“We might have to fear an even greater peril,” said Jacques. “For several hours it’s seemed to me that respiration is more difficult and that more rarefied air is arriving in my lungs.”
“That’s true,” said Lord Rodilan. “I attributed the difficulty in breathing from which I was suffering to fatigue, but Jacques is evidently right: the air’s become thinner.”
“That’s what I feared,” said Marcel. “I hesitated to make you party to my apprehensions, hoping to be mistaken, but there’s no longer any doubt about it; we’re experiencing what mountain-climbers on Earth call mountain sickness. But where has Lord Rodilan gone?”
“He must have gone on ahead,” said Jacques.
Suddenly, from some distance away, they heard an exclamation. “Hurrah!” the Englishman cried. “Here are traces of living beings.”
He emerged from a cleft in the wall of the tunnel brandishing an object that his two companions could not make out. They ran to him, and with a triumphant gesture, Lord Rodilan showed them a fragment of a tool similar to the picks that miners use to detach blocks of coal. Although it was corroded by rust, its original form could still be made out, and they could see the hole in the center into which the wooden handle had been fitted.
“There,” he said, “is irrefutable proof that the Moon is inhabited.”
All three of them went into the narrow passage in which this important discovery had been made. It was evidently the extremity of a mine-shaft that had once been exploited. They could still see traces of the workmen’s picks on the walls; but no matter how hard the three friends searched, they could not find and exit from the short tunnel, which some roof-fall had separated from the rest of the mine in an indeterminate epoch.
“And to think,” said Lord Rodilan, tapping the wall with his iron-tipped stick, “that behind this obstacle there might be beings like us.”
“It proves, at least,” said Jacques, “that the inhabitants of the Moon got down this far—so one can live in the surface.”
Marcel seemed to be plunged into a profound meditation.
“You’re not saying anything, friend,” said Jacques, clapping him on the shoulder.
Marcel shivered. “There’s something inexplicable here,” he said. “If the air continues getting thinner as we go further, how is life possible? In particular, how will it be possible for us to survive on the lunar surface?”
“Forward ho!” sad the Englishman. “Anything rather than retrace our steps.”
They resumed their march. The slope of the tunnel they were following becoming increasingly step, and the rarefaction of the atmosphere became rapidly worse. Only a few hours had gone by when their avid lungs lacked air; the blood was ringing in their ears, their temples were beating forcefully, a veil was descending over their eyes and droplets of blood were pearling at the surface of their skin. They were forced to stop.
“It’s impossible to go on, my dear friends,” said Marcel.
“What are we going to do, then?” asked Jacques.
“For the moment, there’s only one thing we can do. We have to go back to the cave where we ran aground, and where we left all our provisions and resources in the shell. Evidently, the Moon is inhabited, we were certain of that when we attempted the voyage; the document you’ve had before your eyes is categorical proof of it, and the discovery that our friend has just made confirms it. Where can we find the human race of which we’re in search? What are the conditions of its existence? Nothing thus far has been able to inform us. Are we going to lose courage, then, because we haven’t succeeded at the first attempt? Lunar humankind exists; we have to find it, and we shall. Let’s go back to our point of departure. We’ll decide what to do there.”
“Ah!” said Lord Rodilan. “I thought I was on the point of exchanging a vigorous handshake with a Selenite! I had a very poor inspiration in coming with you.”
“No, my dear lord,” said Marcel, smiling in spite of the gravity of the situation. “All your friends think you’re dead. In their minds, you’ve exceeded Empedocles by a hundred cubits. Your goal is attained.”
“Well, so be it,” said the Englishman. “If we can’t live here, we can always die here.”
Sadly, the voyagers retraced the route that they had followed. The descent was effected without difficulty; they traversed the cave of diamonds again, without paying it any heed, and went back in haste to the place where they had landed.
But the shore was empty. A cry of amazement and despair escaped their lips. The shell had disappeared!
X. A Humankind That Does Not Want to Perish
Ever since human intelligence, too cramped in the narrow sphere in which it is confined, began to sound the profundities of space in order to study the laws governing the worlds gravitating in infinity, the satellite that has faithfully accompanied the Earth on its journey, and whose glow illuminates its nights at irregular intervals has been the object of its most constant preoccupation. While the poetic imagination of the Greeks divined the blonde Phoebe and made her descend from Heaven on a silvery ray to the shepherd Endymion, asleep on the bank of the Cephise, the Chaldean priests were calculating the orbit of our satellite, describing its phases and predicting eclipses.
In the Middle Ages, astrology attributed a harmful influence to the Moon. She it was who presided over nocturnal incantations; it was her indecisive and tremulous light by which witches unearthed cadavers, sought the redoubtable mandrake at the foot of gibbets, and made up powerful philters that distributed hatred, pleasure or death at their whim. It was on one of pale Hecate’s rays that they rode to the Sabbat on Walpurgis Night, and by means of which they returned to their lairs when nascent dawn dissipated the phantoms, sent the souls of the dead back to their sepulchers, and made the infernal deities return to their somber domains.
