An Unknown World

by Pierre de Sélènes

  Everything had been carefully calculated with regard to volume and weight, in order not to clutter the projectile or make it unreasonably heavy. As they were not taking dogs with them, as had been done on the previous voyage, they had more space at their disposal and their cargo was both more complete and less cumbersome than that of the first explorers.

  The shell itself, which was to serve as a receptacle for such numerous and various objects, and in which the three travelers were going to live for an indeterminate time, had to undergo a few indispensable adjustments. Although, as has already been said, it had not suffered any external deformation, it was necessary to polish its surface again, but that was a trivial matter. It was necessary to reestablish the broken partitions that had succeeded so well in deadening the initial shock during the first departure. On that point there was nothing to change, so wisely and skillfully had the precautions taken eighteen years before been executed; it was sufficient to repeat what had already been done.

  But one important point remained to be set right; Marcel, it will not have been forgotten, had calculated that the rockets with which Barbicane had equipped the shell would be insufficient to deaden its fall, not being sufficiently powerful, In addition, since 186-, the science had made progress; the ingenious chemist Cailletet had discovered a means of liquefying some of the gases that had thus far resisted all other attempts.6 Evidently, that liquefaction could only be obtained under enormous pressure, but once the gas had been reduced to liquid form and enclosed in receptacles of proven resistance, one had a considerable expansive force in a very small volume, easier to manipulate than that of the numerous and varied explosives that modern scientists have recently discovered. Marcel therefore decided to substitute liquid oxygen for the powder previously employed, and to dispose around the hull of the projectile the three new series of rockets on whose action he was relying absolutely.

  While these preparations were being made in Florida, the old astronomer François Mathieu-Rollère, entirely given over to the new idea that now impassioned him, had done everything he could to facilitate the execution of the project suggested to him by his daughter. Without revealing exactly what he had in mind, he let it be known that he was interested in checking and completing, with the aid of the giant telescope in the Rocky Mountains, the observations commenced by the Observatoire de Paris of the constitution and the motion of recently discovered nebulae. And as he had a great skill in astronomical research, Admiral Mouchez, the illustrious director of the Observatory, who valued him highly, had obtained a special mission for him from the Ministry of Public Education.7

  Neither Marcel nor Lord Rodilan attempted to generate any publicity regarding the projected enterprise; they both judged that the blizzard of advertising that had accompanied the first voyage—the loud announcements thrown to all the echoes of publicity, the entire populations invited to witness a scientific experiment as if it were a fairground spectacle—were unworthy of true scientists. It was, in fact, a matter of a serious attempt to resolve an interesting problem of cosmography, and not a pretentious and almost charlatanesque exhibition in which the pride of an ignorant crowd could find its pleasure.

  In any case, the conditions were no longer the same. The Gun Club, which had initiated the first enterprise, had been far from capable of raising the considerable sum that it had cost; it had been necessary to appeal to the public of the Old and New worlds, to bring national pride into play, and to provoke, especially among Americans, the surge of patriotic enthusiasm that had caused capital to flow into the explorers’ coffers.

  Today was not at all similar. The complete failure of the Society for Interstellar Communications and the sale of all its assets, including the Columbiad, at a derisory price, had reduced the expenses of the initial establishment in considerable proportions; in addition, the generosity of Lord Rodilan dispensed with the necessity for any appeal to the public, and, in consequence, of any publicity. The entirely relative success obtained by Barbicane, Nicholl and Michel Ardan had been somewhat forgotten; a profound silence had fallen over that grandiose exploit. Other events had occurred that had deflected attention and impassioned public opinion.

  Before going to the observatory in the Rocky Mountains, from which he would be able to follow the shell in its flight, François Mathieu-Rollère, perhaps also pushed by his daughter, who wanted to postpone the moment of supreme separation until the last minute, had decided to spend a few days in Florida to take account personally of the preparations for the enterprise in which he was taking such a keen interest. So, on 10 November, Marcel and Lord Rodilan, alerted by telegram, went to Tampa to meet the steamer carrying Jacques and his two companions.

