An Unknown World

by Pierre de Sélènes

  At the appointed moment, a delegation of the Supreme Council, at the head of which was Rugel, came to fetch the three strangers from their residence and take them to the great and venerable Aldeovaze.

  The road that led to the palace, which they traveled on foot, surrounded by the sages who formed their escort, was lined by the crowds of inhabitants attracted by a legitimate curiosity. In the ranks of that multitude, however, there was no shouting, no tumult, no hasty and indiscreet fervor; they all kept to their places calmly and with dignity, and there, where all the members of the crowd had respect for themselves and their neighbors, there was no need for regulations or for police to avoid ill-timed or turbulent manifestations.

  As the cortege went by, everyone bowed to salute the newcomers, with a smile of benevolent welcome, and only a slight murmur marked the surprise caused to those who were not yet familiar with them by the sight of the intrepid voyagers who had come in such a strange fashion from a neighboring world.

  The weather was calm and mild; a slight breeze was causing light vapors to move through the air, which were floating like veils of fine airborne gauze. The little bay in the depths of which the old capital stood was covered with vessels of various sizes filled with curiosity-seekers who had come from all points of the shore, avid to enjoy the spectacle that was in preparation.

  At the very moment when the Head of State came to occupy the throne that had been reserved for him, around which was grouped the imposing assembly of the members of the Council, who were joined, for that exceptional circumstance by all the high dignitaries of the State and the provincial governors, the three strangers appeared on the terrace.

  A long shiver of curiosity ran through the crowd, all the way to the most distant ranks of the audience. The strangeness of their costumes—they had conserved their European garments—identified them to the attention of the spectators.

  They were momentarily dazzled by the magnificent scene they had before their eyes.

  The face of the prudent Aldeovaze was imprinted with a majestic gravity tempered by an expression of benevolence and mildness. He had stood up to honor his guests, and his tall stature, uncurbed by the weight of years, his head, crowned with long white hair, and his beard, whose silvery waves descended over his chest, gave him an appearance of indescribable grandeur. The vivacity of his gaze, and the energy detectable in his regular features, which age had not withered, denoted a soul in which generosity had not been weakened in any way by the pressure of the will.

  All those surrounding him had stood up with him. Guided by Rugel, their introducer, Marcel, Jacques and Lord Rodilan advanced, bowed profoundly, and waited.

  “Inhabitants of Earth,” said Aldeovaze, in a grave and sonorous voice, “be welcome among us. Since the day when your courage permitted you to cross the distance separating us, when you came as the messengers of a world imperfectly known thus far, we have conceived the hope, caressed for a long time, of finally entering into a sustained relationship with the globe around which we are gravitating.

  “We wanted to give your reception an exceptional glamour, in order that everyone here would know that a new age is about to begin. Two humankinds, which seemed to be separated forever by the inexorable laws of nature, will be able, thanks to you, to enter into regular communication. We have no doubt that these communications will be fruitful.

  “For a long time we have been thinking about it; our scientists have tried to attract the attention of their terrestrial brothers. Those attempts have been futile thus far; your audacity has resolved the problem. The genius of science, which is only one of the manifestations of the Supreme Power that rules the universe, has brought you to us, in the midst of perils over which your great courage was able to triumph.

  “We hope that this is only a beginning, and it is perhaps permissible for us to anticipate a time when, thanks to the incessant progress of the human mind, the worlds that gravitate around a common center, linked to one another, will form a single vast family. That would be an immortal glory for us.

  “Go and enter into communication with our scientists; study with them the geological constitution of our world, our sciences, our arts and our industries. Take account of the state of our mores, our customs and our institutions; and when you have acquired a complete knowledge of our civilization, instruct us in your turn and enable us to know the world of which you are the representatives.”

  Aldeovaze had finished speaking.

  His words, collected by a vibratory apparatus and amplified, thanks to an ingenious application of electricity, arrived clearly and precisely all the way to the last ranks of spectators, who were watching the moving ceremony from the middle of the bay. Others apparatus transmitted the speeches exchanged in the capital as far as the most distant provinces, whose inhabitants, gathered in the public squares, were, in a way, attending the solemnities.

  “Glorious and venerated leader of the world where we have received such a cordial welcome,” replied Marcel, in an emotional voice, “The children of Earth salute you. The noble and generous words that we have just heard have filled our hearts with a profound joy and an eternal gratitude.

  “The high hopes that you have conceived have animated us with a new ardor. We shall be proud to serve as intermediaries between the two humankinds, who are as yet unacquainted, and in order to arrive at that admirable result, we are ready, supported by your august benevolence, to make every effort, and to brave any perils.”

  A murmur of approval, which was the highest expression of enthusiasm in that calm and ponderous race, ran through the crowd.

  Aldeovaze had descended from his throne and was conversing in a familiar fashion with Marcel. All the members of the Supreme Council surrounded Jacques and Lord Rodilan, charmed by the facility with which the newcomers spoke their language. They were interrogated regarding the tribulations of their journey; people wanted to hear from their own mouths the story of the impressions they had experienced during that formidable journey. They were asked what they thought about the world they had come to visit in such extraordinary conditions. Their courage was admired; their eulogy and their names were on all lips.