With the progress of science, the Moon, observed with the aid of improved instruments, has gradually and successively delivered the secrets of her strange existence to us. Today, when telescopes, masterpieces of modern industry, have permitted her to approach to a distance of eighteen leagues, she is known in an almost complete fashion; she can be photographed, the height of her mountains has been measured, and the depth of her craters. Maps of the visible surface have been drawn, far more exact than those of the terrestrial surface, where many regions, such as the poles, the heart of Africa and the Australian continent, are still unexplored.
To judge by the appearance that the lunar disk presents, bristling with mountains, pockmarked by a multitude of craters of all sizes—all extinct, for the eye can perceive the depths of their blocked chimneys—it seems that the Moon is a chilled world from which all life is completely absent.
That is not so, however. Already, with the telescopes of Lord Rosse and Foucault,12 astronomers believe that they have distinguished signs indicating the presence of an atmosphere in the lowest regions of the lunar soil; the contours of ridges that normally appear very clearly have been seen to soften and blur, as if veiled by mist. Phenomena of the refraction of light have been observed, and it has been logically concluded that, in these regions at least, there is air and water—which is to say that life is not impossible there.
Reasoning has confirmed the data of observation. In the unfathomable times when our planetary system was formed, when the sun projected from its blazing center the fulgurant drops that have become worlds, the eruption that gave birth to the Earth formed the Moon at the same time, which, detached from our globe, was retained in its orbit. The two worlds, at first in a gaseous state, began to condense, and passed successively through the liquid state and then to the solid state. The volume of the Moon being much less than that of the Earth, however, its transformation was much more rapid. In an epoch when the Earth was still a molten mass, the Moon had already formed a solid crust on which life was manifest with an exuberant abundance.
Then the centuries succeeded one another, and when the Earth arrived, with difficulty, at the point of giving birth on its surface to the fir
st seeds of life and the primitive forms appeared, still crude and barely sketched, of gigantic vegetables and monstrous animals, the Moon saw a normal and progressive life established on its surface.
In that epoch, vast oceans filled the cavities of which our gaze now plumbs the dry depths; dense forests stood on the flanks of her mountains; a humankind superior to ours, because the conditions of life were more favorable there, was born and grew, and, under fortunate influences, attained an intellectual development and moral heights that we have not yet reached.
Lunar humankind had thus arrived at a surprising degree of civilization, science and morality when the first human beings—the prognathous individuals contemporary with cave-bears—had scarcely begun to appear on Earth. But the vital evolution of the Moon was to be much shorter than that of its neighboring planet. If it had arrived in its highest period sooner, its decadence also had to commence sooner. From age to age, the cooling of the lunar globe progressed; the heat retreated from the periphery toward the center, whose incandescent nucleus, the source of life, diminished slowly but ineluctably.
As on the Earth, for as long as the central heat had been considerable, the waters that filtered into the profound layers through the numerous fissures furrowing the Moon had been vaporized and thus returned to the general circulation of the surface, but in consequence of the gradual cooling, the water had ended up being completely absorbed. Thanks to that slow absorption, the still-fluid rocks enclosing the molten core had solidified and the chemical elements, still unstable, had combined.
At the same time, the oxygen in the air was fixed in the solid parts, and thus the atmosphere had gradually disappeared, along with the lunar seas. As the elements essential for the maintenance of organized beings such as we understand them diminished, like had gradually retreated.
But lunar humankind did not want to die.
When one studies a map of the Moon attentively, one notices fissures in a considerable number of its valleys, at the feet of its high mountain chains. At the distance from which we observe them, they resemble thin black lines, as if traced by a sharp point, but in reality, they are wide crevasses whose edges are several kilometers apart, and which often penetrate profoundly into the entrails of the soil.
The scientific explorations to which the inhabitants of the Moon had devoted themselves had enabled them to understand the intimate structure of the globe on which they lived, which had no more secrets from them. They knew that beneath the solid crust, where life had been manifest for centuries, a whole subterranean region existed where a still-primitive life was maintained far from the sun’s rays.
At variable depths, estimated at between twelve and fifteen terrestrial leagues, in immense excavations, there were seas, continents, rivers and an abundant vegetation. There, in the caves closer to the center, where a mild and even temperature still reigned, the vaults of which rose to prodigious heights, where the air was denser and where, for lack of daylight, an electrically-sourced light maintained by cosmic phenomena reigned, there was room for an entire human race. It was there that the last inhabitants of our satellite had retired, with their sciences, their industries, their institutions and their laws, resolved to defend their lives until the last moment.
While terrestrial humankind was awakening painfully to intellectual and moral life, and rising, through long secular periods, from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age and the Iron Age; while the first human tribes, dispersed and wandering through the gigantic primitive forests, passed from the condition of hunters to that of pastors, and then agriculturalists, and finally industrialists, the inhabitants of the Moon continued their existence of uninterrupted progress in the subterranean world where life was maintained.
