CHAPTER 20

A Summary of the Six Messages First Received from Mr. Cavor

The two earlier messages of Mr. Cavor tell briefly the bare facts of the making of the sphere, and our departure from the earth. He speaks of me as a man who is dead. "Poor Bedford," he says of me, "this poor young man"; and he blames himself for persuading a young man, "by no means well equipped for such adventures" to accompany him on his journey. I think he undervalues the part my energy and practical ability played in the realization of his theoretical sphere.

And then he becomes increasingly unfair to me. He says: "It quickly became clear that the strangeness of our surroundings was exciting my companion greatly. He became thoughtless, rash and quarrelsome. In a little while his folly in devouring some poisonous plants and his consequent intoxication led to our capture by the Selenites."

(He says, you observe, nothing of his devouring those same poisonous plants.)

He goes on to describe our fighting with the Selenites in the lunar caves, how we made our way to the exterior, and how we separated to search for the sphere. Then he says: "Presently I came upon a number of Selenites, led by two who had larger heads and smaller bodies than any we had seen so far. And after escaping from them for some time I fell into a crack, cut my head rather badly, and injured my knee. At last, finding crawling very painful, I surrendered to them. Perceiving my helpless condition, they carried me with them into the moon. And of Bedford I have heard or seen nothing more. Either the night overtook him in the crater, or else, which is more probable, he found the sphere and escaped in it—only, I fear, to find it uncontrollable, and to meet a slow death in outer space."

From this point Cavor mentions me no more. He describes how the Selenites carried him to the interior down "a great shaft" by means of "a sort of balloon". This shaft, he says, is one of an enormous system of shafts that run for nearly a hundred miles towards the centre of the moon. These shafts communicate together by tunnels; 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 energy of the Selenites in the past."

They took him down the shaft, at first into an inky blackness, and then into a region where the light became increasingly brighter. And as he descended the Selenites also became luminous. At last far below him he saw what looked like a lake of heatless fire, the waters of the Central Sea.

"The Selenites took me for a short journey on this sea in one of their canoes. Its caverns and passages are winding, and Selenites are often lost for ever in them.

"All the cities of the moon lie, I learnt, immediately above this Central Sea, in such caverns as I have described. They communicate with the exterior by enormous vertical shafts which open in what are called by earthly astronomers the 'craters' of the moon.

"These shafts and the plants of the surface must play an important part in ventilating the atmosphere of the moon. At one time there was certainly a cold wind blowing down the shaft, and later there was a moist, warm wind blowing upward ... "

I am told by astronomers that Cavor's account of the atmosphere and structure of the moon is in absolute agreement with what was already known of the moon's condition. Had earthly astronomers had sufficient courage and imagination, says Mr. Wendigee, they might have foretold almost everything that Cavor has to say. They know now pretty certainly that the moon and earth are 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, she must be hollowed out by a great system of caverns. 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 caverns in accordance with the simple laws of nature. The air on the side of the moon facing the sun grows hot, and flows through the tunnels and, caverns, to replace the shrinking air of the cooling side that the sunlight has left. There is, therefore, a constant breeze in the tunnels.