Kabanata Kabanata 23 · An Abstract of the Six Messages First Received from Mr. Cavor

. 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....