death, with every sense

alert. In a little while I did not doubt that something was quietly

ascending the cleft. Very slowly and quite noiselessly I assured myself

of a good grip on my chain, and waited for that something to appear.

“Just look at those chaps with the hatchets again,” I said.

“They’re all right,” said Cavor.

I took a sort of provisional aim at the gap in the grating. I could

hear now quite distinctly the soft twittering of the ascending

Selenites, the dab of their hands against the rock, and the falling of

dust from their grips as they clambered.

Then I could see that there was something moving dimly in the blackness

below the grating, but what it might be I could not distinguish. The

whole thing seemed to hang fire just for a moment—then smash! I had

sprung to my feet, struck savagely at something that had flashed out at

me. It was the keen point of a spear. I have thought since that its

length in the narrowness of the cleft must have prevented its being

sloped to reach me. Anyhow, it shot out from the grating like the

tongue of a snake, and missed and flew back and flashed again. But the

second time I snatched and caught it, and wrenched it away, but not

before another had darted ineffectually at me.

I shouted with triumph as I felt the hold of the Selenite resist my

pull for a moment and give, and then I was jabbing down through the

bars, amidst squeals from the darkness, and Cavor had snapped off the

other spear, and was leaping and flourishing it beside me, and making

inefficient jabs. Clang, clang, came up through the grating, and then

an axe hurtled through the air and whacked against the rocks beyond, to

remind me of the fleshers at the carcasses up the cavern.

I turned, and they were all coming towards us in open order waving

their axes. They were short, thick, little beggars, with long arms,

strikingly different from the ones we had seen before. If they had not

heard of us before, they must have realised the situation with

incredible swiftness. I stared at them for a moment, spear in hand.

“Guard that grating, Cavor,” I cried, howled to intimidate them, and

rushed to meet them. Two of them missed with their hatchets, and the

rest fled incontinently. Then the two also were sprinting away up the

cavern, with hands clenched and heads down. I never saw men run like

them!

I knew the spear I had was no good for me. It was thin and flimsy, only

effectual for a thrust, and too long for a quick recover. So I only

chased the Selenites as far as the first carcass, and stopped there and

picked up one of the crowbars that were lying about. It felt

comfortingly heavy, and equal to smashing any number of Selenites. I

threw away my spear, and picked up a second crowbar for the other hand.

I felt five times better than I had with the spear. I shook the two

threateningly at the Selenites, who had come to a halt in a little

crowd far away up the cavern, and then turned about to look at Cavor.

He was leaping from side to side of the grating, making threatening

jabs with his broken spear. That was all right. It would keep the

Selenites down—for a time at any rate. I looked up the cavern again.

What on earth were we going to do now?

We were cornered in a sort of way already. But these butchers up the

cavern had been surprised, they were probably scared, and they had no

special weapons, only those little hatchets of theirs. And that way lay

escape. Their sturdy little forms—ever so much shorter and thicker than

the mooncalf herds—were scattered up the slope in a way that was

eloquent of indecision. I had the moral advantage of a mad bull in a

street. But for all that, there seemed a tremendous crowd of them. Very

probably there was. Those Selenites down the cleft had certainly some

infernally long spears. It might be they had other surprises for us....

But, confound it! if we charged up the cave we should let them up

behind us, and if we didn’t those little brutes up the cave would

probably get reinforced. Heaven alone knew what tremendous engines of

warfare—guns, bombs, terrestrial torpedoes—this unknown world below our

feet, this vaster world of which we had only pricked the outer cuticle,

might not presently send up to our destruction. It became clear the

only thing to do was to charge! It became clearer as the legs of a

number of fresh Selenites appeared running down the cavern towards us.

“Bedford!” cried Cavor, and behold! he was halfway between me and the

grating.

“Go back!” I cried. “What are you doing—”

“They’ve got—it’s like a gun!”

And struggling in the grating between those defensive spears appeared

the head and shoulders of a singularly lean and angular Selenite,

bearing some complicated apparatus.

I realised Cavor’s utter incapacity for the fight we had in hand. For a

moment I hesitated. Then I rushed past him whirling my crowbars, and

shouting to confound the aim of the Selenite. He was aiming in the

queerest way with the thing against his stomach. “_Chuzz!_” The thing

wasn’t a gun; it went off like a cross-bow more, and dropped me in the

middle of a leap.

I didn’t fall down, I simply came down a little shorter than I should

have done if I hadn’t been hit, and from the feel of my shoulder the

thing might have tapped me and glanced off. Then my left hand hit

against the shaft, and I perceived there was a sort of spear sticking

half through my shoulder. The moment after I got home with the crowbar

in my right hand, and hit the Selenite fair and square. He collapsed—he

crushed and crumpled—his head smashed like an egg.

I dropped a crowbar, pulled the spear out of my shoulder, and began to

jab it down the grating into the darkness. At each jab came a shriek

and twitter. Finally I hurled the spear down upon them with all my

strength, leapt up, picked up the crowbar again, and started for the

multitude up the cavern.

“Bedford!” cried Cavor. “Bedford!” as I flew past him.

I seem to remember his footsteps coming on behind me.

Step, leap ... whack, step, leap.... Each leap seemed to last ages.

With each, the cave opened out and the number of Selenites visible

increased. At first they seemed all running about like ants in a

disturbed ant-hill, one or two waving hatchets and coming to meet me,

more running away, some bolting sideways into the avenue of carcasses,

then presently others came in sight carrying spears, and then others. I

saw a most extraordinary thing, all hands and feet, bolting for cover.

The cavern grew darker farther up.

Flick! something flew over my head. Flick! As I soared in mid-stride I

saw a spear hit and quiver in one of the carcasses to my left. Then, as

I came down, one hit the ground before me, and I heard the remote

chuzz! with which their things were fired. Flick, flick! for a moment

it was a shower. They were volleying!

I stopped dead.

I don’t think I thought clearly then. I seem to remember a kind of

stereotyped phrase running through my mind: “Zone of fire, seek cover!”

I know I made a dash for the space between two of the carcasses, and

stood there panting and feeling very wicked.

I looked round for Cavor, and for a moment it seemed as if he had

vanished from the world. Then he came out of the darkness between the

row of the carcasses and the rocky wall of the cavern. I saw his little

face, dark and blue, and shining with perspiration and emotion.

He was saying something, but what it was I did not heed. I had realised

that we might work from mooncalf to mooncalf up the cave until we were

near enough to charge home. It was charge or nothing. “Come on!” I

said, and led the way.

“Bedford!” he cried unavailingly.

My mind was busy as we went up that narrow alley between the dead

bodies and the wall of the cavern. The rocks curved about—they could

not enfilade us. Though in that narrow space we could not leap, yet

with our earth-born strength we were still able to go very much faster

than the Selenites. I reckoned we should presently come right among

them. Once we were on them, they would be nearly as formidable as black

beetles. Only there would first of all be a volley. I thought of a

stratagem. I whipped off my flannel jacket as I ran.

“Bedford!” panted Cavor behind me.

I glanced back. “What?” said I.

He was pointing upward over the carcasses. “White light!” he said.

“White light again!”

I looked, and it was even so; a faint white ghost of light in the

remoter cavern roof. That seemed to give me double strength.

“Keep close,” I said. A flat, long Selenite dashed out of the darkness,

and squealed and fled. I halted, and stopped Cavor with my hand. I hung

my jacket over my crowbar, ducked round the next carcass, dropped

jacket and crowbar, showed myself, and darted back.

“Chuzz-flick,” just one arrow came. We were close on the Selenites, and

they were standing in a crowd, broad, short, and tall together, with a

little battery of their shooting implements pointing down the cave.

Three or four other arrows followed the first, then their fire ceased.

I stuck out my head, and escaped by a hair’s-breadth. This time I drew

a dozen shots or more, and heard the Selenites shouting and twittering

as if with excitement as they shot. I picked up jacket and crowbar

again.

“_Now!_” said I, and thrust out the jacket.

“Chuzz-zz-zz-zz! Chuzz!” In an instant my jacket had grown a thick

beard of arrows, and they were quivering all over the carcass behind

us. Instantly I slipped the crowbar out of the jacket, dropped the

jacket—for all I know to the contrary it is lying up there in the moon

now—and rushed out upon them.

For a minute perhaps it was massacre. I was too fierce to discriminate,

and the Selenites were probably too scared to fight. At any rate they

made no sort of fight against me. I saw scarlet, as the saying is. I

remember I seemed to be wading among those leathery, thin things as a

man wades through tall grass, mowing and hitting, first right, then

left; smash. Little drops of moisture flew about. I trod on things that

crushed and piped and went slippery. The crowd seemed to open and close

and flow like water. They seemed to have no combined plan whatever.

There were spears flew about me, I was grazed over the ear by one. I

was stabbed once in the arm and once in the cheek, but I only found

that out afterwards, when the blood had had time to run and cool and

feel wet.

What Cavor did I do not know. For a space it seemed that this fighting

had lasted for an age, and must needs go on for ever. Then suddenly it

was all over, and there was nothing to be seen but the backs of heads

bobbing up and down as their owners ran in all directions.... I seemed

altogether unhurt. I ran forward some paces, shouting, then turned

about. I was amazed.

I had come right through them in vast flying strides, they were all

behind me, and running hither and thither to hide.

I felt an enormous astonishment at the evaporation of the great fight

into which I had hurled myself, and not a little exultation. It did not

seem to me that I had discovered the Selenites were unexpectedly

flimsy, but that I was unexpectedly strong. I laughed stupidly. This

fantastic moon!

I glanced for a moment at the smashed and writhing bodies that were

scattered over the cavern floor, with a vague idea of further violence,

then hurried on after Cavor.

XVIII.

In the Sunlight

Presently we saw that the cavern before us opened upon a hazy void. In

another moment we had emerged upon a sort of slanting gallery, that

projected into a vast circular space, a huge cylindrical pit running

vertically up and down. Round this pit the slanting gallery ran without

any parapet or protection for a turn and a half, and then plunged high

above into the rock again. Somehow it reminded me then of one of those

spiral turns of the railway through the Saint Gothard. It was all

tremendously huge. I can scarcely hope to convey to you the Titanic

proportion of all that place, the Titanic effect of it. Our eyes

followed up the vast declivity of the pit wall, and overhead and far

above we beheld a round opening set with faint stars, and half of the

lip about it well nigh blinding with the white light of the sun. At

that we cried aloud simultaneously.

“Come on!” I said, leading the way.

“But there?” said Cavor, and very carefully stepped nearer the edge of

the gallery. I followed his example, and craned forward and looked

down, but I was dazzled by that gleam of light above, and I could see

only a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purple

floating therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of this

darkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one

puts one’s ear outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormous

hollow, it may be, four miles beneath our feet...

For a moment I listened, then tightened my grip on my crowbar, and led

the way up the gallery.

“This must be the shaft we looked down upon,” said Cavor. “Under that

lid.”

“And below there, is where we saw the lights.”

“The lights!” said he. “Yes—the lights of the world that now we shall

never see.”

“We’ll come back,” I said, for now we had escaped so much I was rashly

sanguine that we should recover the sphere.

His answer I did not catch.

“Eh?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he answered, and we hurried on in silence.

I suppose that slanting lateral way was four or five miles long,

allowing for its curvature, and it ascended at a slope that would have

made it almost impossibly steep on earth, but which one strode up

easily under lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites during all

that portion of our flight, and directly they became aware of us they

ran headlong. It was clear that the knowledge of our strength and

violence had reached them. Our way to the exterior was unexpectedly

plain. The spiral gallery straightened into a steeply ascendent tunnel,

its floor bearing abundant traces of the mooncalves, and so straight

and short in proportion to its vast arch, that no part of it was

absolutely dark. Almost immediately it began to lighten, and then far

off and high up, and quite blindingly brilliant, appeared its opening

on the exterior, a slope of Alpine steepness surmounted by a crest of

bayonet shrub, tall and broken down now, and dry and dead, in spiky

silhouette against the sun.

And it is strange that we men, to whom this very vegetation had seemed

so weird and horrible a little time ago, should now behold it with the

emotion a home-coming exile might feel at sight of his native land. We

welcomed even the rareness of the air that made us pant as we ran, and

which rendered speaking no longer the easy thing that it had been, but

an effort to make oneself heard. Larger grew the sunlit circle above

us, and larger, and all the nearer tunnel sank into a rim of

indistinguishable black. We saw the dead bayonet shrub no longer with

any touch of green in it, but brown and dry and thick, and the shadow

of its upper branches high out of sight made a densely interlaced

pattern upon the tumbled rocks. And at the immediate mouth of the

tunnel was a wide trampled space where the mooncalves had come and

gone.

We came out upon this space at last into a light and heat that hit and

pressed upon us. We traversed the exposed area painfully, and clambered

up a slope among the scrub stems, and sat down at last panting in a

high place beneath the shadow of a mass of twisted lava. Even in the

shade the rock felt hot.

The air was intensely hot, and we were in great physical discomfort,

but for all that we were no longer in a nightmare. We seemed to have

come to our own province again, beneath the stars. All the fear and

stress of our flight through the dim passages and fissures below had

fallen from us. That last fight had filled us with an enormous

confidence in ourselves so far as the Selenites were concerned. We

looked back almost incredulously at the black opening from which we had

just emerged. Down there it was, in a blue glow that now in our

memories seemed the next thing to absolute darkness, we had met with

things like mad mockeries of men, helmet-headed creatures, and had

walked in fear before them, and had submitted to them until we could

submit no longer. And behold, they had smashed like wax and scattered

like chaff, and fled and vanished like the creatures of a dream!

I rubbed my eyes, doubting whether we had not slept and dreamt these

things by reason of the fungus we had eaten, and suddenly discovered

the blood upon my face, and then that my shirt was sticking painfully

to my shoulder and arm.

“Confound it!” I said, gauging my injuries with an investigatory hand,

and suddenly that distant tunnel mouth became, as it were, a watching

eye.

“Cavor!” I said; “what are they going to do now? And what are we going

to do?”

He shook his head, with his eyes fixed upon the tunnel. “How can one

tell what they will do?”

“It depends on what they think of us, and I don’t see how we can begin

to guess that. And it depends upon what they have in reserve. It’s as

you say, Cavor, we have touched the merest outside of this world. They

may have all sorts of things inside here. Even with those shooting

things they might make it bad for us....

“Yet after all,” I said, “even if we _don’t_ find the sphere at once,

there is a chance for us. We might hold out. Even through the night. We

might go down there again and make a fight for it.”

I stared about me with speculative eyes. The character of the scenery

had altered altogether by reason of the enormous growth and subsequent

drying of the scrub. The crest on which we sat was high, and commanded

a wide prospect of the crater landscape, and we saw it now all sere and

dry in the late autumn of the lunar afternoon. Rising one behind the

other were long slopes and fields of trampled brown where the

mooncalves had pastured, and far away in the full blaze of the sun a

drove of them basked slumberously, scattered shapes, each with a blot

of shadow against it like sheep on the side of a down. But never a sign

of a Selenite was to be seen. Whether they had fled on our emergence

from the interior passages, or whether they were accustomed to retire

after driving out the mooncalves, I cannot guess. At the time I

believed the former was the case.

“If we were to set fire to all this stuff,” I said, “we might find the

sphere among the ashes.”

Cavor did not seem to hear me. He was peering under his hand at the

stars, that still, in spite of the intense sunlight, were abundantly

visible in the sky. “How long do you think we’ve have been here?” he

asked at last.

“Been where?”

“On the moon.”

“Two earthly days, perhaps.”

“More nearly ten. Do you know, the sun is past its zenith, and sinking

in the west. In four days’ time or less it will be night.”

“But—we’ve only eaten once!”

“I know that. And— But there are the stars!”

“But why should time seem different because we are on a smaller

planet?”

“I don’t know. There it is!”

“How does one tell time?”

“Hunger—fatigue—all those things are different. Everything is

different—everything. To me it seems that since first we came out of

the sphere has been only a question of hours—long hours—at most.”

“Ten days,” I said; “that leaves—” I looked up at the sun for a moment,

and then saw that it was halfway from the zenith to the western edge of

things. “Four days! ... Cavor, we mustn’t sit here and dream. How do

you think we may begin?”

I stood up. “We must get a fixed point we can recognise—we might hoist

a flag, or a handkerchief, or something—and quarter the ground, and

work round that.”

He stood up beside me.

“Yes,” he said, “there is nothing for it but to hunt the sphere.

Nothing. We may find it—certainly we may find it. And if not—”

“We must keep on looking.”

He looked this way and that, glanced up at the sky and down at the

tunnel, and astonished me by a sudden gesture of impatience. “Oh! but

we have done foolishly! To have come to this pass! Think how it might

have been, and the things we might have done!”

“We might do something yet.”

“Never the thing we might have done. Here below our feet is a world.

Think of what that world must be! Think of that machine we saw, and the

lid and the shaft! They were just remote outlying things, and those

creatures we have seen and fought with no more than ignorant peasants,

dwellers in the outskirts, yokels and labourers half akin to brutes.