In those calm and tranquil regions, where the temperature was almost invariable, where the influence of seasons was not manifest, where humankind did not have to defend itself against the blind forces of a hostile nature, in which the struggle for existence did not have the bitterness that it presents among us, those beings, adapted to life in an environment supercharged with oxygen, and where vitality was, in consequence, more energetic and more resistant, had far surpassed the level of knowledge at which we had lingered for such a long time.
Afflicted with fewer needs than us, they were exempt from the majority of our vices and our avidities. Less preoccupied with the satisfaction of base or egotistical passions, they had devoted themselves more to the cultivation of their souls and their morality was as advanced as their science. After having experimented in previous ages with the various political forms between which we hesitate down here, they had arrived at a simple and rational social organization in which everyone occupied the exact place assured by their degree of intelligence and moral worth.
For long centuries, already, even before the cooling of the surface had constrained them to take refuge in their new abode, they had been preoccupied with the neighboring star whose enormous disk shone above their heads, in the orbit in which they moved, of which they knew that their own world was only the modest satellite. They had measured the distance that separated them and, thanks to powerful optical instruments that they had constructed long before us, they had observed it attentively and studied it carefully. No part of its surface had escaped their investigations, and its constitution was well known to them.
They knew, and were in no doubt, that the Earth was inhabited; they had even been able, in a certain measure, to track the development of its life. What had happened on the globe they inhabited had informed them regarding the history of the terrestrial globe. Their eyes had followed the transformations of its surface; they had seen continents emerge and disappear, and the vast forests of prehistoric ages diminish with the centuries. The great rivers that furrowed the terrestrial continents were apparent to them. In the principal valleys or mouths of the most important watercourses, they had seen patches appear of different color and appearance from neighboring regions, and in which the increasing perfection of their optical instruments had eventually enabled them to recognize the agglomerations of human habitations.
With the progress that they had accomplished in the astronomical sciences and natural sciences, having considerable forces of nature at their disposal, they had soon conceived the desire to enter into communication with the inhabitants of that neighboring world, and they had often tried to attracted their attention. In that epoch, however, the peoples that were beginning to cover the surface of the Earth were still too crude and barbaric to think of gazing at, let alone studying, the worlds orbiting over their heads. If, sometimes, their gazes has risen into the depths of night as far as those brilliant dots, their blind superstition had seen divinities therein, whose favor it was necessary to conquer, or whose harmful influence it was necessary to ward off, by means of prayers and sacrifices.
None of the efforts made by the inhabitants of the Moon had been crowned with success; all their interrogations had remained without response. So, discouraged, they had ended up thinking that, either their observations were inexact, and the Earth was uninhabited, or that the beings that populated it, deprived of intelligence, did not rise much above the animal level. And the attempts, commenced with a certain ardor, had remained unrepeated for long centuries.
Later, after their conditions of existence had changed so completely, when they were able to measure with an almost infallible certainty the duration of time that they still had to live, they had resumed directing their gaze toward the world that was still continuing its majestic course so close at hand.
Further improvements in the art of constructing optical instruments had made new and more precise observations possible. Signs appeared to them: traces similar to canals, geometrical figures that might be the walls of cities, whose regular forms seemed to reveal the presence of active and intelligent beings; monuments of which they were able, by measuring their shadows, to calculate the height, had told them that the inhabitants of the Earth were in possession of fairly powerful mechanical means, and they had concluded
that they were somewhat advanced in the knowledge of sciences. Their desire to establish regular and sustained communication with them was augmented.
As the signs by means of which, in previous ages, they had tried to attract the attention of the inhabitants of the Earth with powerful luminous sources, had not succeeded, they had thought of other methods. Since they had not replied to appeals, it was necessary to compel their attention by sending them messages directly, brusquely if necessary, the origin and significance of which could not be mistaken. As the laws of ballistics had been familiar to them for a long time, it had been child’s play for them to send projectiles beyond the two world’s zone of neutral attraction, whose weight would then ensure that they fell on Earth.
But as seven-tenths of the surface of the terrestrial globe is occupied by oceans, the majority of the lunar messages were inevitably lost in the bosom of the seas. In addition, vast spaces on the various continents are either completely deserted or inhabited by savage, ignorant populations absolutely incapable of understanding such invitations and of responding to them. Finally, those lunar projectiles which the hazard of their fall had enabled to fall in civilized regions plunged, for the most part, deeply into the soil, which closed up after their passage and concealed them from the knowledge of the inhabitants of those countries.
It had required a prodigious combination of fortuitous circumstances for one of those messages to be conserved intact, discovered and understood.
That was the one that Marcel had shown to his two friends. Although he had not been able to suspect the conditions in which lunar humankind lived, the audacious engineer had not been mistaken in affirming its existence, and it was in the midst of that humankind that he was about to find himself thrown, with his two companions in adventure.
An Unknown World Page 8
