An Unknown World

by Pierre de Sélènes

  They would gather around them an elite staff, animated like them with an ardent love for humanity, and similarly resolved to devote themselves to that sublime task. In spite of the corruption of the century and the bitter egotism that was devouring it, Marcel had no doubt that he recruit those disinterested auxiliaries; he held his fellows in high enough esteem to believe that there still remained a few souls among them fond of pure virtue.

  The engineer finished explained the general plan of the endeavor as he conceived it. His friends welcomed it enthusiastically, each one proud of the place reserved for them and eager to enter into the campaign.

  Hélène shook Marcel’s hand emotionally, saying: “Thank you—you’ve understood my heart’s desire.”

  As soon as the sale of a certain quantity of stones—carried out in the largest markets in the world—had permitted sufficiently considerable sums to be amassed, they set resolutely to work. In the capitals they had chosen, benevolent establishments were soon built, in which all the resources that modern science could provide were brought together, sagely administered, from which everything resembling bureaucratic rigidity was banished, along with the brutal formality that sometimes renders the alms falling from public charity so bitter to its recipients.

  All those who came were welcomed benevolently and treated with generosity; they felt that they were loved and went away comforted and reconciled with life.

  Then a movement occurred of which philanthropists had long dreamed, but for whose realization they had never dared to hope. On seeing the admirable results produced by that truly Christian and entirely human fashion of doing good, a great surge of generosity and fraternity—not the fraternity that displays itself ostentatiously on public monuments, but that which truly ought to animate all hearts—became manifest with an irresistible force.

  Everywhere, public powers were moved to action.

  It seemed that people suddenly understood, for the first time, that humans are siblings, that those who have the mission to govern them ought before anything else to love them, and that, in a civilized nation worthy of the name, no one ought to suffer, except by their own fault or the effect of the fatal laws to which nature submits humankind.

  Autocrats, legislative assemblies were seen to decree, with an emotional fervor, a series of measures designed to put an end, everywhere, to the frightful iniquities under which so many human creatures were weighed down, and which divided modern societies into two camps, one of human beings favored with all the gifts of fortune and who do not think sufficiently about the miseries of others, and the other of the unfortunates whose sufferings often render them unjust and too willing to listen to counsels of envy and hatred.

  And thanks to the initiative of a few generous and devoted souls, an era of justice, happiness and love appeared to be commencing on Earth.

  Conclusion

  After having witnessed his friends’ triumph, Mathieu-Rollère had resumed his position at the Observatoire de Paris. Modestly, he enjoyed the luster that all these events had cast upon his name. Now, people listened to him deferentially, treating him as a great man, and it was not without an ironic smile, thinking about the past, that he now received so many marks of respect from the same people who had treated him so unworthily.

  Soon, moreover, the death of the illustrious scientist who directed the foremost astronomical establishment in France left that post vacant, and the Minister of Public Education hastened to call upon the man whose robust faith had contributed in such large measure to the solution of the great problem of interplanetary communication. That was the worthy coronation of a life entirely devoted to the veneration of science.

  The engineer Dumesnil, whose name had also become famous, was passionate about the endeavor of which he had been the organizer, and made haste to return to Algeria in order to resume the series of conversations with the lunar world. A year later, great progress had been made. The French government had had no difficulty obtaining from Parliament the funds necessary for the construction of a telescope equal in power to the one in the Rocky Mountains, which was now installed on one of the highest summits in the Atlas.

  A special telegraph wire kept Dumesnil is constant communication with that post, and he could then transmit without delay to Marcel and his friends all the information he received from the Moon.

  The exchange of signals was undoubtedly slow, because it could only be carried out for a certain period during each lunar month, but it was achieved in a regular and continuous fashion. Precious information and interesting details were collected by that means, and the two worlds learned more about one another every day.

  Those who had shared the same life for two years had not forgotten one another. Those on Earth kept their friends up to date with all that they were doing to realize Orealis’ wishes. Those on the Moon, in their turn, had let them know that the prudent Aldeovaze was dead, that Rugel had been appointed to replace him, and that Orealis had married Azali.

  Neither time nor distance could weaken the links of amity that united those elite souls.34

  The communications had been going on for six years, and it was hoped that with the ever-increasing progress of science, they would become more frequent and more rapid, when Marcel received a telegram one day from Dumesnil which said: Large flame appeared in field of telescope. Communications interrupted.

  And from that moment on, the eyes of observers searched the satellite’s disk in vain; no evidence of life appeared on its surface, which seemed to have fallen back into death.

  What had happened? What formidable explosion of subterranean forces had annihilated the human race in the midst of which the three explorers had lived? Had inexorable nature, whose laws it seemed to have violated, rendered it to oblivion at a stroke?

  No one ever knew.

  The years passed. The generous institutions due to the initiative of Marcel and his friends gradually fell into neglect, and were then abandoned; the world fell back into its routine and its indifference.