Down below! Caverns beneath caverns, tunnels, structures, ways... It

must open out, and be greater and wider and more populous as one

descends. Assuredly. Right down at the last the central sea that washes

round the core of the moon. Think of its inky waters under the spare

lights—if, indeed, their eyes _need_ lights! Think of the cascading

tributaries pouring down their channels to feed it! Think of the tides

upon its surface, and the rush and swirl of its ebb and flow! Perhaps

they have ships that go upon it, perhaps down there are mighty cities

and swarming ways, and wisdom and order passing the wit of man. And we

may die here upon it, and never see the masters who _must_ be—ruling

over these things! We may freeze and die here, and the air will freeze

and thaw upon us, and then—! Then they will come upon us, come on our

stiff and silent bodies, and find the sphere we cannot find, and they

will understand at last too late all the thought and effort that ended

here in vain!”

His voice for all that speech sounded like the voice of someone heard

in a telephone, weak and far away.

“But the darkness,” I said.

“One might get over that.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. How am I to know? One might carry a torch, one might

have a lamp— The others—might understand.”

He stood for a moment with his hands held down and a rueful face,

staring out over the waste that defied him. Then with a gesture of

renunciation he turned towards me with proposals for the systematic

hunting of the sphere.

“We can return,” I said.

He looked about him. “First of all we shall have to get to earth.”

“We could bring back lamps to carry and climbing irons, and a hundred

necessary things.”

“Yes,” he said.

“We can take back an earnest of success in this gold.”

He looked at my golden crowbars, and said nothing for a space. He stood

with his hands clasped behind his back, staring across the crater. At

last he signed and spoke. “It was _I_ found the way here, but to find a

way isn’t always to be master of a way. If I take my secret back to

earth, what will happen? I do not see how I can keep my secret for a

year, for even a part of a year. Sooner or later it must come out, even

if other men rediscover it. And then ... Governments and powers will

struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, and

against these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiply the

occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while, if I tell

my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn with

human dead. Other things are doubtful, but that is certain. It is not

as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to

men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battle-ground

and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his

time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can

do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use.

It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again—in

a thousand years’ time.”

“There are methods of secrecy,” I said.

He looked up at me and smiled. “After all,” he said, “why should one

worry? There is little chance of our finding the sphere, and down below

things are brewing. It’s simply the human habit of hoping till we die

that makes us think of return. Our troubles are only beginning. We have

shown these moon folk violence, we have given them a taste of our

quality, and our chances are about as good as a tiger’s that has got

loose and killed a man in Hyde Park. The news of us must be running

down from gallery to gallery, down towards the central parts.... No

sane beings will ever let us take that sphere back to earth after so

much as they have seen of us.”

“We aren’t improving our chances,” said I, “by sitting here.”

We stood up side by side.

“After all,” he said, “we must separate. We must stick up a

handkerchief on these tall spikes here and fasten it firmly, and from

this as a centre we must work over the crater. You must go westward,

moving out in semicircles to and fro towards the setting sun. You must

move first with your shadow on your right until it is at right angles

with the direction of your handkerchief, and then with your shadow on

your left. And I will do the same to the east. We will look into every

gully, examine every skerry of rocks; we will do all we can to find my

sphere. If we see the Selenites we will hide from them as well as we

can. For drink we must take snow, and if we feel the need of food, we

must kill a mooncalf if we can, and eat such flesh as it has—raw—and so

each will go his own way.”

“And if one of us comes upon the sphere?”

“He must come back to the white handkerchief, and stand by it and

signal to the other.”

“And if neither?”

Cavor glanced up at the sun. “We go on seeking until the night and cold

overtake us.”

“Suppose the Selenites have found the sphere and hidden it?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Or if presently they come hunting us?”

He made no answer.

“You had better take a club,” I said.

He shook his head, and stared away from me across the waste.

But for a moment he did not start. He looked round at me shyly,

hesitated. “_Au revoir_,” he said.

I felt an odd stab of emotion. A sense of how we had galled each other,

and particularly how I must have galled him, came to me. “Confound it,”

thought I, “we might have done better!” I was on the point of asking

him to shake hands—for that, somehow, was how I felt just then—when he

put his feet together and leapt away from me towards the north. He

seemed to drift through the air as a dead leaf would do, fell lightly,

and leapt again. I stood for a moment watching him, then faced westward

reluctantly, pulled myself together, and with something of the feeling

of a man who leaps into icy water, selected a leaping point, and

plunged forward to explore my solitary half of the moon world. I

dropped rather clumsily among rocks, stood up and looked about me,

clambered on to a rocky slab, and leapt again....

When presently I looked for Cavor he was hidden from my eyes, but the

handkerchief showed out bravely on its headland, white in the blaze of

the sun.

I determined not to lose sight of that handkerchief whatever might

betide.

XIX.

Mr. Bedford Alone

In a little while it seemed to me as though I had always been alone on

the moon. I hunted for a time with a certain intentness, but the heat

was still very great, and the thinness of the air felt like a hoop

about one’s chest. I came presently into a hollow basin bristling with

tall, brown, dry fronds about its edge, and I sat down under these to

rest and cool. I intended to rest for only a little while. I put down

my clubs beside me, and sat resting my chin on my hands. I saw with a

sort of colourless interest that the rocks of the basin, where here and

there the crackling dry lichens had shrunk away to show them, were all

veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded

and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter. What did that matter

now? A sort of languor had possession of my limbs and mind, I did not

believe for a moment that we should ever find the sphere in that vast

desiccated wilderness. I seemed to lack a motive for effort until the

Selenites should come. Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying

that unreasonable imperative that urges a man before all things to

preserve and defend his life, albeit he may preserve it only to die

more painfully in a little while.

Why had we come to the moon?

The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem. What is this

spirit in man that urges him for ever to depart from happiness and

security, to toil, to place himself in danger, to risk even a

reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon

as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to

go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Almost any

man, if you put the thing to him, not in words, but in the shape of

opportunities, will show that he knows as much. Against his interest,

against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable

things. Some force not himself impels him, and go he must. But why?

Why? Sitting there in the midst of that useless moon gold, amidst the

things of another world, I took count of all my life. Assuming I was to

die a castaway upon the moon, I failed altogether to see what purpose I

had served. I got no light on that point, but at any rate it was

clearer to me than it had ever been in my life before that I was not

serving my own purpose, that all my life I had in truth never served

the purposes of my private life. Whose purposes, what purposes, was I

serving? ... I ceased to speculate on why we had come to the moon, and

took a wider sweep. Why had I come to the earth? Why had I a private

life at all? ... I lost myself at last in bottomless speculations....

My thoughts became vague and cloudy, no longer leading in definite

directions. I had not felt heavy or weary—I cannot imagine one doing so

upon the moon—but I suppose I was greatly fatigued. At any rate I

slept.

Slumbering there rested me greatly, I think, and the sun was setting

and the violence of the heat abating, through all the time I slumbered.

When at last I was roused from my slumbers by a remote clamour, I felt

active and capable again. I rubbed my eyes and stretched my arms. I

rose to my feet—I was a little stiff—and at once prepared to resume my

search. I shouldered my golden clubs, one on each shoulder, and went on

out of the ravine of the gold-veined rocks.

The sun was certainly lower, much lower than it had been; the air was

very much cooler. I perceived I must have slept some time. It seemed to

me that a faint touch of misty blueness hung about the western cliff. I

leapt to a little boss of rock and surveyed the crater. I could see no

signs of mooncalves or Selenites, nor could I see Cavor, but I could

see my handkerchief far off, spread out on its thicket of thorns. I

looked about me, and then leapt forward to the next convenient

view-point.

I beat my way round in a semicircle, and back again in a still remoter

crescent. It was very fatiguing and hopeless. The air was really very

much cooler, and it seemed to me that the shadow under the westward

cliff was growing broad. Ever and again I stopped and reconnoitred, but

there was no sign of Cavor, no sign of Selenites; and it seemed to me

the mooncalves must have been driven into the interior again—I could

see none of them. I became more and more desirous of seeing Cavor. The

winged outline of the sun had sunk now, until it was scarcely the

distance of its diameter from the rim of the sky. I was oppressed by

the idea that the Selenites would presently close their lids and

valves, and shut us out under the inexorable onrush of the lunar night.

It seemed to me high time that he abandoned his search, and that we

took counsel together. I felt how urgent it was that we should decide

soon upon our course. We had failed to find the sphere, we no longer

had time to seek it, and once these valves were closed with us outside,

we were lost men. The great night of space would descend upon us—that

blackness of the void which is the only absolute death. All my being

shrank from that approach. We must get into the moon again, though we

were slain in doing it. I was haunted by a vision of our freezing to

death, of our hammering with our last strength on the valve of the

great pit.

I took no thought any more of the sphere. I thought only of finding

Cavor again. I was half inclined to go back into the moon without him,

rather than seek him until it was too late. I was already half-way back

towards our handkerchief, when suddenly—

I saw the sphere!

I did not find it so much as it found me. It was lying much farther to

the westward than I had gone, and the sloping rays of the sinking sun

reflected from its glass had suddenly proclaimed its presence in a

dazzling beam. For an instant I thought this was some new device of the

Selenites against us, and then I understood.

I threw up my arms, shouted a ghostly shout, and set off in vast leaps

towards it. I missed one of my leaps and dropped into a deep ravine and

twisted my ankle, and after that I stumbled at almost every leap. I was

in a state of hysterical agitation, trembling violently, and quite

breathless long before I got to it. Three times at least I had to stop

with my hands resting on my side and in spite of the thin dryness of

the air, the perspiration was wet upon my face.

I thought of nothing but the sphere until I reached it, I forgot even

my trouble of Cavor’s whereabouts. My last leap flung me with my hands

hard against its glass; then I lay against it panting, and trying

vainly to shout, “Cavor! here is the sphere!” When I had recovered a

little I peered through the thick glass, and the things inside seemed

tumbled. I stooped to peer closer. Then I attempted to get in. I had to

hoist it over a little to get my head through the manhole. The screw

stopper was inside, and I could see now that nothing had been touched,

nothing had suffered. It lay there as we had left it when we had

dropped out amidst the snow. For a time I was wholly occupied in making

and remaking this inventory. I found I was trembling violently. It was

good to see that familiar dark interior again! I cannot tell you how

good. Presently I crept inside and sat down among the things. I looked

through the glass at the moon world and shivered. I placed my gold

clubs upon the table, and sought out and took a little food; not so

much because I wanted it, but because it was there. Then it occurred to

me that it was time to go out and signal for Cavor. But I did not go

out and signal for Cavor forthwith. Something held me to the sphere.

After all, everything was coming right. There would be still time for

us to get more of the magic stone that gives one mastery over men. Away

there, close handy, was gold for the picking up; and the sphere would

travel as well half full of gold as though it were empty. We could go

back now, masters of ourselves and our world, and then—

I roused myself at last, and with an effort got myself out of the

sphere. I shivered as I emerged, for the evening air was growing very

cold. I stood in the hollow staring about me. I scrutinised the bushes

round me very carefully before I leapt to the rocky shelf hard by, and

took once more what had been my first leap in the moon. But now I made

it with no effort whatever.

The growth and decay of the vegetation had gone on apace, and the whole

aspect of the rocks had changed, but still it was possible to make out

the slope on which the seeds had germinated, and the rocky mass from

which we had taken our first view of the crater. But the spiky shrub on

the slope stood brown and sere now, and thirty feet high, and cast long

shadows that stretched out of sight, and the little seeds that

clustered in its upper branches were brown and ripe. Its work was done,

and it was brittle and ready to fall and crumple under the freezing

air, so soon as the nightfall came. And the huge cacti, that had

swollen as we watched them, had long since burst and scattered their

spores to the four quarters of the moon. Amazing little corner in the

universe—the landing place of men!

Some day, thought I, I will have an inscription standing there right in

the midst of the hollow. It came to me, if only this teeming world

within knew of the full import of the moment, how furious its tumult

would become!

But as yet it could scarcely be dreaming of the significance of our

coming. For if it did, the crater would surely be an uproar of pursuit,

instead of as still as death! I looked about for some place from which

I might signal Cavor, and saw that same patch of rock to which he had

leapt from my present standpoint, still bare and barren in the sun. For

a moment I hesitated at going so far from the sphere. Then with a pang

of shame at that hesitation, I leapt....

From this vantage point I surveyed the crater again. Far away at the

top of the enormous shadow I cast was the little white handkerchief

fluttering on the bushes. It was very little and very far, and Cavor

was not in sight. It seemed to me that by this time he ought to be

looking for me. That was the agreement. But he was nowhere to be seen.

I stood waiting and watching, hands shading my eyes, expecting every

moment to distinguish him. Very probably I stood there for quite a long

time. I tried to shout, and was reminded of the thinness of the air. I

made an undecided step back towards the sphere. But a lurking dread of

the Selenites made me hesitate to signal my whereabouts by hoisting one

of our sleeping-blankets on to the adjacent scrub. I searched the

crater again.

It had an effect of emptiness that chilled me. And it was still. Any

sound from the Selenites in the world beneath had died away. It was as

still as death. Save for the faint stir of the shrub about me in the

little breeze that was rising, there was no sound nor shadow of a

sound. And the breeze blew chill.

Confound Cavor!

I took a deep breath. I put my hands to the sides of my mouth. “Cavor!”

I bawled, and the sound was like some manikin shouting far away.

I looked at the handkerchief, I looked behind me at the broadening

shadow of the westward cliff, I looked under my hand at the sun. It

seemed to me that almost visibly it was creeping down the sky.

I felt I must act instantly if I was to save Cavor. I whipped off my

vest and flung it as a mark on the sere bayonets of the shrubs behind

me, and then set off in a straight line towards the handkerchief.

Perhaps it was a couple of miles away—a matter of a few hundred leaps

and strides. I have already told how one seemed to hang through those

lunar leaps. In each suspense I sought Cavor, and marvelled why he

should be hidden. In each leap I could feel the sun setting behind me.

Each time I touched the ground I was tempted to go back.

A last leap and I was in the depression below our handkerchief, a

stride, and I stood on our former vantage point within arms’ reach of

it. I stood up straight and scanned the world about me, between its

lengthening bars of shadow. Far away, down a long declivity, was the

opening of the tunnel up which we had fled, and my shadow reached

towards it, stretched towards it, and touched it, like a finger of the

night.

Not a sign of Cavor, not a sound in all the stillness, only the stir

and waving of the scrub and of the shadows increased. And suddenly and

violently I shivered. “Cav—” I began, and realised once more the

uselessness of the human voice in that thin air. Silence. The silence

of death.

Then it was my eye caught something—a little thing lying, perhaps fifty

yards away down the slope, amidst a litter of bent and broken branches.

What was it? I knew, and yet for some reason I would not know. I went

nearer to it. It was the little cricket-cap Cavor had worn. I did not

touch it, I stood looking at it.

I saw then that the scattered branches about it had been forcibly

smashed and trampled. I hesitated, stepped forward, and picked it up.

I stood with Cavor’s cap in my hand, staring at the trampled reeds and

thorns about me. On some of them were little smears of something dark,

something that I dared not touch. A dozen yards away, perhaps, the

rising breeze dragged something into view, something small and vividly

white.

It was a little piece of paper crumpled tightly, as though it had been

clutched tightly. I picked it up, and on it were smears of red. My eye

caught faint pencil marks. I smoothed it out, and saw uneven and broken

writing ending at last in a crooked streak upon the paper.

I set myself to decipher this.

“I have been injured about the knee, I think my kneecap is hurt, and I

cannot run or crawl,” it began—pretty distinctly written.

Then less legibly: “They have been chasing me for some time, and it is

only a question of”—the word “time” seemed to have been written here

and erased in favour of something illegible—“before they get me. They

are beating all about me.”

Then the writing became convulsive. “I can hear them,” I guessed the

tracing meant, and then it was quite unreadable for a space. Then came

a little string of words that were quite distinct: “a different sort of

Selenite altogether, who appears to be directing the—” The writing

became a mere hasty confusion again.

“They have larger brain cases—much larger, and slenderer bodies, and

very short legs. They make gentle noises, and move with organized

deliberation...

“And though I am wounded and helpless here, their appearance still

gives me hope.” That was like Cavor. “They have not shot at me or

attempted... injury. I intend—”

Then came the sudden streak of the pencil across the paper, and on the

back and edges—blood!

And as I stood there stupid, and perplexed, with this dumbfounding

relic in my hand, something very soft and light and chill touched my

hand for a moment and ceased to be, and then a thing, a little white

speck, drifted athwart a shadow. It was a tiny snowflake, the first

snowflake, the herald of the night.

I looked up with a start, and the sky had darkened almost to blackness,

and was thick with a gathering multitude of coldly watchful stars. I

looked eastward, and the light of that shrivelled world was touched

with sombre bronze; westward, and the sun robbed now by a thickening

white mist of half its heat and splendour, was touching the crater rim,

was sinking out of sight, and all the shrubs and jagged and tumbled

rocks stood out against it in a bristling disorder of black shapes.

