THE FIRST MEN IN THE

MOON

BY
H. G. WELLS

1901
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Mr. Bedford Meets Mr. Cavor At Lympne
Chapter 2. The First Making Of Cavorite
Chapter 3. The Building Of The Sphere
Chapter 4. Inside The Sphere
Chapter 5. The Journey To The Moon
Chapter 6. The Landing On The Moon
Chapter 7. Sunrise On The Moon
Chapter 8. A Lunar Morning
Chapter 9. Prospecting Begins
Chapter 10. Lost Men In The Moon
Chapter 11. The Mooncalf Pastures
Chapter 12. The Selenite's Face
Chapter 13. Mr. Cavor Makes Some Suggestions
Chapter 14. Experiments In Intercourse
Chapter 15. The Giddy Bridge
Chapter 16. Points Of View
Chapter 17. The Fight In The Cave Of The Moon Butchers
Chapter 18. In The Sunlight
Chapter 19. Mr. Bedford Alone
Chapter 20. Mr. Bedford In Infinite Space
Chapter 21. Mr. Bedford At Littlestone
Chapter 22. The Astonishing Communication Of Mr. Julius Wendigee
Chapter 23. An Abstract Of The Six Messages First Received From Mr. Cavor
Chapter 24. The Natural History Of The Selenites
Chapter 25. The Grand Lunar
Chapter 26. The Last Message Cavor Sent To The Earth
 1

CHAPTER 1. 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
 2

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-a-
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
 3

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 medieval 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
 4

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."
 5

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
 6

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.
 7

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?"

 8

"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.
 9

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.
 10

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
 11

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 Rontgen 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
 12

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
 13

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
 14

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
 15

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.

 16

CHAPTER 2. 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—
 17

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
 18

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
 19

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. Its 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 hasweight, 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."

 20

"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 in 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
 21

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
 22

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.
 23

CHAPTER 3. 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.

 24

"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,
 25

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."
 26

"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—"
 27

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
deluxe. "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—
 28

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."

 29

"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 bout 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
 30

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 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.
 31

CHAPTER 4. 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."

 32

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
 33

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.

 34

"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.
 35

CHAPTER 5. 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
 36

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."

 37

"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 pounds," 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
 38

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 degrees Centigrade, 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
 39

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 gray 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,{*} but for the most part
in a sort of quiescence that was neither waking nor slumber, we fell through
 40

a space of time that had neither night nor day in it, silently, softly, and
swiftly down towards the moon.

{* Footnote: 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.}
 41

CHAPTER 6. 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 gray 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 gray 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
 42

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
 43

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
gray 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?"
 44

"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.

 45

CHAPTER 7. 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 grayish 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 gray, a gray that deepened eastward into
the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow. Innumerable rounded gray
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 gray vapour poured upward from the crater floor, whirls and puffs
 46

and drifting wraiths of gray, 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. Gray summit after gray 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!

 47

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.
 48

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.
 49

"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.
 50

CHAPTER 8. 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—"

 51

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
 52

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
 53

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.
 54

CHAPTER 9. 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
 55

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.
 56

"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.
 57

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.
 58

"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
 59

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-gray, 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.
 60

"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.
 61

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.

 62

"Cavor!" I cried, laying a hand on his arm, "where is the sphere?"

 63

CHAPTER 10. 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.
 64

"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
 65

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?"

 66

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?"
 67

"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….
 68

And ever and again came gusts of turmoil, hammering, the clanging and
throb of machinery, and presently—the bellowing of great beasts!
 69

CHAPTER 11. 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
 70

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
 71

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 then 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,
 72

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
 73

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
 74

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?"

 75

"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.

"Its 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?"
 76

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 Caesar never dreamt. B'in all the
newspapers. Cavorecia. Bedfordecia. Bedfordecia—hic—Limited. Mean—
unlimited! Practically."

Certainly I was intoxicated.

 77

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….
 78

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.
 79

CHAPTER 12. 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
 80

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.
 81

"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.
 82

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
 83

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.
 84

CHAPTER 13. 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."
 85

"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.

 86

"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.

 87

"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 medieval 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."
 88

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
 89

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.
 90

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.
 91

CHAPTER 14. 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.

 92

"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
 93

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
 94

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.
 95

"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!
 96

CHAPTER 15. 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.
 97

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."

 98

"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
 99

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
 100

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
 101

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.
 102

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
 103

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.
 104

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?"

 105

"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 gray, 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.
 106

"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.
 107

CHAPTER 16. 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 gray 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
 108

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!"
 109

"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?"
 110

"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?"

 111

"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—"
 112

"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."
 113

"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.

 114

"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.
 115

CHAPTER 17. 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.
 116

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."
 117

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,{*} 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
 118

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.

{* Footnote: 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.
 119

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.
 120

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
 121

the thing against his stomach. "Chuzz!" The thing wasn't a gun; it went off
like 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 again 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
 122

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.
 123

"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.
 124

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.
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CHAPTER 18. 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 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."
 126

"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.
 127

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….
 128

"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!"

 129

"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 look 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 out 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
 130

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
 131

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
 132

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….
 133

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.

 134

CHAPTER 19. 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
 135

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 bout me, and then leapt forward
to the next convenient view-point.

I beat my 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
 136

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
 137

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!
 138

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.
 139

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
 140

pencil marks. I smoothed it out, and saw uneven and broken writing ending
at last in a crooked streak up on 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
 141

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 gray 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.

 142

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
 143

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.
 144

CHAPTER 20. 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
 145

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.
 146

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.
 147

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.
 148

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? …
 149

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.
 150

CHAPTER 21. MR. BEDFORD AT LITTLESTONE

My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came into the upper
air. The temperature of 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.
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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 curve,
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 gray dawn, rather overcast but showing here and there a
long patch of greenish gray. 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
 152

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?"
 153

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 there 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.

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"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 gray 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
 155

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 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.

 156

"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
 157

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 bring 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.
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"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
 159

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 debacle. 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
 160

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
 161

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
 162

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….
 163

CHAPTER 22. 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
 164

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 fact that had long been familiar to scientific people, namely: that from
some unknown source in space, waves of electromagnetic disturbance,
entirely similar 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 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
 165

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
 166

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.
 167

CHAPTER 23. 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…."
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(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, 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?
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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
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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.
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"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
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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 Gruyere, 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
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greatly by the varying shape of the galleries, and the ingenious contrivances
of the Selenite mind….
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CHAPTER 24. 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
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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
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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
 177

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
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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."
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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
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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
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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
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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 formula; 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-
 183

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
 184

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 not 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 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
 185

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
 186

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 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 the light and of his attitude was strongly
suggestive 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
 187

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…
 188

CHAPTER 25. 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
 189

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.
 190

"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 gray-blue fog, surging with metallic or livid-gray
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
 191

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
 192

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 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.
 193

"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 superfices 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.
 194

"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
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
 195

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
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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.
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"'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;
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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
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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, and 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."
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{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 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.}
 201

CHAPTER 26. 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
 202

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….