  The very memory of those marvelous adventures faded away, and was no more, in the souls of those who had been their heroes, than a dream whose contours became more blurred every day.

  Eventually, when, curbed by old age, he evoked the memory of it, Marcel wondered sadly whether it might all have been a dream.

  Notes

  1 The mountain of Long’s Peak is real, but the observatory constructed there in De la Terre à la Lune is fictitious.

  2 I have translated the author’s French names for lunar features into English, although scientific parlance usually retains the Latin names, in this case Mare Frigoris.

  3 In the original text these images are represented graphically, and these verbal descriptions are improvised.

  4 Given that the text explicitly dates the Columbiad’s first voyage to the 1860s, the figure of 18 years establishes that the date of the present events cannot be later than 1887. Eighteen years from the 1865 publication date of Verne’s novel would be 1883.

  5 Henri-Victor Regnault and Jules de Reiset worked in collaboration during the 1850s on respiration processes, conducting many experiments on animals; among other devices they developed a system for removing exhaled carbon dioxide from air and replenishing the oxygen consumed, which maintained its respirability in a closed environment for some time. The idea was still new when Jules Verne adopted it in De la Terre à la Lune.

  6 Louis-Paul Cailletet first succeeded in producing droplets of liquid oxygen in 1877.

  7 Amédée Mouchez (1821-1892) was appointed director of the Observatoire in 1878. His naval career had mostly been spent in hydrographic studies and attempts to perfect the measurement of longitude with the aid of scientific instruments; he had also made important observations of the 1873 transit of Venus from the Indian Ocean.

  8 The “Sea of Rains” is the Mare Imbrium. The reason why the craters are said to “rise up” is that the author is taking it for granted—as many astronomers then did—that the lunar craters are volcanic, and
must be situated on top of mountains. That mistaken assumption plays an important role in determining the notion of the Moon’s surface and history developed and depicted in the novel.

  9 The mistaken assumption that travelers from the Earth to the Moon would only experience weightlessness briefly, while crossing a “neutral zone” in which the attractions of terrestrial and lunar gravity are equal, is an error of which dramatic use is made in De la Terre à la Lune. As well as being reproduced here in passing, the idea was afforded much greater melodramatic importance in Georges Le Faure and Henri de Graffigny’s Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant russe (tr. as The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist, Black Coat Press, 2 volumes, ISBN 978-1-934543-81-8 and 978-1-934543-82-5), whose first three volumes appeared in 1888-1890 and a fourth in 1896, although Un Monde inconnu was probably written before its publication.

  10 The Sea of Serenity is the Mare Serenitatis. The “Marsh of Mists” (Marais des Brouillards in French), first identified in the rather quaint map drawn up by Montanari in the seventeenth century, was more usually known as the Palus Nebularum before the feature was banished from lunar maps entirely, although it was still included in the maps reproduced in The Moon (1876) by Edmund Neison, which the author of the present work might have used for reference.

  11 December 15 fell on a Saturday in 1883, supporting the notion that that is the year in which the present action is taking place, although the author’s arithmetic then goes awry, as the original incorrectly records the 19th as Tuesday and the 20th as Wednesday; I have corrected the days to make them consistent with the first date.

  12 William Parsons, third Earl of Rosse and Léon Foucault were important pioneers in the development of reflecting telescopes, the latter improving considerably on the latter’s 1848 model in the apparatus he constructed a decade later.

  13 Intensive investigation of the properties of gyroscopes was conducted in France by Léon Foucault in the 1850s, and the development of electric motors in the 1860s created the possibility of causing them to spin indefinitely, thus opening up the possibility of this kind of application to speculation.

  14 Ozone, whose chemical formula was determined in 1865 By Jacques-Louis Sorel, was considered for the remainder of the 19th century and beyond to be a healthy component of the atmosphere, to be eagerly sought out by those is search of a tonic; its toxicity, determined by its powerful oxidant effect, was only gradually realized in the 20th century, so the author of the present work was completely unaware of it.

  15 Although Scientific American did not publish a issue on 29 July 1884, it did publish one on 19 July of that year.

  16 The Observatoire de Nice, founded by the banker Raphael Bischoffheim (the philanthropist whom Marcel mentioned, without naming him, when first explaining his plan to Jacques) began operations in 1880, when Henri Perrotin was appointed as its director.

  17 Author’s note: “Scipio Emilian recounts that he was, in a dream, lifted into the heavens by the soul of his friend Scipio Africanus: ‘What is that sound,’ I said to him, ‘so powerful and harmonious, that fills my ears.’