Into the great lake of darkness westward, a vast wreath of mist was

sinking. A cold wind set all the crater shivering. Suddenly, for a

moment, I was in a puff of falling snow, and all the world about me

grey and dim.

And then it was I heard, not loud and penetrating as at first, but

faint and dim like a dying voice, that tolling, that same tolling that

had welcomed the coming of the day: Boom!... Boom!... Boom!...

It echoed about the crater, it seemed to throb with the throbbing of

the greater stars, the blood-red crescent of the sun’s disc sank as it

tolled out: Boom!... Boom!... Boom!...

What had happened to Cavor? All through that tolling I stood there

stupidly, and at last the tolling ceased.

And suddenly the open mouth of the tunnel down below there, shut like

an eye and vanished out of sight.

Then indeed was I alone.

Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the

Eternal; that which was before the beginning, and that which triumphs

over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being

is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold,

the stillness, the silence—the infinite and final Night of space.

The sense of solitude and desolation became the sense of an

overwhelming presence that stooped towards me, that almost touched me.

“No,” I cried. “_No!_ Not yet! not yet! Wait! Wait! Oh, wait!” My voice

went up to a shriek. I flung the crumpled paper from me, scrambled back

to the crest to take my bearings, and then, with all the will that was

in me, leapt out towards the mark I had left, dim and distant now in

the very margin of the shadow.

Leap, leap, leap, and each leap was seven ages.

Before me the pale serpent-girdled section of the sun sank and sank,

and the advancing shadow swept to seize the sphere before I could reach

it. I was two miles away, a hundred leaps or more, and the air about me

was thinning out as it thins under an air-pump, and the cold was

gripping at my joints. But had I died, I should have died leaping.

Once, and then again my foot slipped on the gathering snow as I leapt

and shortened my leap; once I fell short into bushes that crashed and

smashed into dusty chips and nothingness, and once I stumbled as I

dropped and rolled head over heels into a gully, and rose bruised and

bleeding and confused as to my direction.

But such incidents were as nothing to the intervals, those awful pauses

when one drifted through the air towards that pouring tide of night. My

breathing made a piping noise, and it was as though knives were

whirling in my lungs. My heart seemed to beat against the top of my

brain. “Shall I reach it? O Heaven! Shall I reach it?”

My whole being became anguish.

“Lie down!” screamed my pain and despair; “lie down!”

The nearer I struggled, the more awfully remote it seemed. I was numb,

I stumbled, I bruised and cut myself and did not bleed.

It was in sight.

I fell on all fours, and my lungs whooped.

I crawled. The frost gathered on my lips, icicles hung from my

moustache, I was white with the freezing atmosphere.

I was a dozen yards from it. My eyes had become dim. “Lie down!”

screamed despair; “lie down!”

I touched it, and halted. “Too late!” screamed despair; “lie down!”

I fought stiffly with it. I was on the manhole lip, a stupefied,

half-dead being. The snow was all about me. I pulled myself in. There

lurked within a little warmer air.

The snowflakes—the airflakes—danced in about me, as I tried with

chilling hands to thrust the valve in and spun it tight and hard. I

sobbed. “I will,” I chattered in my teeth. And then, with fingers that

quivered and felt brittle, I turned to the shutter studs.

As I fumbled with the switches—for I had never controlled them before—I

could see dimly through the steaming glass the blazing red streamers of

the sinking sun, dancing and flickering through the snowstorm, and the

black forms of the scrub thickening and bending and breaking beneath

the accumulating snow. Thicker whirled the snow and thicker, black

against the light. What if even now the switches overcame me? Then

something clicked under my hands, and in an instant that last vision of

the moon world was hidden from my eyes. I was in the silence and

darkness of the inter-planetary sphere.

XX.

Mr. Bedford in Infinite Space

It was almost as though I had been killed. Indeed, I could imagine a

man suddenly and violently killed would feel very much as I did. One

moment, a passion of agonising existence and fear; the next, darkness

and stillness, neither light nor life nor sun, moon nor stars, the

blank infinite. Although the thing was done by my own act, although I

had already tasted this very of effect in Cavor’s company, I felt

astonished, dumbfounded, and overwhelmed. I seemed to be borne upward

into an enormous darkness. My fingers floated off the studs, I hung as

if I were annihilated, and at last very softly and gently I came

against the bale and the golden chain, and the crowbars that had

drifted to the middle of the sphere.

I do not know how long that drifting took. In the sphere of course,

even more than on the moon, one’s earthly time sense was ineffectual.

At the touch of the bale it was as if I had awakened from a dreamless

sleep. I immediately perceived that if I wanted to keep awake and alive

I must get a light or open a window, so as to get a grip of something

with my eyes. And besides, I was cold. I kicked off from the bale,

therefore, clawed on to the thin cords within the glass, crawled along

until I got to the manhole rim, and so got my bearings for the light

and blind studs, took a shove off, and flying once round the bale, and

getting a scare from something big and flimsy that was drifting loose,

I got my hand on the cord quite close to the studs, and reached them. I

lit the little lamp first of all to see what it was I had collided

with, and discovered that old copy of _Lloyd’s News_ had slipped its

moorings, and was adrift in the void. That brought me out of the

infinite to my own proper dimensions again. It made me laugh and pant

for a time, and suggested the idea of a little oxygen from one of the

cylinders. After that I lit the heater until I felt warm, and then I

took food. Then I set to work in a very gingerly fashion on the

Cavorite blinds, to see if I could guess by any means how the sphere

was travelling.

The first blind I opened I shut at once, and hung for a time flattened

and blinded by the sunlight that had hit me. After thinking a little I

started upon the windows at right angles to this one, and got the huge

crescent moon and the little crescent earth behind it, the second time.

I was amazed to find how far I was from the moon. I had reckoned that

not only should I have little or none of the “kick-off” that the

earth’s atmosphere had given us at our start, but that the tangential

“fly off” of the moon’s spin would be at least twenty-eight times less

than the earth’s. I had expected to discover myself hanging over our

crater, and on the edge of the night, but all that was now only a part

of the outline of the white crescent that filled the sky. And Cavor—?

He was already infinitesimal.

I tried to imagine what could have happened to him. But at that time I

could think of nothing but death. I seemed to see him, bent and smashed

at the foot of some interminably high cascade of blue. And all about

him the stupid insects stared...

Under the inspiring touch of the drifting newspaper I became practical

again for a while. It was quite clear to me that what I had to do was

to get back to earth, but as far as I could see I was drifting away

from it. Whatever had happened to Cavor, even if he was still alive,

which seemed to me incredible after that blood-stained scrap, I was

powerless to help him. There he was, living or dead behind the mantle

of that rayless night, and there he must remain at least until I could

summon our fellow men to his assistance. Should I do that? Something of

the sort I had in my mind; to come back to earth if it were possible,

and then as maturer consideration might determine, either to show and

explain the sphere to a few discreet persons, and act with them, or

else to keep my secret, sell my gold, obtain weapons, provisions, and

an assistant, and return with these advantages to deal on equal terms

with the flimsy people of the moon, to rescue Cavor, if that were still

possible, and at any rate to procure a sufficient supply of gold to

place my subsequent proceedings on a firmer basis. But that was hoping

far; I had first to get back.

I set myself to decide just exactly how the return to earth could be

contrived. As I struggled with that problem I ceased to worry about

what I should do when I got there. At last my only care was to get

back.

I puzzled out at last that my best chance would be to drop back towards

the moon as near as I dared in order to gather velocity, then to shut

my windows, and fly behind it, and when I was past to open my earthward

windows, and so get off at a good pace homeward. But whether I should

ever reach the earth by that device, or whether I might not simply find

myself spinning about it in some hyperbolic or parabolic curve or

other, I could not tell. Later I had a happy inspiration, and by

opening certain windows to the moon, which had appeared in the sky in

front of the earth, I turned my course aside so as to head off the

earth, which it had become evident to me I must pass behind without

some such expedient. I did a very great deal of complicated thinking

over these problems—for I am no mathematician—and in the end I am

certain it was much more my good luck than my reasoning that enabled me

to hit the earth. Had I known then, as I know now, the mathematical

chances there were against me, I doubt if I should have troubled even

to touch the studs to make any attempt. And having puzzled out what I

considered to be the thing to do, I opened all my moonward windows, and

squatted down—the effort lifted me for a time some feet or so into the

air, and I hung there in the oddest way—and waited for the crescent to

get bigger and bigger until I felt I was near enough for safety. Then I

would shut the windows, fly past the moon with the velocity I had got

from it—if I did not smash upon it—and so go on towards the earth.

And that is what I did.

At last I felt my moonward start was sufficient. I shut out the sight

of the moon from my eyes, and in a state of mind that was, I now

recall, incredibly free from anxiety or any distressful quality, I sat

down to begin a vigil in that little speck of matter in infinite space

that would last until I should strike the earth. The heater had made

the sphere tolerably warm, the air had been refreshed by the oxygen,

and except for that faint congestion of the head that was always with

me while I was away from earth, I felt entire physical comfort. I had

extinguished the light again, lest it should fail me in the end; I was

in darkness, save for the earthshine and the glitter of the stars below

me. Everything was so absolutely silent and still that I might indeed

have been the only being in the universe, and yet, strangely enough, I

had no more feeling of loneliness or fear than if I had been lying in

bed on earth. Now, this seems all the stranger to me, since during my

last hours in that crater of the moon, the sense of my utter loneliness

had been an agony....

Incredible as it will seem, this interval of time that I spent in space

has no sort of proportion to any other interval of time in my life.

Sometimes it seemed as though I sat through immeasurable eternities

like some god upon a lotus leaf, and again as though there was a

momentary pause as I leapt from moon to earth. In truth, it was

altogether some weeks of earthly time. But I had done with care and

anxiety, hunger or fear, for that space. I floated, thinking with a

strange breadth and freedom of all that we had undergone, and of all my

life and motives, and the secret issues of my being. I seemed to myself

to have grown greater and greater, to have lost all sense of movement;

to be floating amidst the stars, and always the sense of earth’s

littleness and the infinite littleness of my life upon it, was implicit

in my thoughts.

I can’t profess to explain the things that happened in my mind. No

doubt they could all be traced directly or indirectly to the curious

physical conditions under which I was living. I set them down here just

for what they are worth, and without any comment. The most prominent

quality of it was a pervading doubt of my own identity. I became, if I

may so express it, dissociate from Bedford; I looked down on Bedford as

a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be connected. I saw

Bedford in many relations—as an ass or as a poor beast, where I had

hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very

spirited or rather forcible person. I saw him not only as an ass, but

as the son of many generations of asses. I reviewed his school-days and

his early manhood, and his first encounter with love, very much as one

might review the proceedings of an ant in the sand. Something of that

period of lucidity I regret still hangs about me, and I doubt if I

shall ever recover the full-bodied self satisfaction of my early days.

But at the time the thing was not in the least painful, because I had

that extraordinary persuasion that, as a matter of fact, I was no more

Bedford than I was any one else, but only a mind floating in the still

serenity of space. Why should I be disturbed about this Bedford’s

shortcomings? I was not responsible for him or them.

For a time I struggled against this really very grotesque delusion. I

tried to summon the memory of vivid moments, of tender or intense

emotions to my assistance; I felt that if I could recall one genuine

twinge of feeling the growing severance would be stopped. But I could

not do it. I saw Bedford rushing down Chancery Lane, hat on the back of

his head, coat tails flying out, _en route_ for his public examination.

I saw him dodging and bumping against, and even saluting, other similar

little creatures in that swarming gutter of people. Me? I saw Bedford

that same evening in the sitting-room of a certain lady, and his hat

was on the table beside him, and it wanted brushing badly, and he was

in tears. Me? I saw him with that lady in various attitudes and

emotions—I never felt so detached before.... I saw him hurrying off to

Lympne to write a play, and accosting Cavor, and in his shirt sleeves

working at the sphere, and walking out to Canterbury because he was

afraid to come! Me? I did not believe it.

I still reasoned that all this was hallucination due to my solitude,

and the fact that I had lost all weight and sense of resistance. I

endeavoured to recover that sense by banging myself about the sphere,

by pinching my hands and clasping them together. Among other things, I

lit the light, captured that torn copy of _Lloyd’s_, and read those

convincingly realistic advertisements about the Cutaway bicycle, and

the gentleman of private means, and the lady in distress who was

selling those “forks and spoons.” There was no doubt they existed

surely enough, and, said I, “This is your world, and you are Bedford,

and you are going back to live among things like that for all the rest

of your life.” But the doubts within me could still argue: “It is not

you that is reading, it is Bedford, but you are not Bedford, you know.

That’s just where the mistake comes in.”

“Confound it!” I cried; “and if I am not Bedford, what am I?”

But in that direction no light was forthcoming, though the strangest

fancies came drifting into my brain, queer remote suspicions, like

shadows seen from away. Do you know, I had a sort of idea that really I

was something quite outside not only the world, but all worlds, and out

of space and time, and that this poor Bedford was just a peephole

through which I looked at life? ...

Bedford! However I disavowed him, there I was most certainly bound up

with him, and I knew that wherever or whatever I might be, I must needs

feel the stress of his desires, and sympathise with all his joys and

sorrows until his life should end. And with the dying of Bedford—what

then? ...

Enough of this remarkable phase of my experiences! I tell it here

simply to show how one’s isolation and departure from this planet

touched not only the functions and feeling of every organ of the body,

but indeed also the very fabric of the mind, with strange and

unanticipated disturbances. All through the major portion of that vast

space journey I hung thinking of such immaterial things as these, hung

dissociated and apathetic, a cloudy megalomaniac, as it were, amidst

the stars and planets in the void of space; and not only the world to

which I was returning, but the blue-lit caverns of the Selenites, their

helmet faces, their gigantic and wonderful machines, and the fate of

Cavor, dragged helpless into that world, seemed infinitely minute and

altogether trivial things to me.

Until at last I began to feel the pull of the earth upon my being,

drawing me back again to the life that is real for men. And then,

indeed, it grew clearer and clearer to me that I was quite certainly

Bedford after all, and returning after amazing adventures to this world

of ours, and with a life that I was very likely to lose in this return.

I set myself to puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to

earth.

XXI.

Mr. Bedford at Littlestone

My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came into

the upper air. The temperature of the sphere began to rise forthwith. I

knew it behoved me to drop at once. Far below me, in a darkling

twilight, stretched a great expanse of sea. I opened every window I

could, and fell—out of sunshine into evening, and out of evening into

night. Vaster grew the earth and vaster, swallowing up the stars, and

the silvery translucent starlit veil of cloud it wore spread out to

catch me. At last the world seemed no longer a sphere but flat, and

then concave. It was no longer a planet in the sky, but the world of

Man. I shut all but an inch or so of earthward window, and dropped with

a slackening velocity. The broadening water, now so near that I could

see the dark glitter of the waves, rushed up to meet me. The sphere

became very hot. I snapped the last strip of window, and sat scowling

and biting my knuckles, waiting for the impact....

The sphere hit the water with a huge splash: it must have sent it

fathoms high. At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open. Down I

went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere pressing

against my feet, and so drove up again as a bubble drives. And at the

last I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the sea, and my

journey in space was at an end.

The night was dark and overcast. Two yellow pinpoints far away showed

the passing of a ship, and nearer was a red glare that came and went.

Had not the electricity of my glow-lamp exhausted itself, I could have

got picked up that night. In spite of the inordinate fatigue I was

beginning to feel, I was excited now, and for a time hopeful, in a

feverish, impatient way, that so my travelling might end.

But at last I ceased to move about, and sat, wrists on knees, staring

at a distant red light. It swayed up and down, rocking, rocking. My

excitement passed. I realised I had yet to spend another night at least

in the sphere. I perceived myself infinitely heavy and fatigued. And so

I fell asleep.

A change in my rhythmic motion awakened me. I peered through the

refracting glass, and saw that I had come aground upon a huge shallow

of sand. Far away I seemed to see houses and trees, and seaward a

curved, vague distortion of a ship hung between sea and sky.

I stood up and staggered. My one desire was to emerge. The manhole was

upward, and I wrestled with the screw. Slowly I opened the manhole. At

last the air was singing in again as once it had sung out. But this

time I did not wait until the pressure was adjusted. In another moment

I had the weight of the window on my hands, and I was open, wide open,

to the old familiar sky of earth.

The air hit me on the chest so that I gasped. I dropped the glass

screw. I cried out, put my hands to my chest, and sat down. For a time

I was in pain. Then I took deep breaths. At last I could rise and move

about again.

I tried to thrust my head through the manhole, and the sphere rolled

over. It was as though something had lugged my head down directly it

emerged. I ducked back sharply, or I should have been pinned face under

water. After some wriggling and shoving I managed to crawl out upon

sand, over which the retreating waves still came and went.

I did not attempt to stand up. It seemed to me that my body must be

suddenly changed to lead. Mother Earth had her grip on me now—no

Cavorite intervening. I sat down heedless of the water that came over

my feet.