  “I hope, my dear Lord,” Marcel had said, while they were waiting to meet the arrivals, “that you aren’t going to alarm the funereal prophecies of our friend’s fiancée. The poor child, if I can believe Jacques’ letters, has only a very mediocre confidence in our ultimate success; she seeks to reassure herself, but can’t always succeed. Don’t increase her anxieties; at least let her hope.”

  “Oh, my dear chap,” replied Lord Rodilan, phlegmatically, “I’m a gentleman; I know the regard one owes to a young woman, and although my opinion has not varied, I shall not allow it to appear—you can be sure of that.”

  The meeting was cordial and touching. Hélène, whose smile did not hide her anxiety, felt slightly reassured by Marcel’s masculine confidence and robust gaiety. Lord Rodilan’s phlegm also contributed to her reassurance; she could not imagine that such a correct gentleman envisaged the prospect of a frightful death with such tranquil indifference.

  As for her father, he was entirely given over to his scientific preoccupations and did not perceive anything. The fortnight he spent with the three bold companions was employed in examining everything; he remade all the calculations on which Marcel’s confidence was founded, and confirmed their accuracy. He wanted to go down into the Columbiad to verify its definitive condition, and carefully checked the projectile, whose new fitments he praised highly.

  “My dear friends,” he said, when he had inspected everything, “I’m now absolutely certain that you’ll succeed.” And he rubbed his hands together with evident satisfaction.

  On 23 November he left with his daughter for the Rocky Mountains.

  On the previous day, Jacques had had one last conversation with Hélène.

  “So,” said the young woman, “it’s completely settled, and nothing can change your mind. You’re going to leave on this frightful adventure, the mere thought of which chills my heart with fear.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jacques relied. “Your father has verified our calculations himself and declared that the journey is possible and devoid of peril. What we have done in order to reach the goal that we’re pursuing, nothing will prevent us from doing the same to return. Look at Marcel; he doesn’t have an instant’s hesitation or doubt. Look at Lord Rodilan; isn’t his superb calm the guarantee of a sure success?”

  “Oh,” said Hélène, “those men aren’t in love, and aren’t leaving behind someone who loves them.”

  “But dear heart, it’s precisely because I love you and want to win you that I’ve resigned myself to causing you such anguish. You know very well that I have no other means of bending your father’s will. When I come back, he’ll grant me your hand. If I refused to leave with my friends now, I’d be dishonored; your father would banish me from his presence forever; all hope of being your husband would be lost, and I’d have nothing left to do but die, sad and desperate.”

  “Die, Jacques, you! You know very well that I wouldn’t survive you.”

  “But I’ll come back; I have an unshakable conviction as to that. Don’t take away, at this cruel moment of separation, the courage that I need to distance myself from you.”

  “Go, then,” she murmured, stifling her sobs ineptly. “And may God protect us all.”

  VI. The Observers at Long’s Peak

  The day of departure was drawing near; it
was 1 December. The operations necessary for the loading of the Columbiad had begun. After numerous reflections, after having passed in review and submitted to the regulation of rigorous calculation all the recently-discovered explosive substances, the three voyagers had come back to the fulmicotton employed by their predecessors.

  It will be remembered that, in spite of the error made by the Cambridge Observatory regarding the initial velocity that the shell would require to cross the zone of neutral attraction, the charge of four hundred thousand pounds of fulmicotton had been adequate to obtain that result. They had, therefore, maintained that figure, and on 10 December the charge was complete.

  Although the planned attempt had not been announced far and wide, like the preceding one, only the scientific societies of the two worlds having been notified, and although the political preoccupations then agitating the United States had deflected public attention elsewhere, a fairly large number of people, mostly attracted by a love of science, had gathered in Tampa and were following the progress of the gigantic project with interest.

  It was, therefore, in the midst of a numerous crowd that the three companions embarked. Marcel had brought a young engineer from France, named Georges Dumesnil, previously attached to a factory at Creusot, of proven experience, who had helped him in the technical part of all the preliminary operations. It was to him that he confided the delicate mission of supervising the descent of the shell into the barrel of the Columbiad and launching the electric spark that would set fire to the fulmicotton charge and hurl the projectile into space.

