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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?
Chapter 23 103
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
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