  Jacques and Lord Rodilan lent themselves with a good grace to that insistent but always discreet curiosity. Everything that they had seen in the last four months—that humankind, so different from their own; that environment, relatively restricted, in which a precious specimen of an eminently perfectible race was conserved, as if in a hothouse; those people among whom nature alone maintained life without them being constrained to labor to that end themselves; those arts, so delicate, those sciences, so complete, those institutions, so simple and fecund—had maintained their souls in a perpetual state of admiration and wonder.

  Jacques’ preoccupations had dissipated, his melancholy had vanished, and, returned to his natural ardor and generosity, he delivered himself entirely to these new friends, whose sympathetic welcome had gone to his heart.

  If some member of London’s Pall Mall Club had been able to see Lord Rodilan at that moment, he would not have recognized the phlegmatic and cold gentleman who had paraded his inexorable ennui through the gilded drawing rooms of Waterloo Place. The atmosphere of spleen in which he had enveloped himself had definitively melted on contact with those sincere and disinterested affections. Everything he saw and heard excited his curiosity and his interest; he now found that it was well worth the trouble of being alive.

  Thus, our two friends responded with a cordial enthusiasm and communicative cheerfulness to the questions that were addressed to them from all directions. Sometimes, the comments that brought out Jacques’ expansive character, and Lord Rodilan’s incisive and lively turn of mind even brought smiles to the lips of their serious listeners.

  When the reception was concluded, Aldeovaze, accompanied by the three strangers and followed by the members of the Council and the dignitaries who had taken part in the ceremony, went into one of the rooms of the palace where all the objects removed from the shel
l, which were to be the objects of comparison and study for the scientists of the lunar world, had been set out in methodical order. It will be remembered that Marcel, convinced that he would encounter a new humankind on the Earth’s satellite, had equipped himself with numerous items comprising specimens of our arts and industries, which could give an idea of the level of advancement of our sciences.

  All of that was the object of attentive examination on the part of the learned assembly. Those serious and reflective minds rapidly took account of the progress that terrestrial humankind had accomplished, the various phases through which it had passed , and were sometimes astonished that a world so contemporary with their own was, in certain respects, lagging so far behind. Some of the theories exposed by Marcel and Jacques left them rather cold; they seemed to be saying: “It’s a long time since we surpassed those phases of science.”

  Nevertheless, the photograph albums, of which the shell contained and abundant collection, excited their admiration.

  At first, they had mistaken the pictures for drawings of an extreme finesse; their astonishment was great when they learned that it was solar light alone, captured and fixed on glass plates coated with a sensitive substance, which had designed those images. They were very familiar with the laws of optics, the refraction of luminous rays passing through lenses and their projection on a screen, but the idea had never occurred to them of trying to capture those fugitive images and rendering them durable.

  Marcel enjoyed their astonishment. He showed them the photographic apparatus that he had brought and explained its functioning to them. When one of those gathered around him exclaimed: “It’s very unfortunate that we’re deprived of the light of the Sun,” he reassured him, and promised to produce, with the aid of the light illuminating the lunar world, pictures similar to those that they had before their eyes.

  Among the objects exhibited were the weapons with which the three explorers had equipped themselves: revolvers and repeating rifles of the latest model. The albums also contained images of powerful engines of destruction created by the genius of war, the irrefutable proof of the inferiority of our race. The scientists who considered those instruments of death or turned the pages of the albums had a profound knowledge of ballistics, but the men in question, who had always lived in an atmosphere of concord and peace could not imagine that human creatures reaching that point of sanguinary madness and killing one another to dispute the miserable shreds of the planet they occupied. At first, therefore, they only saw them as items of scientific apparatus.

  Marcel was careful not to disabuse them. He decided that he would inform a few chosen scientists later, in confidential conversations, about the lamentable history of our humankind: its beginnings, when it was scarcely distinguishable from animality, and its slow progress, in which each step had been marked by bloody conflicts and every conquest had had its price in grief and tears.

  He hoped that those minds, endowed with noble philosophical conceptions, would understand that human genius had required perseverance and faith in the future to triumph over so many difficulties and perils. He already sensed that that was the only means of elevating slightly the sad condition of the inhabitants of Earth in the eyes of those superior beings.

  Some of the scientists making up the assembly had paused to examine a magnificent atlas of anatomy, and Jacques—who, they were not unaware, had studied the medical sciences and physiology deeply in his capacity as a doctor—was explaining the mechanism of the organs of nutrition. It was with the ever-alert curiosity of minds avid for knowledge that they considered the human structure, which only differed from theirs on that one point.

  That point was, however, of great importance, and one of those surrounding Jacques could not resist saying to him: “Friend, I won’t hide it from you that at first, when we saw that nature, less generous to you than to us, had not liberated you from the painful obligation of renewing the elements necessary to your life every day, we thought that your race must have very little leisure time left to cultivate its thinking faculties, so we were agreeably surprised to learn that you have advanced so far in the study of the sciences. What we see of your progress in all orders of knowledge amazes us and charms us at the same time.”

