I saw that same reddish globe again, my first discovery in my voyage through the Heavens. It seemed paler to me. Whatever it was, it was definitely not a comet; it had neither the dazzling head nor the long atmospheric tail that is the obligatory accompaniment of all comets; no more was it a star, properly speaking, no scintillation within it indicated an active flame. What was it, then? Suddenly, a sort of grotesque face turned towards me; I recognized it. My reddish globe, my tail-less comet, my ray-less star was the Moon!
On that subject, I had read all that dreamers had thought and all that thinkers had dreamed, from Pythagoras to Seneca, and from Cyrano de Bergerac and Fontenelle to Humboldt and Arago.
Among the scientists, one alone had not been content to think and dream; he had wanted to see with his own eyes.
From Easter to St Michael’s Day,
He built a telescope
So large, so large, that Herschel’s
Was myopic by comparison.44
Then, he saw…what did he see? Huge bats in human form, Homo vespertilio—and I was consumed by desire to know that which all these scientists had thought, dreamed or seen, in the direct line of incontestable truth, Could I ever hope to have a better opportunity to clear up my doubts? The Moon was there, right there in front of me, accessible to me!
Exerting all my will-power to one unique purpose, combining all its force into a single impulse, I precipitated myself in headlong flight, and a few minutes later I touched down on a high mountain that presented hardly any other view than that of immense glaciers. The natural location of glaciers is on high mountains; I was not surprised.
I left these lunar Alps, or Cordilleras, to descend to the plain. There, the soil was covered with snow of dazzling whiteness, doubtless fallen the previous day; I had presumably arrived on our satellite in the winter season.
Winter could not be manifest everywhere, though. I visited the Moon’s four cardinal points; I descended into its valleys, and also into the craters of its volcanoes. I traveled over its seas, its gulfs. Everything there was rigid, motionless; it was all frozen. The place was fully illuminated by the Sun, but the Sun’s light did not brighten or heat up anything there; its rays arrived there chilled, without the power to melt a snowflake, without awakening an atom of life. On the plains, there was not a tree; on the receding flanks of the rocks, there was not a blade of green grass or patch of moss; in the air, which was so clear that I could see every planet gravitating around its orbit, there was not a cloud, nor a bird in flight; no cry or insect hum could be heard there!
I could only perceive a single breath—that which emerged from my own breast.
The Moon is dead, dead, dead!
“Has it, at least, lived its planetary life? Was it once inhabited?”
To that double question, I can give a bold affirmative response.
The cadavers of cities lie upon its plains; though covered by their shrouds of snow, the remaining indications of rounded shapes and rectangular lines are sufficient testimony to the hand of a constructor. Now, was this constructor Fontenelle’s human being or Monsieur Nicolet’s bat?
To decide the matter, it seemed at first that I would only have to dig down into the layers of snow, to go into one of the houses, which must surely have retained traces of heir inhabitants, even better than those of Pompeii. Any tool that came to hand, of iron or wood, would be sufficient to the task. But one does not travel through the impalpable ether with arms and luggage—except in extraordinary cases, as we shall soon see.
I had brought with me neither a spade nor a pickaxe, and I could not excavate a path through those towns and ice-sealed tombs with my fingernails. Besides which, the land’s more-than-Siberian cold rendered me incapable of action. I was already thinking of leaving, and in thinking that, became depressed. Had I, then, undertake this long journey only to register the Moon’s death-certificate? Would nothing help to enlighten me as to the nature of its former inhabitants?
Providence came to my aid!
Numbed by cold, with frostbitten fingers and chattering teeth, I was on the point losing all hope and was about to resume my flight, when a large corridor formed by high white rocks, decorated externally by a layer of ice that gave them the appearance of immense blocks of porcelain, opened before me. On the hardened ground and along the walls, a series of objects were scattered, the nature of which it was impossible for me to make out. I drew nearer, only expecting to find a few outcrops of rock or a few tree-trunks not covered by the snow—which would have been a victory in itself—but a much greater surprise and an unexpected triumph awaited me! I had before my eyes a complete specimen of the ancient population of the Moon. These sad specimens of an entire vanished race must have taken refuge there at the very moment of the great cataclysm. There were there still, conserved intact by the cold, with their last anguished expressions and in their final stances, perhaps hundreds of centuries old.