It was dawn, a grey dawn, rather overcast but showing here and there a

long patch of greenish grey. Some way out a ship was lying at anchor, a

pale silhouette of a ship with one yellow light. The water came

rippling in in long shallow waves. Away to the right curved the land, a

shingle bank with little hovels, and at last a lighthouse, a sailing

mark and a point. Inland stretched a space of level sand, broken here

and there by pools of water, and ending a mile away perhaps in a low

shore of scrub. To the north-east some isolated watering-place was

visible, a row of gaunt lodging-houses, the tallest things that I could

see on earth, dull dabs against the brightening sky. What strange men

can have reared these vertical piles in such an amplitude of space I do

not know. There they are, like pieces of Brighton lost in the waste.

For a long time I sat there, yawning and rubbing my face. At last I

struggled to rise. It made me feel that I was lifting a weight. I stood

up.

I stared at the distant houses. For the first time since our starvation

in the crater I thought of earthly food. “Bacon,” I whispered, “eggs.

Good toast and good coffee.... And how the devil am I going to get all

this stuff to Lympne?” I wondered where I was. It was an east shore

anyhow, and I had seen Europe before I dropped.

I heard footsteps crunching in the sand, and a little round-faced,

friendly-looking man in flannels, with a bathing towel wrapped about

his shoulders, and his bathing dress over his arm, appeared up the

beach. I knew instantly that I must be in England. He was staring most

intently at the sphere and me. He advanced staring. I dare say I looked

a ferocious savage enough—dirty, unkempt, to an indescribable degree;

but it did not occur to me at the time. He stopped at a distance of

twenty yards. “Hul-lo, my man!” he said doubtfully.

“Hullo yourself!” said I.

He advanced, reassured by that. “What on earth is that thing?” he

asked.

“Can you tell me where I am?” I asked.

“That’s Littlestone,” he said, pointing to the houses; “and that’s

Dungeness! Have you just landed? What’s that thing you’ve got? Some

sort of machine?”

“Yes.”

“Have you floated ashore? Have you been wrecked or something? What is

it?”

I meditated swiftly. I made an estimate of the little man’s appearance

as he drew nearer. “By Jove!” he said, “you’ve had a time of it! I

thought you— Well— Where were you cast away? Is that thing a sort of

floating thing for saving life?”

I decided to take that line for the present. I made a few vague

affirmatives. “I want help,” I said hoarsely. “I want to get some stuff

up the beach—stuff I can’t very well leave about.” I became aware of

three other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and straw

hats, coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathing

section of this Littlestone.

“Help!” said the young man: “rather!” He became vaguely active. “What

particularly do you want done?” He turned round and gesticulated. The

three young men accelerated their pace. In a minute they were about me,

plying me with questions I was indisposed to answer. “I’ll tell all

that later,” I said. “I’m dead beat. I’m a rag.”

“Come up to the hotel,” said the foremost little man. “We’ll look after

that thing there.”

I hesitated. “I can’t,” I said. “In that sphere there’s two big bars of

gold.”

They looked incredulously at one another, then at me with a new

inquiry. I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently they

had the Selenites’ crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had

not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them. It was like

kittens round a beetle. They didn’t know what to do with the stuff. The

fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars, and then

dropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.

“It’s lead, or gold!” said one.

“Oh, it’s _gold!_” said another.

“Gold, right enough,” said the third.

Then they all stared at me, and then they all stared at the ship lying

at anchor.

“I say!” cried the little man. “But where did you get that?”

I was too tired to keep up a lie. “I got it in the moon.”

I saw them stare at one another.

“Look here!” said I, “I’m not going to argue now. Help me carry these

lumps of gold up to the hotel—I guess, with rests, two of you can

manage one, and I’ll trail this chain thing—and I’ll tell you more when

I’ve had some food.”

“And how about that thing?”

“It won’t hurt there,” I said. “Anyhow—confound it!—it must stop there

now. If the tide comes up, it will float all right.”

And in a state of enormous wonderment, these young men most obediently

hoisted my treasures on their shoulders, and with limbs that felt like

lead I headed a sort of procession towards that distant fragment of

“sea-front.” Half-way there we were reinforced by two awe-stricken

little girls with spades, and later a lean little boy, with a

penetrating sniff, appeared. He was, I remember, wheeling a bicycle,

and he accompanied us at a distance of about a hundred yards on our

right flank, and then I suppose, gave us up as uninteresting, mounted

his bicycle and rode off over the level sands in the direction of the

sphere.

I glanced back after him.

“_He_ won’t touch it,” said the stout young man reassuringly, and I was

only too willing to be reassured.

At first something of the grey of the morning was in my mind, but

presently the sun disengaged itself from the level clouds of the

horizon and lit the world, and turned the leaden sea to glittering

waters. My spirits rose. A sense of the vast importance of the things I

had done and had yet to do came with the sunlight into my mind. I

laughed aloud as the foremost man staggered under my gold. When indeed

I took my place in the world, how amazed the world would be!

If it had not been for my inordinate fatigue, the landlord of the

Littlestone hotel would have been amusing, as he hesitated between my

gold and my respectable company on the one and my filthy appearance on

the other. But at last I found myself in a terrestrial bathroom once

more with warm water to wash myself with, and a change of raiment,

preposterously small indeed, but anyhow clean, that the genial little

man had lent me. He lent me a razor too, but I could not screw up my

resolution to attack even the outposts of the bristling beard that

covered my face.

I sat down to an English breakfast and ate with a sort of languid

appetite—an appetite many weeks old and very decrepit—and stirred

myself to answer the questions of the four young men. And I told them

the truth.

“Well,” said I, “as you press me—I got it in the moon.”

“The moon?”

“Yes, the moon in the sky.”

“But how do you mean?”

“What I say, confound it!”

“Then you have just come from the moon?”

“Exactly! through space—in that ball.” And I took a delicious mouthful

of egg. I made a private note that when I went back to the moon I would

take a box of eggs.

I could see clearly that they did not believe one word of what I told

them, but evidently they considered me the most respectable liar they

had ever met. They glanced at one another, and then concentrated the

fire of their eyes on me. I fancy they expected a clue to me in the way

I helped myself to salt. They seemed to find something significant in

my peppering my egg. These strangely shaped masses of gold they had

staggered under held their minds. There the lumps lay in front of me,

each worth thousands of pounds, and as impossible for any one to steal

as a house or a piece of land. As I looked at their curious faces over

my coffee-cup, I realised something of the enormous wilderness of

explanations into which I should have to wander to render myself

comprehensible again.

“You don’t _really_ mean—” began the youngest young man, in the tone of

one who speaks to an obstinate child.

“Just pass me that toast-rack,” I said, and shut him up completely.

“But look here, I say,” began one of the others. “We’re not going to

believe that, you know.”

“Ah, well,” said I, and shrugged my shoulders.

“He doesn’t want to tell us,” said the youngest young man in a stage

aside; and then, with an appearance of great _sang-froid_, “You don’t

mind if I take a cigarette?”

I waved him a cordial assent, and proceeded with my breakfast. Two of

the others went and looked out of the farther window and talked

inaudibly. I was struck by a thought. “The tide,” I said, “is running

out?”

There was a pause, a doubt who should answer me.

“It’s near the ebb,” said the fat little man.

“Well, anyhow,” I said, “it won’t float far.”

I decapitated my third egg, and began a little speech. “Look here,” I

said. “Please don’t imagine I’m surly or telling you uncivil lies, or

anything of that sort. I’m forced almost, to be a little short and

mysterious. I can quite understand this is as queer as it can be, and

that your imaginations must be going it. I can assure you, you’re in at

a memorable time. But I can’t make it clear to you now—it’s impossible.

I give you my word of honour I’ve come from the moon, and that’s all I

can tell you.... All the same, I’m tremendously obliged to you, you

know, tremendously. I hope that my manner hasn’t in any way given you

offence.”

“Oh, not in the least!” said the youngest young man affably. “We can

quite understand,” and staring hard at me all the time, he heeled his

chair back until it very nearly upset, and recovered with some

exertion. “Not a bit of it,” said the fat young man.

“Don’t you imagine _that!_” and they all got up and dispersed, and

walked about and lit cigarettes, and generally tried to show they were

perfectly amiable and disengaged, and entirely free from the slightest

curiosity about me and the sphere. “I’m going to keep an eye on that

ship out there all the same,” I heard one of them remarking in an

undertone. If only they could have forced themselves to it, they would,

I believe, even have gone out and left me. I went on with my third egg.

“The weather,” the fat little man remarked presently, “has been

immense, has it not? I don’t know _when_ we have had such a summer.”

Phoo-whizz! Like a tremendous rocket!

And somewhere a window was broken....

“What’s that?” said I.

“It isn’t—?” cried the little man, and rushed to the corner window.

All the others rushed to the window likewise. I sat staring at them.

Suddenly I leapt up, knocked over my third egg, rushed for the window

also. I had just thought of something. “Nothing to be seen there,”

cried the little man, rushing for the door.

“It’s that boy!” I cried, bawling in hoarse fury; “it’s that accursed

boy!” and turning about I pushed the waiter aside—he was just bringing

me some more toast—and rushed violently out of the room and down and

out upon the queer little esplanade in front of the hotel.

The sea, which had been smooth, was rough now with hurrying cat’s-paws,

and all about where the sphere had been was tumbled water like the wake

of a ship. Above, a little puff of cloud whirled like dispersing smoke,

and the three or four people on the beach were staring up with

interrogative faces towards the point of that unexpected report. And

that was all! Boots and waiter and the four young men in blazers came

rushing out behind me. Shouts came from windows and doors, and all

sorts of worrying people came into sight—agape.

For a time I stood there, too overwhelmed by this new development to

think of the people.

At first I was too stunned to see the thing as any definite disaster—I

was just stunned, as a man is by some accidental violent blow. It is

only afterwards he begins to appreciate his specific injury.

“Good Lord!”

I felt as though somebody was pouring funk out of a can down the back

of my neck. My legs became feeble. I had got the first intimation of

what the disaster meant for me. There was that confounded boy—sky high!

I was utterly left. There was the gold in the coffee-room—my only

possession on earth. How would it all work out? The general effect was

of a gigantic unmanageable confusion.

“I say,” said the voice of the little man behind. “I _say_, you know.”

I wheeled about, and there were twenty or thirty people, a sort of

irregular investment of people, all bombarding me with dumb

interrogation, with infinite doubt and suspicion. I felt the compulsion

of their eyes intolerably. I groaned aloud.

“I _can’t_,” I shouted. “I tell you I can’t! I’m not equal to it! You

must puzzle and—and be damned to you!”

I gesticulated convulsively. He receded a step as though I had

threatened him. I made a bolt through them into the hotel. I charged

back into the coffee-room, rang the bell furiously. I gripped the

waiter as he entered. “D’ye hear?” I shouted. “Get help and carry these

bars up to my room right away.”

He failed to understand me, and I shouted and raved at him. A

scared-looking little old man in a green apron appeared, and further

two of the young men in flannels. I made a dash at them and

commandeered their services. As soon as the gold was in my room I felt

free to quarrel. “Now get out,” I shouted; “all of you get out if you

don’t want to see a man go mad before your eyes!” And I helped the

waiter by the shoulder as he hesitated in the doorway. And then, as

soon as I had the door locked on them all, I tore off the little man’s

clothes again, shied them right and left, and got into bed forthwith.

And there I lay swearing and panting and cooling for a very long time.

At last I was calm enough to get out of bed and ring up the round-eyed

waiter for a flannel nightshirt, a soda and whisky, and some good

cigars. And these things being procured me, after an exasperating delay

that drove me several times to the bell, I locked the door again and

proceeded very deliberately to look the entire situation in the face.

The net result of the great experiment presented itself as an absolute

failure. It was a rout, and I was the sole survivor. It was an absolute

collapse, and this was the final disaster. There was nothing for it but

to save myself, and as much as I could in the way of prospects from our

_débâcle_. At one fatal crowning blow all my vague resolutions of

return and recovery had vanished. My intention of going back to the

moon, of getting a sphereful of gold, and afterwards of having a

fragment of Cavorite analysed and so recovering the great

secret—perhaps, finally, even of recovering Cavor’s body—all these

ideas vanished altogether.

I was the sole survivor, and that was all.

I think that going to bed was one of the luckiest ideas I have ever had

in an emergency. I really believe I should either have got loose-headed

or done some indiscreet thing. But there, locked in and secure from all

interruptions, I could think out the position in all its bearings and

make my arrangements at leisure.

Of course, it was quite clear to me what had happened to the boy. He

had crawled into the sphere, meddled with the studs, shut the Cavorite

windows, and gone up. It was highly improbable he had screwed the

manhole stopper, and, even if he had, the chances were a thousand to

one against his getting back. It was fairly evident that he would

gravitate with my bales to somewhere near the middle of the sphere and

remain there, and so cease to be a legitimate terrestrial interest,

however remarkable he might seem to the inhabitants of some remote

quarter of space. I very speedily convinced myself on that point. And

as for any responsibility I might have in the matter, the more I

reflected upon that, the clearer it became that if only I kept quiet

about things, I need not trouble myself about that. If I was faced by

sorrowing parents demanding their lost boy, I had merely to demand my

lost sphere—or ask them what they meant. At first I had had a vision of

weeping parents and guardians, and all sorts of complications; but now

I saw that I simply had to keep my mouth shut, and nothing in that way

could arise. And, indeed, the more I lay and smoked and thought, the

more evident became the wisdom of impenetrability.

It is within the right of every British citizen, provided he does not

commit damage nor indecorum, to appear suddenly wherever he pleases,

and as ragged and filthy as he pleases, and with whatever amount of

virgin gold he sees fit to encumber himself, and no one has any right

at all to hinder and detain him in this procedure. I formulated that at

last to myself, and repeated it over as a sort of private Magna Charta

of my liberty.

Once I had put that issue on one side, I could take up and consider in

an equable manner certain considerations I had scarcely dared to think

of before, namely, those arising out of the circumstances of my

bankruptcy. But now, looking at this matter calmly and at leisure, I

could see that if only I suppressed my identity by a temporary

assumption of some less well-known name, and if I retained the two

months’ beard that had grown upon me, the risks of any annoyance from

the spiteful creditor to whom I have already alluded became very small

indeed. From that to a definite course of rational worldly action was

plain sailing. It was all amazingly petty, no doubt, but what was there

remaining for me to do?

Whatever I did I was resolved that I would keep myself level and right

side up.

I ordered up writing materials, and addressed a letter to the New

Romney Bank—the nearest, the waiter informed me—telling the manager I

wished to open an account with him, and requesting him to send two

trustworthy persons properly authenticated in a cab with a good horse

to fetch some hundredweight of gold with which I happened to be

encumbered. I signed the letter “Blake,” which seemed to me to be a

thoroughly respectable sort of name. This done, I got a Folkstone Blue

Book, picked out an outfitter, and asked him to send a cutter to

measure me for a dark tweed suit, ordering at the same time a valise,

dressing bag, brown boots, shirts, hat (to fit), and so forth; and from

a watchmaker I also ordered a watch. And these letters being

despatched, I had up as good a lunch as the hotel could give, and then

lay smoking a cigar, as calm and ordinary as possible, until in

accordance with my instructions two duly authenticated clerks came from

the bank and weighed and took away my gold. After which I pulled the

clothes over my ears in order to drown any knocking, and went very

comfortably to sleep.

I went to sleep. No doubt it was a prosaic thing for the first man back

from the moon to do, and I can imagine that the young and imaginative

reader will find my behaviour disappointing. But I was horribly

fatigued and bothered, and, confound it! what else was there to do?

There certainly was not the remotest chance of my being believed, if I

had told my story then, and it would certainly have subjected me to

intolerable annoyances. I went to sleep. When at last I woke up again I

was ready to face the world as I have always been accustomed to face it

since I came to years of discretion. And so I got away to Italy, and

there it is I am writing this story. If the world will not have it as

fact, then the world may take it as fiction. It is no concern of mine.

And now that the account is finished, I am amazed to think how

completely this adventure is gone and done with. Everybody believes

that Cavor was a not very brilliant scientific experimenter who blew up

his house and himself at Lympne, and they explain the bang that

followed my arrival at Littlestone by a reference to the experiments

with explosives that are going on continually at the government

establishment of Lydd, two miles away. I must confess that hitherto I

have not acknowledged my share in the disappearance of Master Tommy

Simmons, which was that little boy’s name. That, perhaps, may prove a

difficult item of corroboration to explain away. They account for my

appearance in rags with two bars of indisputable gold upon the

Littlestone beach in various ingenious ways—it doesn’t worry me what

they think of me. They say I have strung all these things together to

avoid being questioned too closely as to the source of my wealth. I

would like to see the man who could invent a story that would hold

together like this one. Well, they must take it as fiction—there it is.