  The departure took place as he had foreseen on 15 December at ten forty-six and forty seconds in the evening. The shell, launched with prodigious force, escaped the blazing flanks of the Columbiad in the midst of the cheers of an enthusiastic crowd.

  The experience of the first departure had not been useless, and the disasters that the previous explosion had occasioned were mostly avoided. It is true that the witnesses felt a violent commotion, and a considerable number, in spite of being warned, fell to the ground, but no trains were derailed, no ship broke its anchor-chain and the vessels crossing the Atlantic were not disturbed in their progress. The sky was not even obscured by unusual vapors, and the observers whose eyes was fixed to the ocular of telescopes like that in the Rocky Mountains saw the passage through our atmosphere of a sort of incandescent asteroid, which they would have taken in any other circumstance for a vulgar bolide. Alerted as they were, they recognized it as the Columbiad’s projectile.

  The scientist Mathieu-Rollère stamped his feet. “Ah!” he cried, rubbing his hands together vigorously. “There they go, those brave young men. They’re exactly on time. Now the vehicle transporting them, leaving our atmosphere, has disappeared into the depths of space. But in three days we’ll see them again; we’ll follow their fall step by step, and witness their triumphant arrival on our satellite.”

  Hélène wept silently.

  During the three nights that followed the departure, the astronomer was at his post, trying to sound the darkness that filled space and follow the shell carrying the three audacious individuals in its flight—but the darkness was impenetrable and, although he knew scientifically the route that the projectile would follow, the giant eye of the telescope could not perceive anything; the jealous night kept its secret. Exhausted by fatigue, he had fallen asleep on the afternoon of the fourth day when suddenly—it was about five o’clock in the evening, but night falls quickly at that time of year in those northern regions—one of the young astronomers taking shifts at the telescope uttered a cry: “There they are! There they are!”

  Mathieu-Rollère, immediately alerted, leapt to his feet.

  On the broadly-illuminated disk of the Moon an almost imperceptible black dot stood out, which, as they were able to ascertain with the aid of the micrometer, was definitely moving.

  “It’s them, no doubt about it,” murmured the scientist.

  In fact, the moving dot in which the astronomer recognized the projectile was at that moment over the western part of the Sea of Rains, where the craters of Aristillus and Autolycus rise up.8 It seemed to be advancing in the narrow valley limited by the extreme tip of the Caucasus chain and the two craters.

  Although the movement of the projectile was almost insensible at such a distance, it was evident that the fall was taking place with frightful rapidity.

  All the astronomers usually present at the observatory, and a considerable number of other scientists attracted by the desire to follow the strange experiment, had come successively to fix their eyes to the ocular of the telescope, and all of them had observed the displacement of the dot observed by Mathieu-Rollère. They all shared his opinion.

  He took his place at the ocular again. The other astronomers, their gazes attached to the hands of a sidereal clock, calculated the moment at which the travelers would arrive at their goal. It was at eleven fifty-nine and sixty seconds that they ought to reach the surface of the satellite.

  “They’re getting close,” murmured Mathieu-Rollère, “but there’s something I can’t explain. They ought to be able, with the aid of the rockets at their disposal, to slow their velocity—but doubtless, at such a distance, such an observation is impossible.”

  Suddenly, he uttered an exclamation. They hurried around him. “I can no longer see them!” he stammered.

  They all approached and looked in their turn.

  “Of course!” cried the honorable W. Burnett, the director of the observatory. “They’ve fallen into a fissure.” He added: “Look, in fact, at that crack in the lunar surface snaking from the foot of the Caucasus chain; it only appears to us as a thin line traced in ink, but in reality it’s several kilometers wide—sufficient space to give passage to thousands of projectiles of that caliber.”

  He turned to Mathieu-Rollère. “And it’s doubtless because they perceived the direction in which the shell was headed that they left until the last moment the rockets designed to deaden their fall.”