I therefore found myself in a position to answer, with complete authority, the great question of the inhabitants of the Moon—a question that had so keenly preoccupied the scientific world and myself!
The Moon had once been populated, not by giant bats, as Monsieur Nicolet had believed, or pretended to believe, but by beings much closer to the form and nature of humans, although they were quite different in certain essential respects.
The double man, Plato’s homo duplex, brought back into favor in our time as an anatomical reality by the savant Dr Serres of the Institut, was displayed there in the full expansion of his duplicate individuality.45 Male in the right half of the body, female in the left side, the lunar human possessed two arms and two legs, exactly like the humans of Earth, but had in addition two distinct and separate heads, elegantly rising from articulated clavicles, capable of certain movements that are forbidden to us. Each of these heads had an elongated neck for a stem, which drew apart progressively from their bases. Evidently, this neck, instead of supporting only seven vertebrae, as ours do, must have accommodated at least 22, like those of birds.
The broad chests of these strange beings presented, not quite in the middle but slightly to the left, two breasts, to which the double mouth of a bicephalous infant could be simultaneously applied. To the right, there was no trace of the vestigial nipple with which nature has decorated us, more in accordance with harmonic law than the law of necessity.
A double spinal column, branching from a junction, permitted the conjoined individuals to look one another in the face in order to smile, to talk—for I cannot doubt that they were possessed of the gift of speech—and to put their hand on one another’s shoulder in a sign of friendship. That affectionate pose must have been habitual to them in moments of great stress. Almost all the poor coupled creatures that I had before my eyes gave me evidence of that.
The inhabitants of the Moon were certainly the most complete hermaphrodites among the superior races, and love, among them, must have been practiced according to the strictest rules of moral hygiene. Brother and sister at first, later husband and wife, linked by custom and by blood, exempt from suspicion and jealousy, since they were never apart, unable to take a single step without one another, since they were born together and would die together, can they not offer perfect models of conjugality? If there were ever a Golden Age of happy households, it must surely have been on the Moon.
At this point, before having reached my conclusion, I felt my thoughts clouding over because of the intensity of the cold, and I suddenly lost consciousness. I only recovered when I heard two voices: two quarrelsome voices, which increased in volume as they argued, replying to one another in the angriest possible tones. To the extent that I could understand, at first, the argument concerned furniture (how strange dreams are!). One of the voices was that of my upholsterer; my upholsterer as arguing with someone, and that someone, who was shouting the louder, was me!
And yet, my astronomical voyage continued.
This is what happened.
2.
Chilled to the bone
, half-frozen, almost as dead as the Moon itself, I took advantage of the feeble residue of my will to head for the first available planet. Desirous above all of warmth, rest and comfort, I had told my upholsterer—don’t ask me how!—to send me all the furniture in my bedroom.
My upholsterer is punctiliousness personified. When I arrived at my planet, I found him waiting at the landing-stage with his baggage. It was the dead of night; without listening to his observations, of which I heard not a single word, and without even bothering to find out whether there was a hotel in the vicinity, I instructed him to set it all up in a beautiful grotto of slate-colored basalt, whose entrance, in the form of a portico, opened on to a lake.
Nothing was lacking in my improvised apartment, not even central heating; I perceived a gentle warmth there, which did not take long to bring me out of my glacial torpor. I could have believed that I was in Paris, surrounded by my furniture in the Renaissance style—I had a penchant for the Renaissance at that time.
