An Abstract Of The Six Messages First Received From Mr Cavor

: The First Men In The Moon

The two earlier messages of Mr. Cavor may very well be reserved for that

larger volume. They simply tell, with greater brevity and with a

difference in several details that is interesting, but not of any vital

importance, the bare facts of the making of the sphere and our departure

from the world. Throughout, Cavor speaks of me as a man who is dead, but

with a curious change of temper as he approaches our landing on the moon.

"Poor Bedford," he says of me, and "this poor young man," and he blames

himself for inducing a young man, "by no means well equipped for such

adventures," to leave a planet "on which he was indisputably fitted to

succeed" on so precarious a mission. I think he underrates the part my

energy and practical capacity played in bringing about the realisation of

his theoretical sphere. "We arrived," he says, with no more account of our

passage through space than if we had made a journey of common occurrence

in a railway train.



And then he becomes increasingly unfair to me. Unfair, indeed, to an

extent I should not have expected in a man trained in the search for

truth. Looking back over my previously written account of these things, I

must insist that I have been altogether juster to Cavor than he has been

to me. I have extenuated little and suppressed nothing. But his account

is:--



"It speedily became apparent that the entire strangeness of our

circumstances and surroundings--great loss of weight, attenuated but

highly oxygenated air, consequent exaggeration of the results of muscular

effort, rapid development of weird plants from obscure spores, lurid

sky--was exciting my companion unduly. On the moon his character seemed to

deteriorate. He became impulsive, rash, and quarrelsome. In a little while

his folly in devouring some gigantic vesicles and his consequent

intoxication led to our capture by the Selenites--before we had had the

slightest opportunity of properly observing their ways...."



(He says, you observe, nothing of his own concession to these same

"vesicles.")



And he goes on from that point to say that "We came to a difficult passage

with them, and Bedford mistaking certain gestures of theirs"--pretty

gestures they were!--"gave way to a panic violence. He ran amuck, killed

three, and perforce I had to flee with him after the outrage. Subsequently

we fought with a number who endeavoured to bar our way, and slew seven or

eight more. It says much for the tolerance of these beings that on my

recapture I was not instantly slain. We made our way to the exterior and

separated in the crater of our arrival, to increase our chances of

recovering our sphere. But presently I came upon a body of Selenites, led

by two who were curiously different, even in form, from any of these we

had seen hitherto, with larger heads and smaller bodies, and much more

elaborately wrapped about. And after evading them for some time I fell

into a crevasse, cut my head rather badly, and displaced my patella, and,

finding crawling very painful, decided to surrender--if they would still

permit me to do so. This they did, and, perceiving my helpless condition,

carried me with them again into the moon. And of Bedford I have heard or

seen nothing more, nor, so far as I can gather, any Selenite. Either the

night overtook him in the crater, or else, which is more probable, he

found the sphere, and, desiring to steal a march upon me, made off with

it--only, I fear, to find it uncontrollable, and to meet a more lingering

fate in outer space."



And with that Cavor dismisses me and goes on to more interesting topics. I

dislike the idea of seeming to use my position as his editor to deflect

his story in my own interest, but I am obliged to protest here against the

turn he gives these occurrences. He said nothing about that gasping

message on the blood-stained paper in which he told, or attempted to tell,

a very different story. The dignified self-surrender is an altogether new

view of the affair that has come to him, I must insist, since he began to

feel secure among the lunar people; and as for the "stealing a march"

conception, I am quite willing to let the reader decide between us on what

he has before him. I know I am not a model man--I have made no pretence

to be. But am I that?



However, that is the sum of my wrongs. From this point I can edit Cavor

with an untroubled mind, for he mentions me no more.



It would seem the Selenites who had come upon him carried him to some

point in the interior down "a great shaft" by means of what he describes

as "a sort of balloon." We gather from the rather confused passage in

which he describes this, and from a number of chance allusions and hints

in other and subsequent messages, that this "great shaft" is one of an

enormous system of artificial shafts that run, each from what is called a

lunar "crater," downwards for very nearly a hundred miles towards the

central portion of our satellite. These shafts communicate by transverse

tunnels, they throw out abysmal caverns and expand into great globular

places; the whole of the moon's substance for a hundred miles inward,

indeed, is a mere sponge of rock. "Partly," says Cavor, "this sponginess

is natural, but very largely it is due to the enormous industry of the

Selenites in the past. The enormous circular mounds of the excavated rock

and earth it is that form these great circles about the tunnels known to

earthly astronomers (misled by a false analogy) as volcanoes."



It was down this shaft they took him, in this "sort of balloon" he speaks

of, at first into an inky blackness and then into a region of continually

increasing phosphorescence. Cavor's despatches show him to be curiously

regardless of detail for a scientific man, but we gather that this light

was due to the streams and cascades of water--"no doubt containing some

phosphorescent organism"--that flowed ever more abundantly downward

towards the Central Sea. And as he descended, he says, "The Selenites also

became luminous." And at last far below him he saw, as it were, a lake of

heatless fire, the waters of the Central Sea, glowing and eddying in

strange perturbation, "like luminous blue milk that is just on the boil."