I have told my story—and now, I suppose, I have to take up the worries

of this terrestrial life again. Even if one has been to the moon, one

has still to earn a living. So I am working here at Amalfi, on the

scenario of that play I sketched before Cavor came walking into my

world, and I am trying to piece my life together as it was before ever

I saw him. I must confess that I find it hard to keep my mind on the

play when the moonshine comes into my room. It is full moon here, and

last night I was out on the pergola for hours, staring away at the

shining blankness that hides so much. Imagine it! tables and chairs,

and trestles and bars of gold! Confound it!—if only one could hit on

that Cavorite again! But a thing like that doesn’t come twice in a

life. Here I am, a little better off than I was at Lympne, and that is

all. And Cavor has committed suicide in a more elaborate way than any

human being ever did before. So the story closes as finally and

completely as a dream. It fits in so little with all the other things

of life, so much of it is so utterly remote from all human experience,

the leaping, the eating, the breathing, and these weightless times,

that indeed there are moments when, in spite of my moon gold, I do more

than half believe myself that the whole thing was a dream....

XXII.

The Astonishing Communication of Mr. Julius Wendigee

When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at

Littlestone, I wrote, “The End,” made a flourish, and threw my pen

aside, fully believing that the whole story of the First Men in the

Moon was done. Not only had I done this, but I had placed my manuscript

in the hands of a literary agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen

the greater portion of it appear in the _Strand Magazine_, and was

setting to work again upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at

Lympne before I realised that the end was not yet. And then, following

me from Amalfi to Algiers, there reached me (it is now about six months

ago) one of the most astounding communications I have ever been fated

to receive. Briefly, it informed me that Mr. Julius Wendigee, a Dutch

electrician, who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to

the apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering

some method of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a

curiously fragmentary message in English, which was indisputably

emanating from Mr. Cavor in the moon.

At first I thought the thing was an elaborate practical joke by some

one who had seen the manuscript of my narrative. I answered Mr.

Wendigee jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicion

altogether aside, and in a state of inconceivable excitement I hurried

from Algiers to the little observatory upon the Monte Rosa in which he

was working. In the presence of his record and his appliances—and above

all of the messages from Cavor that were coming to hand—my lingering

doubts vanished. I decided at once to accept a proposal he made to me

to remain with him, assisting him to take down the record from day to

day, and endeavouring with him to send a message back to the moon.

Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive, but free, in the midst of an

almost inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men,

in the blue darkness of the lunar caves. He was lamed, it seemed, but

otherwise in quite good health—in better health, he distinctly said,

than he usually enjoyed on earth. He had had a fever, but it had left

no bad effects. But curiously enough he seemed to be labouring under a

conviction that I was either dead in the moon crater or lost in the

deep of space.

His message began to be received by Mr. Wendigee when that gentleman

was engaged in quite a different investigation. The reader will no

doubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arising out

of an announcement by Mr. Nikola Tesla, the American electrical

celebrity, that he had received a message from Mars. His announcement

renewed attention to a fact that had long been familiar to scientific

people, namely: that from some unknown source in space, waves of

electromagnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor

Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth.

Besides Tesla quite a number of other observers have been engaged in

perfecting apparatus for receiving and recording these vibrations,

though few would go so far as to consider them actual messages from

some extraterrestrial sender. Among that few, however, we must

certainly count Mr. Wendigee. Ever since 1898 he had devoted himself

almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample means he had

erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a position

singularly adapted in every way for such observations.

My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as

they enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee’s contrivances for detecting and

recording any disturbances in the electromagnetic conditions of space

are singularly original and ingenious. And by a happy combination of

circumstances they were set up and in operation about two months before

Cavor made his first attempt to call up the earth. Consequently we have

fragments of his communication even from the beginning. Unhappily, they

are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things that he

had to tell humanity—the instructions, that is, for the making of

Cavorite, if, indeed, he ever transmitted them—have throbbed themselves

away unrecorded into space. We never succeeded in getting a response

back to Cavor. He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had received

or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that any one

on earth was really aware of his efforts to reach us. And the

persistence he displayed in sending eighteen long descriptions of lunar

affairs—as they would be if we had them complete—shows how much his

mind must have turned back towards his native planet since he left it

two years ago.

You can imagine how amazed Mr. Wendigee must have been when he

discovered his record of electromagnetic disturbances interlaced by

Cavor’s straightforward English. Mr. Wendigee knew nothing of our wild

journey moonward, and suddenly—this English out of the void!

It is well the reader should understand the conditions under which it

would seem these messages were sent. Somewhere within the moon Cavor

certainly had access for a time to a considerable amount of electrical

apparatus, and it would seem he rigged up—perhaps furtively—a

transmitting arrangement of the Marconi type. This he was able to

operate at irregular intervals: sometimes for only half an hour or so,

sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch. At these times he

transmitted his earthward message, regardless of the fact that the

relative position of the moon and points upon the earth’s surface is

constantly altering. As a consequence of this and of the necessary

imperfections of our recording instruments his communication comes and

goes in our records in an extremely fitful manner; it becomes blurred;

it “fades out” in a mysterious and altogether exasperating way. And

added to this is the fact that he was not an expert operator; he had

partly forgotten, or never completely mastered, the code in general

use, and as he became fatigued he dropped words and misspelt in a

curious manner.

Altogether we have probably lost quite half of the communications he

made, and much we have is damaged, broken, and partly effaced. In the

abstract that follows the reader must be prepared therefore for a

considerable amount of break, hiatus, and change of topic. Mr. Wendigee

and I are collaborating in a complete and annotated edition of the

Cavor record, which we hope to publish, together with a detailed

account of the instruments employed, beginning with the first volume in

January next. That will be the full and scientific report, of which

this is only the popular transcript. But here we give at least

sufficient to complete the story I have told, and to give the broad

outlines of the state of that other world so near, so akin, and yet so

dissimilar to our own.

XXIII.

An Abstract of the Six Messages First Received from Mr. Cavor

The two earlier messages of Mr. Cavor may very well be reserved for

that larger volume. They simply tell, with greater brevity and with a

difference in several details that is interesting, but not of any vital

importance, the bare facts of the making of the sphere and our

departure from the world. Throughout, Cavor speaks of me as a man who

is dead, but with a curious change of temper as he approaches our

landing on the moon. “Poor Bedford,” he says of me, and “this poor

young man,” and he blames himself for inducing a young man, “by no

means well equipped for such adventures,” to leave a planet “on which

he was indisputably fitted to succeed” on so precarious a mission. I

think he underrates the part my energy and practical capacity played in

bringing about the realisation of his theoretical sphere. “We arrived,”

he says, with no more account of our passage through space than if we

had made a journey of common occurrence in a railway train.

And then he becomes increasingly unfair to me. Unfair, indeed, to an

extent I should not have expected in a man trained in the search for

truth. Looking back over my previously written account of these things,

I must insist that I have been altogether juster to Cavor than he has

been to me. I have extenuated little and suppressed nothing. But his

account is:—

“It speedily became apparent that the entire strangeness of our

circumstances and surroundings—great loss of weight, attenuated but

highly oxygenated air, consequent exaggeration of the results of

muscular effort, rapid development of weird plants from obscure spores,

lurid sky—was exciting my companion unduly. On the moon his character

seemed to deteriorate. He became impulsive, rash, and quarrelsome. In a

little while his folly in devouring some gigantic vesicles and his

consequent intoxication led to our capture by the Selenites—before we

had had the slightest opportunity of properly observing their ways....”

(He says, you observe, nothing of his own concession to these same

“vesicles.”)

And he goes on from that point to say that “We came to a difficult

passage with them, and Bedford mistaking certain gestures of

theirs”—pretty gestures they were!—“gave way to a panic violence. He

ran amuck, killed three, and perforce I had to flee with him after the

outrage. Subsequently we fought with a number who endeavoured to bar

our way, and slew seven or eight more. It says much for the tolerance

of these beings that on my recapture I was not instantly slain. We made

our way to the exterior and separated in the crater of our arrival, to

increase our chances of recovering our sphere. But presently I came

upon a body of Selenites, led by two who were curiously different, even

in form, from any of these we had seen hitherto, with larger heads and

smaller bodies, and much more elaborately wrapped about. And after

evading them for some time I fell into a crevasse, cut my head rather

badly, and displaced my patella, and, finding crawling very painful,

decided to surrender—if they would still permit me to do so. This they

did, and, perceiving my helpless condition, carried me with them again

into the moon. And of Bedford I have heard or seen nothing more, nor,

so far as I can gather, has any Selenite. Either the night overtook him

in the crater, or else, which is more probable, he found the sphere,

and, desiring to steal a march upon me, made off with it—only, I fear,

to find it uncontrollable, and to meet a more lingering fate in outer

space.”

And with that Cavor dismisses me and goes on to more interesting

topics. I dislike the idea of seeming to use my position as his editor

to deflect his story in my own interest, but I am obliged to protest

here against the turn he gives these occurrences. He said nothing about

that gasping message on the blood-stained paper in which he told, or

attempted to tell, a very different story. The dignified self-surrender

is an altogether new view of the affair that has come to him, I must

insist, since he began to feel secure among the lunar people; and as

for the “stealing a march” conception, I am quite willing to let the

reader decide between us on what he has before him. I know I am not a

model man—I have made no pretence to be. But am I _that?_

However, that is the sum of my wrongs. From this point I can edit Cavor

with an untroubled mind, for he mentions me no more.

It would seem the Selenites who had come upon him carried him to some

point in the interior down “a great shaft” by means of what he

describes as “a sort of balloon.” We gather from the rather confused

passage in which he describes this, and from a number of chance

allusions and hints in other and subsequent messages, that this “great

shaft” is one of an enormous system of artificial shafts that run, each

from what is called a lunar “crater,” downwards for very nearly a

hundred miles towards the central portion of our satellite. These

shafts communicate by transverse tunnels, they throw out abysmal

caverns and expand into great globular places; the whole of the moon’s

substance for a hundred miles inward, indeed, is a mere sponge of rock.

“Partly,” says Cavor, “this sponginess is natural, but very largely it

is due to the enormous industry of the Selenites in the past. The

enormous circular mounds of the excavated rock and earth it is that

form these great circles about the tunnels known to earthly astronomers

(misled by a false analogy) as volcanoes.”

It was down this shaft they took him, in this “sort of balloon” he

speaks of, at first into an inky blackness and then into a region of

continually increasing phosphorescence. Cavor’s despatches show him to

be curiously regardless of detail for a scientific man, but we gather

that this light was due to the streams and cascades of water—“no doubt

containing some phosphorescent organism”—that flowed ever more

abundantly downward towards the Central Sea. And as he descended, he

says, “The Selenites also became luminous.” And at last far below him

he saw, as it were, a lake of heatless fire, the waters of the Central

Sea, glowing and eddying in strange perturbation, “like luminous blue

milk that is just on the boil.”

“This Lunar Sea,” says Cavor, in a later passage, “is not a stagnant

ocean; a solar tide sends it in a perpetual flow around the lunar axis,

and strange storms and boilings and rushings of its waters occur, and

at times cold winds and thunderings that ascend out of it into the busy

ways of the great ant-hill above. It is only when the water is in

motion that it gives out light; in its rare seasons of calm it is

black. Commonly, when one sees it, its waters rise and fall in an oily

swell, and flakes and big rafts of shining, bubbly foam drift with the

sluggish, faintly glowing current. The Selenites navigate its cavernous

straits and lagoons in little shallow boats of a canoe-like shape; and

even before my journey to the galleries about the Grand Lunar, who is

Master of the Moon, I was permitted to make a brief excursion on its

waters.

“The caverns and passages are naturally very tortuous. A large

proportion of these ways are known only to expert pilots among the

fishermen, and not infrequently Selenites are lost for ever in their

labyrinths. In their remoter recesses, I am told, strange creatures

lurk, some of them terrible and dangerous creatures that all the

science of the moon has been unable to exterminate. There is

particularly the Rapha, an inextricable mass of clutching tentacles

that one hacks to pieces only to multiply; and the Tzee, a darting

creature that is never seen, so subtly and suddenly does it slay...”

He gives us a gleam of description.

“I was reminded on this excursion of what I have read of the Mammoth

Caves; if only I had had a yellow flambeau instead of the pervading

blue light, and a solid-looking boatman with an oar instead of a

scuttle-faced Selenite working an engine at the back of the canoe, I

could have imagined I had suddenly got back to earth. The rocks about

us were very various, sometimes black, sometimes pale blue and veined,

and once they flashed and glittered as though we had come into a mine

of sapphires. And below one saw the ghostly phosphorescent fishes flash

and vanish in the hardly less phosphorescent deep. Then, presently, a

long ultra-marine vista down the turgid stream of one of the channels

of traffic, and a landing stage, and then, perhaps, a glimpse up the

enormous crowded shaft of one of the vertical ways.

“In one great place heavy with glistening stalactites a number of boats

were fishing. We went alongside one of these and watched the long-armed

Selenites winding in a net. They were little, hunchbacked insects, with

very strong arms, short, bandy legs, and crinkled face-masks. As they

pulled at it that net seemed the heaviest thing I had come upon in the

moon; it was loaded with weights—no doubt of gold—and it took a long

time to draw, for in those waters the larger and more edible fish lurk

deep. The fish in the net came up like a blue moonrise—a blaze of

darting, tossing blue.

“Among their catch was a many-tentaculate, evil-eyed black thing,

ferociously active, whose appearance they greeted with shrieks and

twitters, and which with quick, nervous movements they hacked to pieces

by means of little hatchets. All its dissevered limbs continued to lash

and writhe in a vicious manner. Afterwards, when fever had hold of me,

I dreamt again and again of that bitter, furious creature rising so

vigorous and active out of the unknown sea. It was the most active and

malignant thing of all the living creatures I have yet seen in this

world inside the moon....

“The surface of this sea must be very nearly two hundred miles (if not

more) below the level of the moon’s exterior; all the cities of the

moon lie, I learnt, immediately above this Central Sea, in such

cavernous spaces and artificial galleries as I have described, and they

communicate with the exterior by enormous vertical shafts which open

invariably in what are called by earthly astronomers the ‘craters’ of

the moon. The lid covering one such aperture I had already seen during

the wanderings that had preceded my capture.

“Upon the condition of the less central portion of the moon I have not

yet arrived at very precise knowledge. There is an enormous system of

caverns in which the mooncalves shelter during the night; and there are

abattoirs and the like—in one of these it was that I and Bedford fought

with the Selenite butchers—and I have since seen balloons laden with

meat descending out of the upper dark. I have as yet scarcely learnt as

much of these things as a Zulu in London would learn about the British

corn supplies in the same time. It is clear, however, that these

vertical shafts and the vegetation of the surface must play an

essential role in ventilating and keeping fresh the atmosphere of the

moon. At one time, and particularly on my first emergence from my

prison, there was certainly a cold wind blowing _down_ the shaft, and

later there was a kind of sirocco upward that corresponded with my

fever. For at the end of about three weeks I fell ill of an indefinable

sort of fever, and in spite of sleep and the quinine tabloids that very

fortunately I had brought in my pocket, I remained ill and fretting

miserably, almost to the time when I was taken into the presence of the

Grand Lunar, who is Master of the Moon.

“I will not dilate on the wretchedness of my condition,” he remarks,

“during those days of ill-health.” And he goes on with great amplitude

with details I omit here. “My temperature,” he concludes, “kept

abnormally high for a long time, and I lost all desire for food. I had

stagnant waking intervals, and sleep tormented by dreams, and at one

phase I was, I remember, so weak as to be earth-sick and almost

hysterical. I longed almost intolerably for colour to break the

everlasting blue...”

He reverts again presently to the topic of this sponge-caught lunar

atmosphere. I am told by astronomers and physicists that all he tells

is in absolute accordance with what was already known of the moon’s

condition. Had earthly astronomers had the courage and imagination to

push home a bold induction, says Mr. Wendigee, they might have foretold

almost everything that Cavor has to say of the general structure of the

moon. They know now pretty certainly that moon and earth are not so

much satellite and primary as smaller and greater sisters, made out of

one mass, and consequently made of the same material. And since the

density of the moon is only three-fifths that of the earth, there can

be nothing for it but that she is hollowed out by a great system of

caverns. There was no necessity, said Sir Jabez Flap, F.R.S., that most

entertaining exponent of the facetious side of the stars, that we

should ever have gone to the moon to find out such easy inferences, and

points the pun with an allusion to Gruyère, but he certainly might have

announced his knowledge of the hollowness of the moon before. And if

the moon is hollow, then the apparent absence of air and water is, of

course, quite easily explained. The sea lies within at the bottom of

the caverns, and the air travels through the great sponge of galleries,

in accordance with simple physical laws. The caverns of the moon, on

the whole, are very windy places. As the sunlight comes round the moon

the air in the outer galleries on that side is heated, its pressure

increases, some flows out on the exterior and mingles with the

evaporating air of the craters (where the plants remove its carbonic

acid), while the greater portion flows round through the galleries to

replace the shrinking air of the cooling side that the sunlight has

left. There is, therefore, a constant eastward breeze in the air of the

outer galleries, and an upflow during the lunar day up the shafts,

complicated, of course, very greatly by the varying shape of the

galleries, and the ingenious contrivances of the Selenite mind....