Monsieur Durand, my upholsterer, had brought my old Gobelins tapestry, decorated with great characters of mythology, my Palissy faiences ornamented in relief with lizards, snakes and frogs, and even my famous Giotto canvas, The Massacre of the Innocents. I could certainly have been satisfied with less, but, I repeat, Monsieur Durand is punctiliousness made man; I had asked him for all my furniture, and he had brought it to me complete—and if he had not delivered the doors and windows along with the furniture, it was doubtless because the landlord had opposed it.
I threw myself on my bed, where I went to sleep immediately.
In the middle of the night, dull cracking sounds became audible above my head. The walls of rock seemed to be splitting noisily—and, from time to time, small flakes of basalt were falling on to my bed. Twenty other noises were not long delayed in mingling with these sounds; I heard sighs and all sorts of murmurs—even the murmur of water, which seemed to be lapping spasmodically against the entrance to my grotto.
“A fire has broken out, caused by my central heating, and the firemen are in the process of putting it out.” That was my first thought.
Frightened, I hurled myself out of bed in order to get out of that inferno as quickly as possible. The exit was closed! The tall portico of rock had subsided, now leaving only a narrow aperture at its base, through which the hissing waves were coming.
“If it’s not a fire,” I said to myself, “then a storm has broken out over the lake—a tempest, most certainly, complicated by an earthquake!”
My situation, already terrible, was about to get even worse.
On going back into my room, I stood petrified by the spectacle that offered itself to me, which a phosphoric leakage from the frock permitted me to contemplate in all its marvelous horror.
All my furniture had come to life. Just as the high basaltic mountain into which I had come in search of shelter was cracking and moaning, and just as the little lake, my neighbor, had come swirling to besiege me in my refuge, every item of my household goods was playing an active role in its turn.
My four-poster bed, made of old oak-wood, entirely disarticulated in its limbs and joints, was attempting to return to its primitive and natural state. Its twisted feet and pillars were unrolling their spirals, standing upright, digging into the ground in order to implant themselves there; they were also implanting lively cuttings, by means of roots abruptly emitted by their nether parts, while a thin layer of bark began to cover each new stems as soon as it set itself upright.
Inlays in mother-of-pearl or tortoiseshell were detaching themselves from other items of furniture and becoming curved, rounding themselves off, acquiring the forms of shells and carapaces. The leather and morocco upholstery of chairs was distending and taking on the appearance of the animals that had furnished it. The horsehair with which the armchairs were stuffed was escaping in order to attach itself to strange animals, comprising their manes or fleeces.
All around me, everything that was conscious of a previous organic life, animal or vegetable, seemed to be trying to return to it. Nor did the miracle stop there. My night-stand started to dance; one by one, with a menacing air, it lifted each of its feet, which terminated in powerful eagle’s claws—and these claws were opening and closing again as I approached, as if to seize their prey.
Further amazement! The mythological characters depicted in my Gobelins tapestry—Mars, Pallas and other gods of the first rank—were suddenly taking on a frightful three-dimensionality; their eyes were lighting up, their muscles stirring, their mouths murmuring confused threats. The lightning-bolt that old Jupiter was holding flashed momentarily, and three times the mountain trembled on its base. Then, all those fallen gods began to flex their backs and stretch their arms in order to rid themselves of the weave that retained them—but they could not complete the task.
Less encumbered than the gods, the Roman soldiers in Giotto’s painting launched themselves out of the canvas with wild-eyed gazes in pursuit of poor little innocents; I saw the blood running, and heard the screams of the victims and the imprecations of their executioners….
By means of a bizarre phenomenon, already observed by Pascal, I was momentarily conscious of my sleeping state. “I’m dreaming; it’s a dream: a frightful nightmare, which my dear doctor would not hesitate to class among his symplegadics!”46 I told myself—but after due consideration, I replied in the negative; “No, I’m awake, I’m fully conscious; it’s all true, all real!”
And I continued to be subject to my dreamer’s torment.