"This Lunar Sea," says Cavor, in a later passage "is not a stagnant ocean;

a solar tide sends it in a perpetual flow around the lunar axis, and

strange storms and boilings and rushings of its waters occur, and at times

cold winds and thunderings that ascend out of it into the busy ways of the

great ant-hill above. It is only when the water is in motion that it

gives out light; in its rare seasons of calm it is black. Commonly, when

one sees it, its waters rise and fall in an oily swell, and flakes and big

rafts of shining, bubbly foam drift with the sluggish, faintly glowing

current. The Selenites navigate its cavernous straits and lagoons in

little shallow boats of a canoe-like shape; and even before my journey to

the galleries about the Grand Lunar, who is Master of the Moon, I was

permitted to make a brief excursion on its waters.



"The caverns and passages are naturally very tortuous. A large proportion

of these ways are known only to expert pilots among the fishermen, and not

infrequently Selenites are lost for ever in their labyrinths. In their

remoter recesses, I am told, strange creatures lurk, some of them terrible

and dangerous creatures that all the science of the moon has been unable

to exterminate. There is particularly the Rapha, an inextricable mass of

clutching tentacles that one hacks to pieces only to multiply; and the

Tzee, a darting creature that is never seen, so subtly and suddenly does

it slay..."



He gives us a gleam of description.



"I was reminded on this excursion of what I have read of the Mammoth

Caves; if only I had had a yellow flambeau instead of the pervading blue

light, and a solid-looking boatman with an oar instead of a scuttle-faced

Selenite working an engine at the back of the canoe, I could have imagined

I had suddenly got back to earth. The rocks about us were very various,

sometimes black, sometimes pale blue and veined, and once they flashed and

glittered as though we had come into a mine of sapphires. And below one

saw the ghostly phosphorescent fishes flash and vanish in the hardly less

phosphorescent deep. Then, presently, a long ultra-marine vista down the

turgid stream of one of the channels of traffic, and a landing stage, and

then, perhaps, a glimpse up the enormous crowded shaft of one of the

vertical ways.



"In one great place heavy with glistening stalactites a number of boats

were fishing. We went alongside one of these and watched the long-armed

Selenites winding in a net. They were little, hunchbacked insects, with

very strong arms, short, bandy legs, and crinkled face-masks. As they

pulled at it that net seemed the heaviest thing I had come upon in the

moon; it was loaded with weights--no doubt of gold--and it took a long

time to draw, for in those waters the larger and more edible fish lurk

deep. The fish in the net came up like a blue moonrise--a blaze of

darting, tossing blue.



"Among their catch was a many-tentaculate, evil-eyed black thing,

ferociously active, whose appearance they greeted with shrieks and

twitters, and which with quick, nervous movements they hacked to pieces by

means of little hatchets. All its dissevered limbs continued to lash and

writhe in a vicious manner. Afterwards, when fever had hold of me, I

dreamt again and again of that bitter, furious creature rising so vigorous

and active out of the unknown sea. It was the most active and malignant

thing of all the living creatures I have yet seen in this world inside the

moon....



"The surface of this sea must be very nearly two hundred miles (if not

more) below the level of the moon's exterior; all the cities of the moon

lie, I learnt, immediately above this Central Sea, in such cavernous

spaces and artificial galleries as I have described, and they communicate

with the exterior by enormous vertical shafts which open invariably in

what are called by earthly astronomers the 'craters' of the moon. The lid

covering one such aperture I had already seen during the wanderings that

had preceded my capture.



"Upon the condition of the less central portion of the moon I have not yet

arrived at very precise knowledge. There is an enormous system of caverns

in which the mooncalves shelter during the night; and there are abattoirs

and the like--in one of these it was that I and Bedford fought with the

Selenite butchers--and I have since seen balloons laden with meat

descending out of the upper dark. I have as yet scarcely learnt as much of

these things as a Zulu in London would learn about the British corn

supplies in the same time. It is clear, however, that these vertical

shafts and the vegetation of the surface must play an essential role in

ventilating and keeping fresh the atmosphere of the moon. At one time, and

particularly on my first emergence from my prison, there was certainly a

cold wind blowing down the shaft, and later there was a kind of sirocco

upward that corresponded with my fever. For at the end of about three

weeks I fell ill of an indefinable sort of fever, and in spite of sleep

and the quinine tabloids that very fortunately I had brought in my pocket,

I remained ill and fretting miserably, almost to the time when I was taken

into the presence of the Grand Lunar, who is Master of the Moon.



"I will not dilate on the wretchedness of my condition," he remarks,

"during those days of ill-health." And he goes on with great amplitude with

details I omit here. "My temperature," he concludes, "kept abnormally high

for a long time, and I lost all desire for food. I had stagnant waking

intervals, and sleep tormented by dreams, and at one phase I was, I

remember, so weak as to be earth-sick and almost hysterical. I longed

almost intolerably for colour to break the everlasting blue..."



He reverts again presently to the topic of this sponge-caught lunar

atmosphere. I am told by astronomers and physicists that all he tells is

in absolute accordance with what was already known of the moon's

condition. Had earthly astronomers had the courage and imagination to

push home a bold induction, says Mr. Wendigee, they might have foretold

almost everything that Cavor has to say of the general structure of the

moon. They know now pretty certainly that moon and earth are not so much

satellite and primary as smaller and greater sisters, made out of one

mass, and consequently made of the same material. And since the density of

the moon is only three-fifths that of the earth, there can be nothing for

it but that she is hollowed out by a great system of caverns. There was no

necessity, said Sir Jabez Flap, F.R.S., that most entertaining exponent of

the facetious side of the stars, that we should ever have gone to the moon

to find out such easy inferences, and points the pun with an allusion to

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 greatly by the varying shape of the

galleries, and the ingenious contrivances of the Selenite mind....