XXIV.

The Natural History of the Selenites

The messages of Cavor from the sixth up to the sixteenth are for the

most part so much broken, and they abound so in repetitions, that they

scarcely form a consecutive narrative. They will be given in full, of

course, in the scientific report, but here it will be far more

convenient to continue simply to abstract and quote as in the former

chapter. We have subjected every word to a keen critical scrutiny, and

my own brief memories and impressions of lunar things have been of

inestimable help in interpreting what would otherwise have been

impenetrably dark. And, naturally, as living beings, our interest

centres far more upon the strange community of lunar insects in which

he was living, it would seem, as an honoured guest than upon the mere

physical condition of their world.

I have already made it clear, I think, that the Selenites I saw

resembled man in maintaining the erect attitude, and in having four

limbs, and I have compared the general appearance of their heads and

the jointing of their limbs to that of insects. I have mentioned, too,

the peculiar consequence of the smaller gravitation of the moon on

their fragile slightness. Cavor confirms me upon all these points. He

calls them “animals,” though of course they fall under no division of

the classification of earthly creatures, and he points out “the insect

type of anatomy had, fortunately for men, never exceeded a relatively

very small size on earth.” The largest terrestrial insects, living or

extinct, do not, as a matter of fact, measure six inches in length;

“but here, against the lesser gravitation of the moon, a creature

certainly as much an insect as vertebrate seems to have been able to

attain to human and ultra-human dimensions.”

He does not mention the ant, but throughout his allusions the ant is

continually being brought before my mind, in its sleepless activity, in

its intelligence and social organisation, in its structure, and more

particularly in the fact that it displays, in addition to the two

forms, the male and the female form, that almost all other animals

possess, a number of other sexless creatures, workers, soldiers, and

the like, differing from one another in structure, character, power,

and use, and yet all members of the same species. For these Selenites,

also, have a great variety of forms. Of course, they are not only

colossally greater in size than ants, but also, in Cavor’s opinion at

least, in intelligence, morality, and social wisdom are they colossally

greater than men. And instead of the four or five different forms of

ant that are found, there are almost innumerably different forms of

Selenite. I had endeavoured to indicate the very considerable

difference observable in such Selenites of the outer crust as I

happened to encounter; the differences in size and proportions were

certainly as wide as the differences between the most widely separated

races of men. But such differences as I saw fade absolutely to nothing

in comparison with the huge distinctions of which Cavor tells. It would

seem the exterior Selenites I saw were, indeed, mostly engaged in

kindred occupations—mooncalf herds, butchers, fleshers, and the like.

But within the moon, practically unsuspected by me, there are, it

seems, a number of other sorts of Selenite, differing in size,

differing in the relative size of part to part, differing in power and

appearance, and yet not different species of creatures, but only

different forms of one species, and retaining through all their

variations a certain common likeness that marks their specific unity.

The moon is, indeed, a sort of vast ant-hill, only, instead of there

being only four or five sorts of ant, there are many hundred different

sorts of Selenite, and almost every gradation between one sort and

another.

It would seem the discovery came upon Cavor very speedily. I infer

rather than learn from his narrative that he was captured by the

mooncalf herds under the direction of these other Selenites who “have

larger brain cases (heads?) and very much shorter legs.” Finding he

would not walk even under the goad, they carried him into darkness,

crossed a narrow, plank-like bridge that may have been the identical

bridge I had refused, and put him down in something that must have

seemed at first to be some sort of lift. This was the balloon—it had

certainly been absolutely invisible to us in the darkness—and what had

seemed to me a mere plank-walking into the void was really, no doubt,

the passage of the gangway. In this he descended towards constantly

more luminous caverns of the moon. At first they descended in

silence—save for the twitterings of the Selenites—and then into a stir

of windy movement. In a little while the profound blackness had made

his eyes so sensitive that he began to see more and more of the things

about him, and at last the vague took shape.

“Conceive an enormous cylindrical space,” says Cavor, in his seventh

message, “a quarter of a mile across, perhaps; very dimly lit at first

and then brighter, with big platforms twisting down its sides in a

spiral that vanishes at last below in a blue profundity; and lit even

more brightly—one could not tell how or why. Think of the well of the

very largest spiral staircase or lift-shaft that you have ever looked

down, and magnify that by a hundred. Imagine it at twilight seen

through blue glass. Imagine yourself looking down that; only imagine

also that you feel extraordinarily light, and have got rid of any giddy

feeling you might have on earth, and you will have the first conditions

of my impression. Round this enormous shaft imagine a broad gallery

running in a much steeper spiral than would be credible on earth, and

forming a steep road protected from the gulf only by a little parapet

that vanishes at last in perspective a couple of miles below.

“Looking up, I saw the very fellow of the downward vision; it had, of

course, the effect of looking into a very steep cone. A wind was

blowing down the shaft, and far above I fancy I heard, growing fainter

and fainter, the bellowing of the mooncalves that were being driven

down again from their evening pasturage on the exterior. And up and

down the spiral galleries were scattered numerous moon people, pallid,

faintly luminous beings, regarding our appearance or busied on unknown

errands.

“Either I fancied it or a flake of snow came drifting down on the icy

breeze. And then, falling like a snowflake, a little figure, a little

man-insect, clinging to a parachute, drove down very swiftly towards

the central places of the moon.

“The big-headed Selenite sitting beside me, seeing me move my head with

the gesture of one who saw, pointed with his trunk-like ‘hand’ and

indicated a sort of jetty coming into sight very far below: a little

landing-stage, as it were, hanging into the void. As it swept up

towards us our pace diminished very rapidly, and in a few moments, as

it seemed, we were abreast of it, and at rest. A mooring-rope was flung

and grasped, and I found myself pulled down to a level with a great

crowd of Selenites, who jostled to see me.

“It was an incredible crowd. Suddenly and violently there was forced

upon my attention the vast amount of difference there is amongst these

beings of the moon.

“Indeed, there seemed not two alike in all that jostling multitude.

They differed in shape, they differed in size, they rang all the

horrible changes on the theme of Selenite form! Some bulged and

overhung, some ran about among the feet of their fellows. All of them

had a grotesque and disquieting suggestion of an insect that has

somehow contrived to mock humanity; but all seemed to present an

incredible exaggeration of some particular feature: one had a vast

right fore-limb, an enormous antennal arm, as it were; one seemed all

leg, poised, as it were, on stilts; another protruded the edge of his

face mask into a nose-like organ that made him startlingly human until

one saw his expressionless gaping mouth. The strange and (except for

the want of mandibles and palps) most insect-like head of the

mooncalf-minders underwent, indeed, the most incredible

transformations: here it was broad and low, here high and narrow; here

its leathery brow was drawn out into horns and strange features; here

it was whiskered and divided, and there with a grotesquely human

profile. One distortion was particularly conspicuous. There were

several brain cases distended like bladders to a huge size, with the

face mask reduced to quite small proportions. There were several

amazing forms, with heads reduced to microscopic proportions and blobby

bodies; and fantastic, flimsy things that existed, it would seem, only

as a basis for vast, trumpet-like protrusions of the lower part of the

mask. And oddest of all, as it seemed to me for the moment, two or

three of these weird inhabitants of a subterranean world, a world

sheltered by innumerable miles of rock from sun or rain, _carried

umbrellas_ in their tentaculate hands—real terrestrial looking

umbrellas! And then I thought of the parachutist I had watched descend.

“These moon people behaved exactly as a human crowd might have done in

similar circumstances: they jostled and thrust one another, they shoved

one another aside, they even clambered upon one another to get a

glimpse of me. Every moment they increased in numbers, and pressed more

urgently upon the discs of my ushers”—Cavor does not explain what he

means by this—“every moment fresh shapes emerged from the shadows and

forced themselves upon my astounded attention. And presently I was

signed and helped into a sort of litter, and lifted up on the shoulders

of strong-armed bearers, and so borne through the twilight over this

seething multitude towards the apartments that were provided for me in

the moon. All about me were eyes, faces, masks, a leathery noise like

the rustling of beetle wings, and a great bleating and cricket-like

twittering of Selenite voices.”

We gather he was taken to a “hexagonal apartment,” and there for a

space he was confined. Afterwards he was given a much more considerable

liberty; indeed, almost as much freedom as one has in a civilised town

on earth. And it would appear that the mysterious being who is the

ruler and master of the moon appointed two Selenites “with large heads”

to guard and study him, and to establish whatever mental communications

were possible with him. And, amazing and incredible as it may seem,

these two creatures, these fantastic men insects, these beings of other

world, were presently communicating with Cavor by means of terrestrial

speech.

Cavor speaks of them as Phi-oo and Tsi-puff. Phi-oo, he says, was about

5 feet high; he had small slender legs about 18 inches long, and slight

feet of the common lunar pattern. On these balanced a little body,

throbbing with the pulsations of his heart. He had long, soft,

many-jointed arms ending in a tentacled grip, and his neck was

many-jointed in the usual way, but exceptionally short and thick. His

head, says Cavor—apparently alluding to some previous description that

has gone astray in space—“is of the common lunar type, but strangely

modified. The mouth has the usual expressionless gape, but it is

unusually small and pointing downward, and the mask is reduced to the

size of a large flat nose-flap. On either side are the little eyes.

“The rest of the head is distended into a huge globe and the chitinous

leathery cuticle of the mooncalf herds thins out to a mere membrane,

through which the pulsating brain movements are distinctly visible. He

is a creature, indeed, with a tremendously hypertrophied brain, and

with the rest of his organism both relatively and absolutely dwarfed.”

In another passage Cavor compares the back view of him to Atlas

supporting the world. Tsi-puff it seems was a very similar insect, but

his “face” was drawn out to a considerable length, and the brain

hypertrophy being in different regions, his head was not round but

pear-shaped, with the stalk downward. There were also litter-carriers,

lopsided beings, with enormous shoulders, very spidery ushers, and a

squat foot attendant in Cavor’s retinue.

The manner in which Phi-oo and Tsi-puff attacked the problem of speech

was fairly obvious. They came into this “hexagonal cell” in which Cavor

was confined, and began imitating every sound he made, beginning with a

cough. He seems to have grasped their intention with great quickness,

and to have begun repeating words to them and pointing to indicate the

application. The procedure was probably always the same. Phi-oo would

attend to Cavor for a space, then point also and say the word he had

heard.

The first word he mastered was “man,” and the second “Mooney”—which

Cavor on the spur of the moment seems to have used instead of

“Selenite” for the moon race. As soon as Phi-oo was assured of the

meaning of a word he repeated it to Tsi-puff, who remembered it

infallibly. They mastered over one hundred English nouns at their first

session.

Subsequently it seems they brought an artist with them to assist the

work of explanation with sketches and diagrams—Cavor’s drawings being

rather crude. “He was,” says Cavor, “a being with an active arm and an

arresting eye,” and he seemed to draw with incredible swiftness.

The eleventh message is undoubtedly only a fragment of a longer

communication. After some broken sentences, the record of which is

unintelligible, it goes on:—

“But it will interest only linguists, and delay me too long, to give

the details of the series of intent parleys of which these were the

beginning, and, indeed, I very much doubt if I could give in anything

like the proper order all the twistings and turnings that we made in

our pursuit of mutual comprehension. Verbs were soon plain sailing—at

least, such active verbs as I could express by drawings; some

adjectives were easy, but when it came to abstract nouns, to

prepositions, and the sort of hackneyed figures of speech, by means of

which so much is expressed on earth, it was like diving in

cork-jackets. Indeed, these difficulties were insurmountable until to

the sixth lesson came a fourth assistant, a being with a huge

football-shaped head, whose _forte_ was clearly the pursuit of

intricate analogy. He entered in a preoccupied manner, stumbling

against a stool, and the difficulties that arose had to be presented to

him with a certain amount of clamour and hitting and pricking before

they reached his apprehension. But once he was involved his penetration

was amazing. Whenever there came a need of thinking beyond Phi-oo’s by

no means limited scope, this prolate-headed person was in request, but

he invariably told the conclusion to Tsi-puff, in order that it might

be remembered; Tsi-puff was ever the arsenal for facts. And so we

advanced again.

“It seemed long and yet brief—a matter of days—before I was positively

talking with these insects of the moon. Of course, at first it was an

intercourse infinitely tedious and exasperating, but imperceptibly it

has grown to comprehension. And my patience has grown to meet its

limitations, Phi-oo it is who does all the talking. He does it with a

vast amount of meditative provisional ‘M’m—M’m’ and has caught up one

or two phrases, If I may say,’ ‘If you understand,’ and beads all his

speech with them.

“Thus he would discourse. Imagine him explaining his artist.

“‘M’m—M’m—he—if I may say—draw. Eat little—drink little—draw. Love

draw. No other thing. Hate all who not draw like him. Angry. Hate all

who draw like him better. Hate most people. Hate all who not think all

world for to draw. Angry. M’m. All things mean nothing to him—only

draw. He like you ... if you understand.... New thing to draw.

Ugly—striking. Eh?

“‘He’—turning to Tsi-puff—‘love remember words. Remember wonderful more

than any. Think no, draw no—remember. Say’—here he referred to his

gifted assistant for a word—‘histories—all things. He hear once—say

ever.’

“It is more wonderful to me than I dreamt that anything ever could be

again, to hear, in this perpetual obscurity, these extraordinary

creatures—for even familiarity fails to weaken the inhuman effect of

their appearance—continually piping a nearer approach to coherent

earthly speech—asking questions, giving answers. I feel that I am

casting back to the fable-hearing period of childhood again, when the

ant and the grasshopper talked together and the bee judged between

them...”

And while these linguistic exercises were going on Cavor seems to have

experienced a considerable relaxation of his confinement. “The first

dread and distrust our unfortunate conflict aroused is being,” he said,

“continually effaced by the deliberate rationality of all I do.... I am

now able to come and go as I please, or I am restricted only for my own

good. So it is I have been able to get at this apparatus, and, assisted

by a happy find among the material that is littered in this enormous

store-cave, I have contrived to despatch these messages. So far not the

slightest attempt has been made to interfere with me in this, though I

have made it quite clear to Phi-oo that I am signalling to the earth.

“‘You talk to other?’ he asked, watching me.

“‘Others,’ said I.

“‘Others,’ he said. ‘Oh yes, Men?’

“And I went on transmitting.”

Cavor was continually making corrections in his previous accounts of

the Selenites as fresh facts flowed upon him to modify his conclusions,

and accordingly one gives the quotations that follow with a certain

amount of reservation. They are quoted from the ninth, thirteenth, and

sixteenth messages, and, altogether vague and fragmentary as they are,

they probably give as complete a picture of the social life of this

strange community as mankind can now hope to have for many generations.

“In the moon,” says Cavor, “every citizen knows his place. He is born

to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education

and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he

has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. ‘Why should

he?’ Phi-oo would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be a

mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that end.

They check any incipient disposition to other pursuits, they encourage

his mathematical bias with a perfect psychological skill. His brain

grows, or at least the mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and

the rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain this essential

part of him. At last, save for rest and food, his one delight lies in

the exercise and display of his faculty, his one interest in its

application, his sole society with other specialists in his own line.

His brain grows continually larger, at least so far as the portions

engaging in mathematics are concerned; they bulge ever larger and seem

to suck all life and vigour from the rest of his frame. His limbs

shrivel, his heart and digestive organs diminish, his insect face is

hidden under its bulging contours. His voice becomes a mere

stridulation for the stating of formulæ; he seems deaf to all but

properly enunciated problems. The faculty of laughter, save for the

sudden discovery of some paradox, is lost to him; his deepest emotion

is the evolution of a novel computation. And so he attains his end.

“Or, again, a Selenite appointed to be a minder of mooncalves is from

his earliest years induced to think and live mooncalf, to find his

pleasure in mooncalf lore, his exercise in their tending and pursuit.

He is trained to become wiry and active, his eye is indurated to the

tight wrappings, the angular contours that constitute a ‘smart

mooncalfishness.’ He takes at last no interest in the deeper part of

the moon; he regards all Selenites not equally versed in mooncalves

with indifference, derision, or hostility. His thoughts are of mooncalf

pastures, and his dialect an accomplished mooncalf technique. So also

he loves his work, and discharges in perfect happiness the duty that

justifies his being. And so it is with all sorts and conditions of

Selenites—each is a perfect unit in a world machine....

“These beings with big heads, on whom the intellectual labours fall,

form a sort of aristocracy in this strange society, and at the head of

them, quintessential of the moon, is that marvellous gigantic ganglion

the Grand Lunar, into whose presence I am finally to come. The

unlimited development of the minds of the intellectual class is

rendered possible by the absence of any bony skull in the lunar

anatomy, that strange box of bone that clamps about the developing

brain of man, imperiously insisting ‘thus far and no farther’ to all

his possibilities. They fall into three main classes differing greatly

in influence and respect. There are administrators, of whom Phi-oo is

one, Selenites of considerable initiative and versatility, responsible

each for a certain cubic content of the moon’s bulk; the experts like

the football-headed thinker, who are trained to perform certain special

operations; and the erudite, who are the repositories of all knowledge.

