CHAPTER 19

The Astonishing Message of Mr. Julius Wendigee

When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at Littlestone, I handed my manuscript to a publisher, fully believing that the whole story of The First Men in the Moon was finished. But one day I received a most astonishing message. Briefly, it informed me that Mr. Julius Wendigee, a Dutch electrician, was receiving day by day a curious message from Mr. Cavor in the moon.

At first I thought it was a practical joke by someone who had seen the manuscript of my story. I answered Mr. Wendigee jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicion altogether aside, and in a state of great excitement I hurried to the little observatory upon the St. Gothard in which Mr. Wendigee was working.

In the presence of his record and his apparatus all my doubts vanished. I decided at once to accept a proposal he made to me to remain with him, assisting him to take down the messages from day to day, and trying with him to send a message back to the moon. Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive, but free, among the ant-like beings of the moon, in the blue darkness of their caves. He was lamed, it seemed, but otherwise in quite good health.

Ever since 1898 Mr. Wendigee had devoted himself to the study of electric waves which are continually reaching the earth from some unknown source in space, and, being a rich man, he had erected an observatory for receiving and recording these waves.

Luckily, Mr. Wendigee's apparatus had been set up and in working order about two months before Cavor made his first attempt to call up the earth. Consequently we have fragments of his messages even from the beginning. But they are only fragments, and the most important of them all—the instructions for making Cavorite—have not reached us. We never succeeded in transmitting a reply to Cavor. He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had received or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that anyone on earth was really aware of his efforts to communicate with us.

You can imagine how amazed Mr. Wendigee must have been when he discovered his record of electric waves interrupted by Cavor's straightforward English. Mr. Wendigee knew nothing of our wild journey to the moon, and suddenly—this English out of the void!

Somewhere within the moon, Cavor had found a considerable amount of electrical apparatus, and he had set up—perhaps secretly—a transmitter of the Marconi type. This he was able to operate at irregular intervals. As a result of this and of the imperfection of our recording instruments, his messages reach us very irregularly; they fade out in a mysterious way.

Altogether we have probably lost quite half of the communications he made, and much we have is damaged and broken. The reader, therefore, must be prepared for a considerable number of gaps and changes of topic in the summary that follows.