  “But what will become of them in the depths of that abyss?” said Mathieu-Rollère, his voice trembling with emotion.

  “My God,” said the American, “That’s a question I can’t answer. The fissure into which they’ve fallen, originating from a fracture of the lunar crust, will, in all probability, have sheer vertical sides, and getting out of it will be difficult. On the other hand, if, as recent observations permit the supposition, low-lying lunar areas still enclose air, they have a greater chance of encountering a breathable atmosphere when they emerge from the shell.

  “On my soul,” muttered one of the young staff-members of the observatory, “I wouldn’t give ten cents for their hides.”

  Hélène had fainted, and the old scientist was trying to bring her round.

  For all the observers in the Rocky Mountains, the three voyagers were irredeemably lost.

  VII. The Fall

  “Hurrah!” cried Marcel. “We’re falling!”

  “Are you are of that?” said Jacques.

  “Perfectly sure. We’ve just crossed the neutral zone in which, the shell being subject to the double attraction of the Earth and the Moon, weight was annihilated, and you must have felt, as I did, that we were to longer weighed down to the floor of the projectile.”9

  “Oh yes!” said Lord Rodilan. “And I must say that I’ve never experienced anything similar to that strange sensation. It seemed to me that I no longer had a body, and that I’d become a pure spirit. That alone was worth the trouble of making the voyage. But there’s nothing durable in this world, and now we’ve become heavy and material again, as before. Fortunately, it will soon be finished and in a little while we’ll...”

  “That’s understood, my dear friend,” said Jacques, “but keep it to yourself. We have the means to deaden our fall and we’ll disembark as tranquilly on to the soil of the Moon as passengers descending to the platform of Charing Cross station.”

  “A thousand guineas,” said Lord Rodilan, “that we’ll be reduced to pulp.”


  “Done,” retorted Marcel, laughing. “I’m sure that, if you win, you won’t be claiming the price of the wager from me.”

  “For myself,” said Jacques, “I’m fully confident. I sense that I shall see Hélène again.

  “Bravo, my son,” said Marcel solemnly. “It’s necessary to have faith in science. And now, pay attention! Gunners to your cannon!”

  Beneath the gaze of the voyagers, the dry bed of an immense sea extended, oval in form, from which a few isolated craters emerged with steep and tormented slopes. Toward the west, three of those craters, arranged in a triangle, were near the mountains that formed the boundary of the plain in that direction. In the midst of those mountains a large strait opened that connected with another sea, smaller in its dimensions.

  The Sun’s rays, the force of which was not attenuated by any vapor, poured a dazzling light over that desolate landscape. The soil, absolutely arid, where no trace of vegetation could be seen, seemed only to present to the gaze the rocky foundations of an extinct world; its surface, irregularly hollowed out by profound depressions, was bristling with peaks that jutted up abruptly; even the flat regions seemed swollen by an infinite number of blisters that might have been mistaken for tightly-packed granulations at a distance.

  The whole of that strange panorama offered a spectacle of incontestable grandeur to the eyes of the marveling voyagers.

  “How beautiful it is!” murmured Jacques, as if overwhelmed by admiration.

  Even the Englishman, in spite of his phlegm and detachment from everything, was unable to conserve his indifference. “In truth,” he exclaimed, “I’ve never seen anything as splendid.”

  As for Marcel, he was triumphant. “Look,” he said to his companions. “We’re about to arrive in what is perhaps the most interesting region of our satellite. That great depression extending beneath us is obviously the bed of an ancient ocean, which astronomers have baptized with the name of the Sea of Rains. The three craters you see a little to the left also have names. The largest is Archimedes; beside it is Aristillus, and a little further to the north Autolycus. The strait that separates those two mountain chains you can see—the denser one extended to the south is known as the Apennines, the lesser one heading northwards the Caucasus—leads to another plain that is none other than the Sea of Serenity. To judge by the direction of our fall, I imagine that we’re going to make a soft landing in the Marsh of Mists, which extends from the foot of Autolycus in a north-easterly direction.10