To the latter class belongs Tsi-puff, the first lunar professor of

terrestrial languages. With regard to these latter, it is a curious

little thing to note that the unlimited growth of the lunar brain has

rendered unnecessary the invention of all those mechanical aids to

brain work which have distinguished the career of man. There are no

books, no records of any sort, no libraries or inscriptions. All

knowledge is stored in distended brains much as the honey-ants of Texas

store honey in their distended abdomens. The lunar Somerset House and

the lunar British Museum Library are collections of living brains...

“The less specialised administrators, I note, do for the most part take

a very lively interest in me whenever they encounter me. They will come

out of the way and stare at me and ask questions to which Phi-oo will

reply. I see them going hither and thither with a retinue of bearers,

attendants, shouters, parachute-carriers, and so forth—queer groups to

see. The experts for the most part ignore me completely, even as they

ignore each other, or notice me only to begin a clamorous exhibition of

their distinctive skill. The erudite for the most part are rapt in an

impervious and apoplectic complacency, from which only a denial of

their erudition can rouse them. Usually they are led about by little

watchers and attendants, and often there are small and active-looking

creatures, small females usually, that I am inclined to think are a

sort of wife to them; but some of the profounder scholars are

altogether too great for locomotion, and are carried from place to

place in a sort of sedan tub, wabbling jellies of knowledge that enlist

my respectful astonishment. I have just passed one in coming to this

place where I am permitted to amuse myself with these electrical toys,

a vast, shaven, shaky head, bald and thin-skinned, carried on his

grotesque stretcher. In front and behind came his bearers, and curious,

almost trumpet-faced, news disseminators shrieked his fame.

“I have already mentioned the retinues that accompany most of the

intellectuals: ushers, bearers, valets, extraneous tentacles and

muscles, as it were, to replace the abortive physical powers of these

hypertrophied minds. Porters almost invariably accompany them. There

are also extremely swift messengers with spider-like legs and ‘hands’

for grasping parachutes, and attendants with vocal organs that could

well nigh wake the dead. Apart from their controlling intelligence

these subordinates are as inert and helpless as umbrellas in a stand.

They exist only in relation to the orders they have to obey, the duties

they have to perform.

“The bulk of these insects, however, who go to and fro upon the spiral

ways, who fill the ascending balloons and drop past me clinging to

flimsy parachutes are, I gather, of the operative class. ‘Machine

hands,’ indeed, some of these are in actual nature—it is no figure of

speech, the single tentacle of the mooncalf herd is profoundly modified

for clawing, lifting, guiding, the rest of them no more than necessary

subordinate appendages to these important parts. Some, who I suppose

deal with bell-striking mechanisms, have enormously developed auditory

organs; some whose work lies in delicate chemical operations project a

vast olfactory organ; others again have flat feet for treadles with

anchylosed joints; and others—who I have been told are

glassblowers—seem mere lung-bellows. But every one of these common

Selenites I have seen at work is exquisitely adapted to the social need

it meets. Fine work is done by fined-down workers, amazingly dwarfed

and neat. Some I could hold on the palm of my hand. There is even a

sort of turnspit Selenite, very common, whose duty and only delight it

is to apply the motive power for various small appliances. And to rule

over these things and order any erring tendency there might be in some

aberrant natures are the most muscular beings I have seen in the moon,

a sort of lunar police, who must have been trained from their earliest

years to give a perfect respect and obedience to the swollen heads.

“The making of these various sorts of operative must be a very curious

and interesting process. I am very much in the dark about it, but quite

recently I came upon a number of young Selenites confined in jars from

which only the fore-limbs protruded, who were being compressed to

become machine-minders of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this

highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by

irritants and nourished by injection, while the rest of the body is

starved. Phi-oo, unless I misunderstood him, explained that in the

earlier stages these queer little creatures are apt to display signs of

suffering in their various cramped situations, but they easily become

indurated to their lot; and he took me on to where a number of

flexible-minded messengers were being drawn out and broken in. It is

quite unreasonable, I know, but such glimpses of the educational

methods of these beings affect me disagreeably. I hope, however, that

may pass off, and I may be able to see more of this aspect of their

wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand-tentacle sticking

out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost

possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course it is really in

the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving

children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.

“Quite recently, too—I think it was on the eleventh or twelfth visit I

made to this apparatus—I had a curious light upon the lives of these

operatives. I was being guided through a short cut hither, instead of

going down the spiral, and by the quays to the Central Sea. From the

devious windings of a long, dark gallery, we emerged into a vast, low

cavern, pervaded by an earthy smell, and as things go in this darkness,

rather brightly lit. The light came from a tumultuous growth of livid

fungoid shapes—some indeed singularly like our terrestrial mushrooms,

but standing as high or higher than a man.

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

“‘Yes, food.’

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

“My eye had just caught the figure of an exceptionally big and ungainly

Selenite lying motionless among the stems, face downward. We stopped.

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

have grown curious.)

“‘_No!_’ exclaimed Phi-oo. ‘Him—worker—no work to do. Get little drink

then—make sleep—till we him want. What good him wake, eh? No want him

walking about.’

“‘There’s another!’ cried I.

“And indeed all that huge extent of mushroom ground was, I found,

peppered with these prostrate figures sleeping under an opiate until

the moon had need of them. There were scores of them of all sorts, and

we were able to turn over some of them, and examine them more precisely

than I had been able to do previously. They breathed noisily at my

doing so, but did not wake. One, I remember very distinctly: he left a

strong impression, I think, because some trick of the light and of his

attitude was strongly suggestive of a drawn-up human figure. His

fore-limbs were long, delicate tentacles—he was some kind of refined

manipulator—and the pose of his slumber suggested a submissive

suffering. No doubt it was a mistake for me to interpret his expression

in that way, but I did. And as Phi-oo rolled him over into the darkness

among the livid fleshiness again I felt a distinctly unpleasant

sensation, although as he rolled the insect in him was confessed.

“It simply illustrates the unthinking way in which one acquires habits

of feeling. To drug the worker one does not want and toss him aside is

surely far better than to expel him from his factory to wander starving

in the streets. In every complicated social community there is

necessarily a certain intermittency of employment for all specialised

labour, and in this way the trouble of an ‘unemployed’ problem is

altogether anticipated. And yet, so unreasonable are even

scientifically trained minds, I still do not like the memory of those

prostrate forms amidst those quiet, luminous arcades of fleshy growth,

and I avoid that short cut in spite of the inconveniences of the

longer, more noisy, and more crowded alternative.

“My alternative route takes me round by a huge, shadowy cavern, very

crowded and clamorous, and here it is I see peering out of the

hexagonal openings of a sort of honeycomb wall, or parading a large

open space behind, or selecting the toys and amulets made to please

them by the dainty-tentacled jewellers who work in kennels below, the

mothers of the moon world—the queen bees, as it were, of the hive. They

are noble-looking beings, fantastically and sometimes quite beautifully

adorned, with a proud carriage, and, save for their mouths, almost

microscopic heads.

“Of the condition of the moon sexes, marrying and giving in marriage,

and of birth and so forth among the Selenites, I have as yet been able

to learn very little. With the steady progress of Phi-oo in English,

however, my ignorance will no doubt as steadily disappear. I am of

opinion that, as with the ants and bees, there is a large majority of

the members in this community of the neuter sex. Of course on earth in

our cities there are now many who never live that life of parentage

which is the natural life of man. Here, as with the ants, this thing

has become a normal condition of the race, and the whole of such

replacement as is necessary falls upon this special and by no means

numerous class of matrons, the mothers of the moon-world, large and

stately beings beautifully fitted to bear the larval Selenite. Unless I

misunderstand an explanation of Phi-oo’s, they are absolutely incapable

of cherishing the young they bring into the moon; periods of foolish

indulgence alternate with moods of aggressive violence, and as soon as

possible the little creatures, who are quite soft and flabby and pale

coloured, are transferred to the charge of celibate females, women

‘workers’ as it were, who in some cases possess brains of almost

masculine dimensions.”

Just at this point, unhappily, this message broke off. Fragmentary and

tantalising as the matter constituting this chapter is, it does

nevertheless give a vague, broad impression of an altogether strange

and wonderful world—a world with which our own may have to reckon we

know not how speedily. This intermittent trickle of messages, this

whispering of a record needle in the stillness of the mountain slopes,

is the first warning of such a change in human conditions as mankind

has scarcely imagined heretofore. In that satellite of ours there are

new elements, new appliances, traditions, an overwhelming avalanche of

new ideas, a strange race with whom we must inevitably struggle for

mastery—gold as common as iron or wood...

XXV.

The Grand Lunar

The penultimate message describes, with occasionally elaborate detail,

the encounter between Cavor and the Grand Lunar, who is the ruler or

master of the moon. Cavor seems to have sent most of it without

interference, but to have been interrupted in the concluding portion.

The second came after an interval of a week.

The first message begins: “At last I am able to resume this—” it then

becomes illegible for a space, and after a time resumed in

mid-sentence.

The missing words of the following sentence are probably “the crowd.”

There follows quite clearly: “grew ever denser as we drew near the

palace of the Grand Lunar—if I may call a series of excavations a

palace. Everywhere faces stared at me—blank, chitinous gapes and masks,

eyes peering over tremendous olfactory developments, eyes beneath

monstrous forehead plates; and undergrowth of smaller creatures dodged

and yelped, and helmet faces poised on sinuous, long-jointed necks

appeared craning over shoulders and beneath armpits. Keeping a welcome

space about me marched a cordon of stolid, scuttle-headed guards, who

had joined us on our leaving the boat in which we had come along the

channels of the Central Sea. The quick-eyed artist with the little

brain joined us also, and a thick bunch of lean porter-insects swayed

and struggled under the multitude of conveniences that were considered

essential to my state. I was carried in a litter during the final stage

of our journey. This litter was made of some very ductile metal that

looked dark to me, meshed and woven, and with bars of paler metal, and

about me as I advanced there grouped itself a long and complicated

procession.

“In front, after the manner of heralds, marched four trumpet-faced

creatures making a devastating bray; and then came squat,

resolute-moving ushers before and behind, and on either hand a galaxy

of learned heads, a sort of animated encyclopedia, who were, Phi-oo

explained, to stand about the Grand Lunar for purposes of reference.

(Not a thing in lunar science, not a point of view or method of

thinking, that these wonderful beings did not carry in their heads!)

Followed guards and porters, and then Phi-oo’s shivering brain borne

also on a litter. Then came Tsi-puff in a slightly less important

litter; then myself on a litter of greater elegance than any other, and

surrounded by my food and drink attendants. More trumpeters came next,

splitting the ear with vehement outcries, and then several big brains,

special correspondents one might well call them, or historiographers,

charged with the task of observing and remembering every detail of this

epoch-making interview. A company of attendants, bearing and dragging

banners and masses of scented fungus and curious symbols, vanished in

the darkness behind. The way was lined by ushers and officers in

caparisons that gleamed like steel, and beyond their line, so far as my

eyes could pierce the gloom, the heads of that enormous crowd extended.

“I will own that I am still by no means indurated to the peculiar

effect of the Selenite appearance, and to find myself, as it were,

adrift on this broad sea of excited entomology was by no means

agreeable. Just for a space I had something very like what I should

imagine people mean when they speak of the ‘horrors.’ It had come to me

before in these lunar caverns, when on occasion I have found myself

weaponless and with an undefended back, amidst a crowd of these

Selenites, but never quite so vividly. It is, of course, as absolutely

irrational a feeling as one could well have, and I hope gradually to

subdue it. But just for a moment, as I swept forward into the welter of

the vast crowd, it was only by gripping my litter tightly and summoning

all my will-power that I succeeded in avoiding an outcry or some such

manifestation. It lasted perhaps three minutes; then I had myself in

hand again.

“We ascended the spiral of a vertical way for some time, and then

passed through a series of huge halls dome-roofed and elaborately

decorated. The approach to the Grand Lunar was certainly contrived to

give one a vivid impression of his greatness. Each cavern one entered

seemed greater and more boldly arched than its predecessor. This effect

of progressive size was enhanced by a thin haze of faintly

phosphorescent blue incense that thickened as one advanced, and robbed

even the nearer figures of clearness. I seemed to advance continually

to something larger, dimmer, and less material.

“I must confess that all this multitude made me feel extremely shabby

and unworthy. I was unshaven and unkempt; I had brought no razor; I had

a coarse beard over my mouth. On earth I have always been inclined to

despise any attention to my person beyond a proper care for

cleanliness; but under the exceptional circumstances in which I found

myself, representing, as I did, my planet and my kind, and depending

very largely upon the attractiveness of my appearance for a proper

reception, I could have given much for something a little more artistic

and dignified than the husks I wore. I had been so serene in the belief

that the moon was uninhabited as to overlook such precautions

altogether. As it was I was dressed in a flannel jacket,

knickerbockers, and golfing stockings, stained with every sort of dirt

the moon offered, slippers (of which the left heel was wanting), and a

blanket, through a hole in which I thrust my head. (These clothes,

indeed, I still wear.) Sharp bristles are anything but an improvement

to my cast of features, and there was an unmended tear at the knee of

my knickerbockers that showed conspicuously as I squatted in my litter;

my right stocking, too, persisted in getting about my ankle. I am fully

alive to the injustice my appearance did humanity, and if by any

expedient I could have improvised something a little out of the way and

imposing I would have done so. But I could hit upon nothing. I did what

I could with my blanket—folding it somewhat after the fashion of a

toga, and for the rest I sat as upright as the swaying of my litter

permitted.

“Imagine the largest hall you have ever been in, imperfectly lit with

blue light and obscured by a grey-blue fog, surging with metallic or

livid-grey creatures of such a mad diversity as I have hinted. Imagine

this hall to end in an open archway beyond which is a still larger

hall, and beyond this yet another and still larger one, and so on. At

the end of the vista, dimly seen, a flight of steps, like the steps of

Ara Coeli at Rome, ascend out of sight. Higher and higher these steps

appear to go as one draws nearer their base. But at last I came under a

huge archway and beheld the summit of these steps, and upon it the

Grand Lunar exalted on his throne.

“He was seated in what was relatively a blaze of incandescent blue.

This, and the darkness about him gave him an effect of floating in a

blue-black void. He seemed a small, self-luminous cloud at first,

brooding on his sombre throne; his brain case must have measured many

yards in diameter. For some reason that I cannot fathom a number of

blue search-lights radiated from behind the throne on which he sat, and

immediately encircling him was a halo. About him, and little and

indistinct in this glow, a number of body-servants sustained and

supported him, and overshadowed and standing in a huge semicircle

beneath him were his intellectual subordinates, his remembrancers and

computators and searchers and servants, and all the distinguished

insects of the court of the moon. Still lower stood ushers and

messengers, and then all down the countless steps of the throne were

guards, and at the base, enormous, various, indistinct, vanishing at

last into an absolute black, a vast swaying multitude of the minor

dignitaries of the moon. Their feet made a perpetual scraping whisper

on the rocky floor, as their limbs moved with a rustling murmur.

“As I entered the penultimate hall the music rose and expanded into an

imperial magnificence of sound, and the shrieks of the news-bearers

died away....

“I entered the last and greatest hall....

“My procession opened out like a fan. My ushers and guards went right

and left, and the three litters bearing myself and Phi-oo and Tsi-puff

marched across a shiny darkness of floor to the foot of the giant

stairs. Then began a vast throbbing hum, that mingled with the music.

The two Selenites dismounted, but I was bidden remain seated—I imagine

as a special honour. The music ceased, but not that humming, and by a

simultaneous movement of ten thousand respectful heads my attention was

directed to the enhaloed supreme intelligence that hovered above me.

“At first as I peered into the radiating glow this quintessential brain

looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with dim,

undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within. Then beneath

its enormity and just above the edge of the throne one saw with a start

minute elfin eyes peering out of the glow. No face, but eyes, as if

they peered through holes. At first I could see no more than these two

staring little eyes, and then below I distinguished the little dwarfed

body and its insect-jointed limbs shrivelled and white. The eyes stared

down at me with a strange intensity, and the lower part of the swollen

globe was wrinkled. Ineffectual-looking little hand-tentacles steadied

this shape on the throne....

“It was great. It was pitiful. One forgot the hall and the crowd.

“I ascended the staircase by jerks. It seemed to me that this darkly

glowing brain case above us spread over me, and took more and more of

the whole effect into itself as I drew nearer. The tiers of attendants

and helpers grouped about their master seemed to dwindle and fade into

the night. I saw that shadowy attendants were busy spraying that great

brain with a cooling spray, and patting and sustaining it. For my own

part, I sat gripping my swaying litter and staring at the Grand Lunar,

unable to turn my gaze aside. And at last, as I reached a little

landing that was separated only by ten steps or so from the supreme

seat, the woven splendour of the music reached a climax and ceased, and

I was left naked, as it were, in that vastness, beneath the still

scrutiny of the Grand Lunar’s eyes.