  “It’s because the need to nourish ourselves,” Jacques replied, smiling, “has done for the inhabitants of the Earth—to a lesser degree, I hasten to admit—what the love of truth alone has done for you. It’s because they were constrained to those material necessities, and had to satisfy them at any cost, that humans became ingenious in seeking and finding. Each of their conquests, while satisfying their minds, also increased their well-being, and they found the compensation for their efforts therein.”

  In the meantime, Lord Rodilan, deploying a terrestrial planisphere before the eyes of another group, explained to them in broad terms how civilization, born between two rivers whose courses he designated on the Asian continent, had gradually developed, following the march of the Sun, and had initially passed to an almost imperceptible country with profoundly fragmented coasts named Greece, to establish itself thereafter in the neighboring Italian peninsula and eventually to advance to the shore of the great Atlantic Ocean.

  Then, placing his finger on two small islands that formed the most advanced point of the occidental continent, he exclaimed: “Now, there is the center of modern civilization! From those islands, so tiny in surface area but so great in the genius of their inhabitants, thousands of vessels incessantly set forth to all parts of the globe in search of the most useful products and the most precious merchandise, in order to distribute them thereafter over the surface of the Earth. There isn’t a single country in which its language isn’t spoken. England is the name of that nation, the foremost in the world, and there isn’t a point on the globe that doesn’t recognize its supremacy. Vast and rich regions are submissive to it.”

  And his finger ran proudly over the Indian peninsula, the Australian continent, southern Africa and the entire country north of the St. Lawrence. He drew himself up to his full height; all his British pride revived. One might have thought that he believed himself to be in the midst of one of those conferences in which intractable Albion defends its most unjustifiable pretentions so arrogantly.

  “Now, now,” said Marcel, suddenly, having overheard his companion’s last words. “It seems to me, Milord, that you’re selling France short.” Then, turning to his listeners, who seemed surprised by the vivacity of the argument, because they never departed from their calm and gravity in their own discussion, he said: “Far be it from me to have any thought of diminishing the illustrious nation to which our friend belongs, for you’ve already suspected, given the warmth of his pleading, that he’s talking about his own country, but it’s permissible for me to claim on behalf of my own country, France”—he indicated with his finger the part of Europe of what all peoples have successively pronounced the name with envy or love—“the share of glory that is her due.

  “If England is great in terms of commerce and industry, France is no less so in terms of heart and thought. Always in the human avant-garde, it has always held the torch of progress high, lighting the way that other nations have followed. There is not a great and generous idea that she has not propagated and for which she has not shed blood. Her disinterested devotion has always been at the service of justice and right; she has fought for all just causes; an enemy of all oppressors and a friend of all the oppressed, she has seen her name blessed by all those she has freed; her triumphs have made all other peoples pale with jealousy, and although she had sometimes been defeated, she has only been crushed by weight of numbers or surprised by treason.”

  While Marcel was allowing himself to get carried away by his patriotism Jacques had drawn closer to him and shook his hand forcefully.

  “Bravo, friend!” he said.

  A little blood had risen to Lord Rodilan’s ordinarily pale cheeks, and he was doubtless getting ready to reply with some acerbity when the prudent Aldeovaze, who had b
een listening attentively to the debate, stepped forward, smiling.

  “I see,” he said, “that you belong to two great nations of the Earth, and the audacity of your enterprise proves to us that you must count among the most eminent of your compatriots. But at the distance you find yourselves from your fatherlands, is it really fitting to reawaken rivalries that we cannot appreciate here? The work to which you have committed yourselves is only just beginning; you ought to devote yourselves entirely to bringing it to a successful conclusion.”

  “Wisdom is speaking through your mouth,” Marcel replied.

  And the three friends shook hands.

  XV. The First Signals

  Seven months had gone by since the departure of the shell launched by the Columbiad toward the lunar regions when, all of a sudden, improbably, unprecedented and amazing news spread through the scientific world.

  The Scientific American, in its 29 July 188- issue,15 published the following telegram, immediately reproduced by the press of the old and new words:

  Long’s Peak Observatory, Rocky Mountains, 28 July, 8 a.m.

  Alphabetical luminous signals appeared distinctly last night at irregular intervals on dark part of lunar disk, near Hansteen crater, southern part of Ocean of Storms.

  W. Burnett

  At first it was thought to be one of those colossal hoaxes familiar in American puffery, but the universally-recognized serious character of the director of the Long’s Peak Observatory did not permit long hesitation over that point.

  From then on, from St. Petersburg to the Cape of Good Hope, and from New York to Melbourne, a thousand telescopes were feverishly aimed at the Moon.

  All the scientific journals and reviews were resounding with passionate debates. Each of the observers, in accordance with the power of the optical instrument at his disposal, interpreted in his own way the supposed luminous signals that the astronomers in the Rocky Mountains thought they had seen. The majority had widened their eyes in vain, without anything appearing in the field of their telescopes or binoculars, so they flatly denied the phenomenon and treated the honorable W. Burnett as a visionary, with insistent mockery.