A formidable cracking sound warned me of the imminent collapse of that fatal rock, under which I had voluntarily imprisoned myself. From the obscure corner in which I curled myself up, with sweat on my brow, a violent shaking threw me back to the middle of the grotto; the cave, doubtless in consequence of an upset effected within the mountain, became narrower, gradually closing in until I was only left with just enough space to avoid contact with all the monsters by which I was surrounded.
Soon, enormous blocks of basalt detached from the ceiling fell upon the gods of old Olympus, who were more entangled than ever in the threads of their tapestry, and the infamous Roman soldiers, who had not relented in their massacre of innocents. The trees and animals of my furniture, crushed and broken, were no longer anything but shapeless debris. Only my distraught night-stand, as if overcome by madness, ran away from that rain of rocks, using its powerful eagle’s claws to clamber up the wall, scaling it all the way to the top.
To cap it all, the frightful reptiles—Palissy’s lizards, snakes and frogs—which had retained for some time in the torpor habitual to them, were now sliding, running and hopping through the bloody debris; impregnated with that blood, they were swarming around and crawling up my legs, mingling their sinister hissing and frightful croaking with my cries of distress.
It was horrible!
However, the greatest suffering I endured did not arise from the perils I was running, nor from the spectacle before my eyes, nor from the venomous touch of the serpents; it came from the intolerable heat that reigned within the grotto. I was suffocating, choking; I thought I was dying.
In that supreme moment, a resounding voice burst out, overwhelming all those noises, all those rumblings and all those sobs.
The voice was my upholsterer’s. “Quickly! Quickly!” he cried, seizing me by the hand. “The way out has been opened up for us again by a landslide. We haven’t a moment to lose—hurry up!”
Would you believe it? At the very moment when I owed my salvation to the honest Monsieur Durand, I elected to inflict upon him the most unjust outbursts of temper. All my fears and all my suffering had just degenerated into furious anger. I reproached him for his disloyalty; I accused him of knavery. The furniture he had brought me could not be mine; it was bewitched! He swore to me by his greatest gods that he had never played a practical joke in his life. I replied that he was a miserable liar! It was with malevolent, criminal intention that he had fired up the central heating to the point of asphyxiatin
g me. I finished up threatening him to take him to court.
O triple Hecate! O Bombo, Mormo, Gorgo!47
Fortunately, my brave upholsterer continued to drag me along with him, without paying overmuch attention to my recriminations.
Once outside the grotto, I looked for the lake that bathed its edge and could no longer see it. The lake had evaporated into steam, and now formed a large dark red cloud, in which the glow of a fire seemed to be reflected.
I scanned the high mountain of which my grotto was the base; it had been turned upside-down and 20 craters now open simultaneously along its torn flanks. The horizon traced in front of us was nothing but a circle of volcanoes.
“Where are we?” I asked, gripped by terror.
“On Monsieur Le Verrier’s planet, incorrectly called Neptune,” Durand replied, with the utmost calm. “You’ve come from the Moon, haven’t you?”
“What! You know that?” I cried, interrupting him. “My dear Monsieur Durand, do you also know how the Moon died?”
“That’s an old story,” he answered. “After having created the terrestrial globe. God put the Moon at the service of the Earth, in the capacity of its satellite. It was charged with restraining and moderating the seas by means of its gravity, and for a few centuries things went according to plan—but the day came when, weary of turning on it axis, the Moon broke its chain and tried to wander away from its regular orbit. Then there was the Deluge; in addition, to punish it for its disobedience, God struck it dead; since that time, it accomplishes its duties as a star entirely automatically, no longer doing anything but obeying the general laws of gravitation. Now, my dear client, let me resume what I was saying. Yes, as you have been able to verify for yourself, the Moon is dead, and quite dead; here, entirely to the contrary, you have before your eyes a world in formation, where the forces of organic life are presently constituted with a frightful intensity. Here, due to the excess of heat, solid bodies liquefy and liquids evaporate into gaseous form, thus forming the atmosphere indispensable to every planet that wishes to live.”
The Germans on Venus Page 10