“He was scrutinising the first man he had ever seen....

“My eyes dropped at last from his greatness to the ant figures in the

blue mist about him, and then down the steps to the massed Selenites,

still and expectant in their thousands, packed on the floor below. Once

again an unreasonable horror reached out towards me.... And passed.

“After the pause came the salutation. I was assisted from my litter,

and stood awkwardly while a number of curious and no doubt deeply

symbolical gestures were vicariously performed for me by two slender

officials. The encyclopaedic galaxy of the learned that had accompanied

me to the entrance of the last hall appeared two steps above me and

left and right of me, in readiness for the Grand Lunar’s need, and

Phi-oo’s pale brain placed itself about half-way up to the throne in

such a position as to communicate easily between us without turning his

back on either the Grand Lunar or myself. Tsi-puff took up a position

behind him. Dexterous ushers sidled sideways towards me, keeping a full

face to the Presence. I seated myself Turkish fashion, and Phi-oo and

Tsi-puff also knelt down above me. There came a pause. The eyes of the

nearer court went from me to the Grand Lunar and came back to me, and a

hissing and piping of expectation passed across the hidden multitudes

below and ceased.

“That humming ceased.

“For the first and last time in my experience the moon was silent.

“I became aware of a faint wheezy noise. The Grand Lunar was addressing

me. It was like the rubbing of a finger upon a pane of glass.

“I watched him attentively for a time, and then glanced at the alert

Phi-oo. I felt amidst these slender beings ridiculously thick and

fleshy and solid; my head all jaw and black hair. My eyes went back to

the Grand Lunar. He had ceased; his attendants were busy, and his

shining superficies was glistening and running with cooling spray.

“Phi-oo meditated through an interval. He consulted Tsi-puff. Then he

began piping his recognisable English—at first a little nervously, so

that he was not very clear.

“‘M’m—the Grand Lunar—wished to say—wishes to say—he gathers you

are—m’m—men—that you are a man from the planet earth. He wishes to say

that he welcomes you—welcomes you—and wishes to learn—learn, if I may

use the word—the state of your world, and the reason why you came to

this.’

“He paused. I was about to reply when he resumed. He proceeded to

remarks of which the drift was not very clear, though I am inclined to

think they were intended to be complimentary. He told me that the earth

was to the moon what the sun is to the earth, and that the Selenites

desired very greatly to learn about the earth and men. He then told me

no doubt in compliment also, the relative magnitude and diameter of

earth and moon, and the perpetual wonder and speculation with which the

Selenites had regarded our planet. I meditated with downcast eyes, and

decided to reply that men too had wondered what might lie in the moon,

and had judged it dead, little recking of such magnificence as I had

seen that day. The Grand Lunar, in token of recognition, caused his

long blue rays to rotate in a very confusing manner, and all about the

great hall ran the pipings and whisperings and rustlings of the report

of what I had said. He then proceeded to put to Phi-oo a number of

inquiries which were easier to answer.

“He understood, he explained, that we lived on the surface of the

earth, that our air and sea were outside the globe; the latter part,

indeed, he already knew from his astronomical specialists. He was very

anxious to have more detailed information of what he called this

extraordinary state of affairs, for from the solidity of the earth

there had always been a disposition to regard it as uninhabitable. He

endeavoured first to ascertain the extremes of temperature to which we

earth beings were exposed, and he was deeply interested by my

descriptive treatment of clouds and rain. His imagination was assisted

by the fact that the lunar atmosphere in the outer galleries of the

night side is not infrequently very foggy. He seemed inclined to marvel

that we did not find the sunlight too intense for our eyes, and was

interested in my attempt to explain that the sky was tempered to a

bluish colour through the refraction of the air, though I doubt if he

clearly understood that. I explained how the iris of the human eyes can

contract the pupil and save the delicate internal structure from the

excess of sunlight, and was allowed to approach within a few feet of

the Presence in order that this structure might be seen. This led to a

comparison of the lunar and terrestrial eyes. The former is not only

excessively sensitive to such light as men can see, but it can also

_see_ heat, and every difference in temperature within the moon renders

objects visible to it.

“The iris was quite a new organ to the Grand Lunar. For a time he

amused himself by flashing his rays into my face and watching my pupils

contract. As a consequence, I was dazzled and blinded for some little

time....

“But in spite of that discomfort I found something reassuring by

insensible degrees in the rationality of this business of question and

answer. I could shut my eyes, think of my answer, and almost forget

that the the Grand Lunar has no face....

“When I had descended again to my proper place the Grand Lunar asked

how we sheltered ourselves from heat and storms, and I expounded to him

the arts of building and furnishing. Here we wandered into

misunderstandings and cross-purposes, due largely, I must admit, to the

looseness of my expressions. For a long time I had great difficulty in

making him understand the nature of a house. To him and his attendant

Selenites it seemed, no doubt, the most whimsical thing in the world

that men should build houses when they might descend into excavations,

and an additional complication was introduced by the attempt I made to

explain that men had originally begun their homes in caves, and that

they were now taking their railways and many establishments beneath the

surface. Here I think a desire for intellectual completeness betrayed

me. There was also a considerable tangle due to an equally unwise

attempt on my part to explain about mines. Dismissing this topic at

last in an incomplete state, the Grand Lunar inquired what we did with

the interior of our globe.

“A tide of twittering and piping swept into the remotest corners of

that great assembly when it was at last made clear that we men know

absolutely nothing of the contents of the world upon which the

immemorial generations of our ancestors had been evolved. Three times

had I to repeat that of all the 4000 miles of distance between the

earth and its centre men knew only to the depth of a mile, and that

very vaguely. I understood the Grand Lunar to ask why had I come to the

moon seeing we had scarcely touched our own planet yet, but he did not

trouble me at that time to proceed to an explanation, being too anxious

to pursue the details of this mad inversion of all his ideas.

“He reverted to the question of weather, and I tried to describe the

perpetually changing sky, and snow, and frost and hurricanes. ‘But when

the night comes,’ he asked, ‘is it not cold?’

“I told him it was colder than by day.

“‘And does not your atmosphere freeze?’

“I told him not; that it was never cold enough for that, because our

nights were so short.

“‘Not even liquefy?’

“I was about to say ‘No,’ but then it occurred to me that one part at

least of our atmosphere, the water vapour of it, does sometimes liquefy

and form dew, and sometimes freeze and form frost—a process perfectly

analogous to the freezing of all the external atmosphere of the moon

during its longer night. I made myself clear on this point, and from

that the Grand Lunar went on to speak with me of sleep. For the need of

sleep that comes so regularly every twenty-four hours to all things is

part also of our earthly inheritance. On the moon they rest only at

rare intervals, and after exceptional exertions. Then I tried to

describe to him the soft splendours of a summer night, and from that I

passed to a description of those animals that prowl by night and sleep

by day. I told him of lions and tigers, and here it seemed as though we

had come to a deadlock. For, save in their waters, there are no

creatures in the moon not absolutely domestic and subject to his will,

and so it has been for immemorial years. They have monstrous water

creatures, but no evil beasts, and the idea of anything strong and

large existing ‘outside’ in the night is very difficult for them....”

[The record is here too broken to transcribe for the space of perhaps

twenty words or more.]

“He talked with his attendants, as I suppose, upon the strange

superficiality and unreasonableness of (man) who lives on the mere

surface of a world, a creature of waves and winds, and all the chances

of space, who cannot even unite to overcome the beasts that prey upon

his kind, and yet who dares to invade another planet. During this aside

I sat thinking, and then at his desire I told him of the different

sorts of men. He searched me with questions. ‘And for all sorts of work

you have the same sort of men. But who thinks? Who governs?’

“I gave him an outline of the democratic method.

“When I had done he ordered cooling sprays upon his brow, and then

requested me to repeat my explanation conceiving something had

miscarried.

“‘Do they not do different things, then?’ said Phi-oo.

“Some, I admitted, were thinkers and some officials; some hunted, some

were mechanics, some artists, some toilers. ‘But _all_ rule,’ I said.

“‘And have they not different shapes to fit them to their different

duties?’

“‘None that you can see,’ I said, ‘except perhaps, for clothes. Their

minds perhaps differ a little,’ I reflected.

“‘Their minds must differ a great deal,’ said the Grand Lunar, ‘or they

would all want to do the same things.’

“In order to bring myself into a closer harmony with his

preconceptions, I said that his surmise was right. ‘It was all hidden

in the brain,’ I said; but the difference was there. Perhaps if one

could see the minds and souls of men they would be as varied and

unequal as the Selenites. There were great men and small men, men who

could reach out far and wide, men who could go swiftly; noisy,

trumpet-minded men, and men who could remember without thinking....’”

[The record is indistinct for three words.]

“He interrupted me to recall me to my previous statements. ‘But you

said all men rule?’ he pressed.

“‘To a certain extent,’ I said, and made, I fear, a denser fog with my

explanation.

“He reached out to a salient fact. ‘Do you mean,’ asked, ‘that there is

no Grand Earthly?’

“I thought of several people, but assured him finally there was none. I

explained that such autocrats and emperors as we had tried upon earth

had usually ended in drink, or vice, or violence, and that the large

and influential section of the people of the earth to which I belonged,

the Anglo-Saxons, did not mean to try that sort of thing again. At

which the Grand Lunar was even more amazed.

“‘But how do you keep even such wisdom as you have?’ he asked; and I

explained to him the way we helped our limited [A word omitted here,

probably “brains.”] with libraries of books. I explained to him how our

science was growing by the united labours of innumerable little men,

and on that he made no comment save that it was evident we had mastered

much in spite of our social savagery, or we could not have come to the

moon. Yet the contrast was very marked. With knowledge the Selenites

grew and changed; mankind stored their knowledge about them and

remained brutes—equipped. He said this...” [Here there is a short piece

of the record indistinct.]

“He then caused me to describe how we went about this earth of ours,

and I described to him our railways and ships. For a time he could not

understand that we had had the use of steam only one hundred years, but

when he did he was clearly amazed. (I may mention as a singular thing,

that the Selenites use years to count by, just as we do on earth,

though I can make nothing of their numeral system. That, however, does

not matter, because Phi-oo understands ours.) From that I went on to

tell him that mankind had dwelt in cities only for nine or ten thousand

years, and that we were still not united in one brotherhood, but under

many different forms of government. This astonished the Grand Lunar

very much, when it was made clear to him. At first he thought we

referred merely to administrative areas.

“‘Our States and Empires are still the rawest sketches of what order

will some day be,’ I said, and so I came to tell him....” [At this

point a length of record that probably represents thirty or forty words

is totally illegible.]

“The Grand Lunar was greatly impressed by the folly of men in clinging

to the inconvenience of diverse tongues. ‘They want to communicate, and

yet not to communicate,’ he said, and then for a long time he

questioned me closely concerning war.

“He was at first perplexed and incredulous. ‘You mean to say,’ he

asked, seeking confirmation, ‘that you run about over the surface of

your world—this world, whose riches you have scarcely begun to

scrape—killing one another for beasts to eat?’

“I told him that was perfectly correct.

“He asked for particulars to assist his imagination.

“‘But do not ships and your poor little cities get injured?’ he asked,

and I found the waste of property and conveniences seemed to impress

him almost as much as the killing. ‘Tell me more,’ said the Grand

Lunar; ‘make me see pictures. I cannot conceive these things.’

“And so, for a space, though something loath, I told him the story of

earthly War.

“I told him of the first orders and ceremonies of war, of warnings and

ultimatums, and the marshalling and marching of troops. I gave him an

idea of manoeuvres and positions and battle joined. I told him of

sieges and assaults, of starvation and hardship in trenches, and of

sentinels freezing in the snow. I told him of routs and surprises, and

desperate last stands and faint hopes, and the pitiless pursuit of

fugitives and the dead upon the field. I told, too, of the past, of

invasions and massacres, of the Huns and Tartars, and the wars of

Mahomet and the Caliphs, and of the Crusades. And as I went on, and

Phi-oo translated, the Selenites cooed and murmured in a steadily

intensified emotion.

“I told them an ironclad could fire a shot of a ton twelve miles, and

go through 20 feet of iron—and how we could steer torpedoes under

water. I went on to describe a Maxim gun in action, and what I could

imagine of the Battle of Colenso. The Grand Lunar was so incredulous

that he interrupted the translation of what I had said in order to have

my verification of my account. They particularly doubted my description

of the men cheering and rejoicing as they went into battle.

“‘But surely they do not like it!’ translated Phi-oo.

“I assured them men of my race considered battle the most glorious

experience of life, at which the whole assembly was stricken with

amazement.

“‘But what good is this war?’ asked the Grand Lunar, sticking to his

theme.

“‘Oh! as for _good_!’ said I; ‘it thins the population!’

“‘But why should there be a need—?’

“There came a pause, the cooling sprays impinged upon his brow, and

then he spoke again.”

At this point a series of undulations that have been apparent as a

perplexing complication as far back as Cavor’s description of the

silence that fell before the first speaking of the Grand Lunar become

confusingly predominant in the record. These undulations are evidently

the result of radiations proceeding from a lunar source, and their

persistent approximation to the alternating signals of Cavor is

curiously suggestive of some operator deliberately seeking to mix them

in with his message and render it illegible. At first they are small

and regular, so that with a little care and the loss of very few words

we have been able to disentangle Cavor’s message; then they become

broad and larger, then suddenly they are irregular, with an

irregularity that gives the effect at last of some one scribbling

through a line of writing. For a long time nothing can be made of this

madly zigzagging trace; then quite abruptly the interruption ceases,

leaves a few words clear, and then resumes and continues for the rest

of the message, completely obliterating whatever Cavor was attempting

to transmit. Why, if this is indeed a deliberate intervention, the

Selenites should have preferred to let Cavor go on transmitting his

message in happy ignorance of their obliteration of its record, when it

was clearly quite in their power and much more easy and convenient for

them to stop his proceedings at any time, is a problem to which I can

contribute nothing. The thing seems to have happened so, and that is

all I can say. This last rag of his description of the Grand Lunar

begins in mid-sentence.

“...interrogated me very closely upon my secret. I was able in a little

while to get to an understanding with them, and at last to elucidate

what has been a puzzle to me ever since I realised the vastness of

their science, namely, how it is they themselves have never discovered

Cavorite.’ I find they know of it as a theoretical substance, but they

have always regarded it as a practical impossibility, because for some

reason there is no helium in the moon, and helium...”

Across the last letters of helium slashes the resumption of that

obliterating trace. Note that word “secret,” for on that, and that

alone, I base my interpretation of the message that follows, the last

message, as both Mr. Wendigee and myself now believe it to be, that he

is ever likely to send us.

XXVI.

The Last Message Cavor sent to the Earth

On this unsatisfactory manner the penultimate message of Cavor dies

out. One seems to see him away there in the blue obscurity amidst his

apparatus intently signalling us to the last, all unaware of the

curtain of confusion that drops between us; all unaware, too, of the

final dangers that even then must have been creeping upon him. His

disastrous want of vulgar common sense had utterly betrayed him. He had

talked of war, he had talked of all the strength and irrational

violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless

futility of conflict. He had filled the whole moon world with this

impression of our race, and then I think it is plain that he made the

most fatal admission that upon himself alone hung the possibility—at

least for a long time—of any further men reaching the moon. The line

the cold, inhuman reason of the moon would take seems plain enough to

me, and a suspicion of it, and then perhaps some sudden sharp

realisation of it, must have come to him. One imagines him about the

moon with the remorse of this fatal indiscretion growing in his mind.

During a certain time I am inclined to guess the Grand Lunar was

deliberating the new situation, and for all that time Cavor may have

gone as free as ever he had gone. But obstacles of some sort prevented

his getting to his electromagnetic apparatus again after that message I

have just given. For some days we received nothing. Perhaps he was

having fresh audiences, and trying to evade his previous admissions.

Who can hope to guess?

And then suddenly, like a cry in the night, like a cry that is followed

by a stillness, came the last message. It is the briefest fragment, the

broken beginnings of two sentences.

The first was: “I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know—”

There was an interval of perhaps a minute. One imagines some

interruption from without. A departure from the instrument—a dreadful

hesitation among the looming masses of apparatus in that dim, blue-lit

cavern—a sudden rush back to it, full of a resolve that came too late.

Then, as if it were hastily transmitted came: “Cavorite made as

follows: take—”

There followed one word, a quite unmeaning word as it stands: “uless.”

And that is all.

It may be he made a hasty attempt to spell “useless” when his fate was

close upon him. Whatever it was that was happening about that apparatus

we cannot tell. Whatever it was we shall never, I know, receive another

message from the moon. For my own part a vivid dream has come to my

help, and I see, almost as plainly as though I had seen it in actual

fact, a blue-lit shadowy dishevelled Cavor struggling in the grip of

these insect Selenites, struggling ever more desperately and hopelessly

as they press upon him, shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last

fighting, and being forced backwards step by step out of all speech or

sign of his fellows, for evermore into the Unknown—into the dark, into

that silence that has no end....