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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-1" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2 class="no-break">I<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">MR. BEDFORD MEETS MR. CAVOR AT LYMPNE</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">I</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">Mr. Bedford Meets Mr. Cavor at Lympne</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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!”</p>
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<p>And this book is the sequel. So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-10" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>X<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">LOST MEN IN THE MOON</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">X</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">Lost Men in the Moon</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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 <em>there</em>.”</p>
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<p>He pointed a hesitating finger that wavered in an arc.</p>
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<p>“I’m not sure.” His look of consternation deepened. “Anyhow,” he said, with his eyes on me, “it can’t be far.”</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-11" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XI<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">THE MOONCALF PASTURES</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XI</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">The Mooncalf Pastures</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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 hopelessly 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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-12" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XII<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">THE SELENITE’S FACE</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XII</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">The Selenite’s Face</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>“Cavor,” I said, “cannot we have some light?”</p>
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<p>There came no answer.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-13" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XIII<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">MR. CAVOR MAKES SOME SUGGESTIONS</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XIII</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>For a time neither of us spoke. To focus together all the things we had brought upon ourselves, seemed beyond my mental powers.</p>
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<p>“They’ve got us,” I said at last.</p>
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<p>“It was that fungus.”</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-14" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XIV<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">EXPERIMENTS IN INTERCOURSE</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XIV</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">Experiments in Intercourse</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>“They seem to be releasing us,” said Cavor. “Remember we are on the moon! Make no sudden movements!”</p>
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<p>“Are you going to try that geometry?”</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-15" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XV<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">THE GIDDY BRIDGE</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XV</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">The Giddy Bridge</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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?</p>
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<p>Cavor came to my side and laid his hand on my arm. His pale and terrified face was ghastly in the blue light.</p>
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<p>“We can’t do anything,” he said. “It’s a mistake. They don’t understand. We must go. As they want us to go.”</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-16" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XVI<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">POINTS OF VIEW</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XVI</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">Points of View</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>“Cavor,” I said, “it comes from above! I am certain it comes from above!”</p>
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<p>He made no answer, but hurried on.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-17" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XVII<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">THE FIGHT IN THE CAVE OF THE MOON BUTCHERS</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XVII</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">The Fight in the Cave of the Moon Butchers</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-18" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XVIII<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">IN THE SUNLIGHT</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XVIII</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">In the Sunlight</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>Presently we saw that the cavern before us opened on 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.</p>
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<p>“Come on!” I said, leading the way.</p>
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<p>“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....</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-19" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XIX<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">MR. BEDFORD ALONE</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XIX</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">Mr. Bedford Alone</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>Why had we come to the moon?</p>
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<p>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....</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-2" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>II<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">THE FIRST MAKING OF CAVORITE</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">II</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">The First Making of Cavorite</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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!</p>
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<p>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° Fahr. 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.</p>
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<p>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——!</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-20" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XX<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">MR. BEDFORD IN INFINITE SPACE</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XX</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">Mr. Bedford in Infinite Space</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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 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.</p>
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<p>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 <cite>Lloyd’s News</cite> 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.</p>
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<p>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——?</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-21" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>XXI<br/>
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<span class="ctitlefont">MR. BEDFORD AT LITTLESTONE</span></h2>
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<hgroup>
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<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XXI</h2>
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<p epub:type="title">Mr. Bedford at Littlestone</p>
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</hgroup>
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<p>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....</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>The night was dark and overcast. Two yellow pin-points 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.</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-22" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>XXII<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">THE ASTONISHING COMMUNICATION OF MR. JULIUS WENDIGEE</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XXII</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">The Astonishing Communication of Mr. Julius Wendigee</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>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 <cite>Strand Magazine</cite>, 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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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 St. Gothard 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 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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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 electro-magnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth. Besides Mr. 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 extra-terrestrial 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.</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-23" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>XXIII<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">AN ABSTRACT OF THE SIX MESSAGES FIRST RECEIVED FROM MR. CAVOR</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XXIII</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">An Abstract of the Six Messages First Received from Mr. Cavor</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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:—</p>
|
||||
<p>“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....”</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-24" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>XXIV<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SELENITES</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XXIV</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">The Natural History of the Selenites</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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 6 in. 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 ultrahuman dimensions.”</p>
|
||||
<p>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 have 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.</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-25" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>XXV<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">THE GRAND LUNAR</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XXV</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">The Grand Lunar</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>The penultimate message describes, with occasionally even 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.</p>
|
||||
<p>The first message begins: “At last I am able to resume this—” it then becomes illegible for a space, and after a time resumes in mid-sentence.</p>
|
||||
<p>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; an 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.</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-26" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>XXVI<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">THE LAST MESSAGE CAVOR SENT TO THE EARTH</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XXVI</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">The Last Message Cavor Sent to the Earth</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>In 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 going 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 electro-magnetic 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?</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>The first was: “I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know——”</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>III<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">THE BUILDING OF THE SPHERE</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">III</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">The Building of the Sphere</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>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!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Finishes what?” I asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Space—anywhere! The moon!”</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-4" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>IV<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">INSIDE THE SPHERE</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">IV</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">Inside the Sphere</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>“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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What have you got there?” I asked.</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-5" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>V<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">THE JOURNEY TO THE MOON</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">V</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">The Journey to the Moon</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>A question floated up out of the void. “How are we pointing?” I said. “What is our direction?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“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——”</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-6" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>VI<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">THE LANDING ON THE MOON</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">VI</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">The Landing on the Moon</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>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 climbing into the blaze of the sun. I take it the reader has seen pictures or photographs of the moon, so that I need not describe the broader features of that landscape, those spacious ringlike 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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-7" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>VII<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">SUNRISE ON THE MOON</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">VII</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">Sunrise on the Moon</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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!</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-8" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>VIII<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">A LUNAR MORNING</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">VIII</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">A Lunar Morning</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>The harsh emphasis, the pitiless black and white of the 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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
|||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-9" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>IX<br/>
|
||||
<span class="ctitlefont">PROSPECTING BEGINS</span></h2>
|
||||
<hgroup>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">IX</h2>
|
||||
<p epub:type="title">Prospecting Begins</p>
|
||||
</hgroup>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The manhole?” I said.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes!” said Cavor, “if it is air we see!”</p>
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
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