  ‘It is the sound that results from the course and movement of the stars themselves,” he told me, “which rotate in unequal times but whose variety is fixed by an immutable law, and which, mingling their low and high notes, form in their ensemble a melodious concert. For not only is it impossible that such vast movement should continue in silence, but, by a natural law, the outermost elements produce a low note on one side and a high note on the other. Whereas the highest of all, the celestial zone of stars whose revolution is more rapid, moves with a high, sharp note, this one of the moon, because it is the lowest, produces the deepest tone of all, for the earth, remaining motionless, is firmly located at the center of the universe. The revolutions of those eight spheres, two of which have the same force, produce seven sounds with distinct intervals, and that is the mystic bond of all things in the universe. By imitating this with stringed instruments and melodies, learned men have opened the way back to this place for themselves, like other men of noble nature who have followed godlike aims in their human life. But human ears overpowered by the sound have become deaf, and you have no duller sense than hearing…. The sound of the whole universe revolving at the highest speed is so awful that the ears of men cannot bear it, just as you are unable to look directly at the sun, being overpowered by the force of its rays.’ Cicero Republic, Book VI: Scipio’s Dream.”

  18 It is not obvious why the author thinks that hydrogen needs to be absorbed by his modified organisms in the pure state rather than in combination in water vapor, while nitrogen needs to be combined with hydrogen in ammonia. His seeming unawareness of the toxicity of ammonia (at least to visitors from Earth) and the necessity of small quantities of many other elements in composing living flesh is also odd.

  19 As the author has no knowledge of Hertzian waves, this hypothetical speculation is more enterprising that it would have seemed by the time the novel was published, and it is a pity that he did not see fit to imagine any technological extrapolations of the hypothesis.

  20 The Austrian-born Maurice Loewy (1833-1907) began work at the Observatoire de Paris in 1860, and eventually became its director in 1896, after which he supervised work on a monumental atlas of the Moon, eventually published in 1910.

  21 Author’s note: “This discovery, since revealed by Schiaparelli, has been confirmed by Monsieur Perrotin.” This note was obviously added some time after the text was written; the “discovery” in question was announced by Schiaparelli in 1889, and Perrotin supported the claim shortly thereafter; the error was not corrected until the 1960s.

  22 Although this was not the earliest description of a fictitious “space suit” by the time the Flammarion edition was published in 1896 it was probably the earliest when this passage was written, and is more sophisticated than the descriptions of unpressurized suits contained in other 19th century novels.

  23 “The true goddess was revealed in her step.” The quotation is from Virgil’s Aeneid.

  24 Dom Pedro II (1825-1891), who had succeeded to the imperial throne at the age of five in 1831, was indeed passionate about science, and did his very best to promote research in physics, chemistry and astronomy, as well as fighting long and hard for the abolition of slavery. This part of the story must be set prior to 1887, when his health worsened dramatically, making way for a military coup in 1889. Within the story’s chronology it is probably 1885, but the author’s awareness of the coup must mean that the reference in question was added after that date.

  25 The reader is left to presume that some of the lunar observatory’s astronomers will undergo a crash course in the French language, in order to continue sending and receiving messages during the absence of their guests.

  26 Hall crater, named after Asaph Hall, is in another part of the moon, and the direction in which the explorers would he heading to reach the invisible surface, given their starting-point, would be south-west rather than south-east, probably taking them between the craters Cruger and Eichstadt. Similarly, Troubelot is nowhere near the area they seem to be in, so the author’s lunar geography seems have gone seriously awry in this passage.

  27 The rounded valley in the Pyrenees known as the Cirque de Gavarnie is about 800 meters in diameter.

  28 An izard is a kind of chamois.

  29 The quotation, slightly misrendered in the original text, is from Virgil’s Georgics. The passage translates, approximately, as; “The time will come when the plowman…will marvel at the giant bones he has exhumed.”

  30 Alas, Flammarion, working on the hypothesis that lunar craters are volcanic, had no chance of finding the true explanation, which is now generally thought—according to the hypothesis advanced by Eugene Shoemaker in the 1960s—to be that the “ray systems” associated with Tycho and some other craters are streaks of ejecta thrown out by the impact that was actually responsible for the crater.

  31 Verney Cameron was, like Livingstone and Stanley,
a pioneering explorer of central Africa, the first to cross the continent from shore to shore in 1875. Louis Binger conducted his explorations at a later date, publishing an account of his 1889 expedition in 1891; Rodilan could have known of Binger’s earlier activities in 1885, when other evidence within the text suggests that this passage ought to be set, but it is unlikely. It is possible that the novel had been set aside for some time during the writing.

  32 The name of the D’Alembert Mountains has been dropped from modern lunar maps, where they are nowadays simple regarded as part of the Cordillera chain.

  33 This is the way that self-proclaimed humanitarians generally behave in fiction of the period; in reality, it was the diseases introduced by Westerners, rather than their bullets, that reduced the population of the Marquesas to considerably less than half its previous level within a few decades of the French asserting their control over the islands in the mid-19th century.

  34 The original text might well have ended at this point, the subsequent paragraphs being added by a different hand, perhaps on the instruction of the publisher, anxious that his readers, in 1896, would be too well aware that the world-changing events explicitly attributed to the 1880s had not occurred.

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