As Ossipoff concluded this speech, the company of Selenites reappeared. Two of them were pushing a sort of cart in which the scientists and his companions were obliged to embark. Then they went into a long underground tunnel, and after several minutes of vertiginously rapid progress they returned to the light of the Sun. The Terrans now found themselves in the middle of a crater that Fricoulet estimated to be several kilometers wide and which had to be the principal crater of a volcano. This immense arena was bordered by high mountains, whose capriciously jagged summits and sharp peaks extended as far as the eye could see into space. From the bottom of this chimney the sky seemed deep blue, almost black; in spite of the blinding light of the Sun, a few first-magnitude stars sparkled therein, like enormous diamonds in a jewel-box.
“I’m astonished,” murmured Fricoulet, “not to feel any difficulty breathing, even though the pressure is very weak.”
“Pooh!” replied Ossipoff. “It corresponds to that indicated by the barometer on the highest peak in the Andes—which is to say, at an altitude of 7500 meters.”
“It’s claimed, however,” Gontran put in, “that at such an altitude one feels the most painful symptoms of ‘mountain sickness’—and yet I don’t feel anything similar. On the contrary, it seems to me that my lungs are working with marvelous ease. Strangely enough, my stomach remains silent.”
“It must be the case,” Ossipoff replied, “that the atmosphere in which we are plunged has a composition completely different from that of the Earth, of which I shall take account by analyzing it. What seems certain is that oxygen is found here in a more considerable proportion than the breathable air of our native planet, and that the atmosphere also includes other gases.”
Meanwhile, the cart continued to roll across the plain that extended across the bottom of the crater.
Suddenly, Farenheit pointed out a shining mass emerging from the ground in the distance. “Our vehicle!” he cried.
It was indeed the vehicle that had brought the bold travelers far from the Earth. It was embedded a foot deep in the rocky soil and its impact had sprayed dross and lava debris over a fairly wide radius. The glass of one porthole was broken, the base was crumpled and the metal was completely burned through in places.
As he observed this damage, Fricoulet shook his head “God knows how we’ll be able to go back,” he murmured.
The Selenites had come closer and, pointing to the shell, seemed to be asking for explanations in that respect.
Ossipoff picked up a metal bar that had been dislodged from the vehicle, and by that means, as easily as if he were using a pencil, he drew two spheres of unequal size in the dust, as Fricoulet had on the wall of the volcano. He connected them by means of a straight line and completed the drawing by sketching the shape of the vehicle at a point on the line.
Immediately, one of the Selenites knelt down in order to be within closer range of his interlocutor. Then, by means of an expressive mime, he appeared to ask whether the larger sphere drawn on the ground was a heavenly body.
Ossipoff nodded his head several times. Then, to make himself better understood, the scientist drew the Copernican system in the sand, ranking the planets in the order of their distance from the Sun, which he depicted as an immense sphere. When he reached the Earth he drew the orbit of the Moon and called the giant’s particular attention to these two worlds.
The Selenite pointed to the shell in an interrogative manner.
“He’s asking if that’s the means by which we arrived?” said Fricoulet.62
Ossipoff made a gesture signifying “yes.”
“Tell them that we’re ambassadors sent by the Earth to its satellite,” murmured Flammermont, jokingly.
“Rather ask them if they’ve seen another projectile in these parts like that one,” muttered Farenheit, who had not abandoned his quest for vengeance. And he added: “Oh, to be able to get my hands on that scoundrel Sharp…”
Meanwhile, the mute dialogue between the Lunarian and Mikhail Ossipoff continued. The giant put his finger on his tongue; the astronomer shook his head negatively.
“They’ll never be able to understand one another,” murmured Selena.
She was undoubtedly mistaken, for, at that moment, the Selenite got up and, turning toward his companions, began talking to them animatedly, sometimes pointing to the Terrans and sometimes the diagrams drawn in the sand by Ossipoff. Finally, he took another by the hand and, drawing him closer to the old scientist, pointed to him and said, in a loud voice: “Telinga.” He touched Telinga’s tongue and then Ossipoff’s ear. Afterwards, striking his breast to indicate himself, he said: “Roum Sertchoum.”
The one that had just been named Telinga took off a garment consisting of long bands covered with a sort of indecipherable script. At the same time, he mimed drawing characters thereon.
“This one,” said Fricoulet to Flammermont, “is evidently one of your illustrious namesake’s fellow astronomers. It’s probably this one that will be charged with our instruction—for, if I understand the other one’s mute language, we’re to be taught to talk.”
As he finished this speech, the Selenites pointed at the cart. Before getting into it, Ossipoff, by means of an eloquent mime, confided the vehicle to the care of the indigenes. Then the cart got under way again, plunging into a dark underground tunnel. After many turns and detours, it ended up in an immense room lit from one side by daylight. Once in this room they were left alone.
“Prisoners!” exclaimed Jonathan Farenheit, angrily.
Ossipoff put a hand on his arm. “Calm down, Mr. Farenheit,” he said, with great self-composure. “There’s been a misunderstanding. Life is merely a matter of explaining oneself.”
The American shrugged his shoulders furiously. “Explaining oneself?” he growled. “And how are you going to explain yourself to these savages, who don’t speak a word of English?”
“It’s merely a matter of learning their language.”
“I’m not going to do that, myself,” Farenheit retorted.
“But I am,” the old man replied, firmly. “You know that Russians are the foremost linguists in the word.”
“Will it take long?” asked the American.
“I can assure you that I’ll be able to converse with these people in two days.”
The scientist’s response amazed the citizen of the United States. “Two days!” he repeated. “That’s marvelous.”
Fricoulet winked slyly and whispered in Gontran’s ear: “Poor man! He doesn’t know that the lunar year is only 12 days long, each one of which is equivalent to 29 of ours, plus 12 hours 44 minutes.”
Chapter XV
Across the Moon’s invisible hemisphere
The day after their arrival on the lunar surface—only their chronometers could now give the voyagers an exact notion of time, which day and night no longer divided up in the same quantity as on Earth—they saw Telinga come in to the large room that had been assigned to them as a residence.
After forceful gestures—which Fricoulet assured them were cordial greetings—the Selenite stuck out his tongue and placed its finger on it; then he touched their ears and waited.
“He’s probably asking whether it’s convenient to begin your lessons immediately,” said the young engineer, who had formally appointed himself as the little troop’s interpreter.
On receiving his friends’ affirmative response, Fricoulet turned back to Telinga and gave him to understand that he and his companions were at his disposal. The Selenite bowed and went out.
“What?” exclaimed Gontran, astonished, “He’s leaving it at that?”
“Perhaps he’s gone to fetch its grammars and dictionaries,” Fricoulet replied.
“Do you think that there’s a Lhomond and a Littré here?”63 asked the young Comte.
It was Ossipoff who replied: “Personally, I think that these people’s level of education must be much more advanced than ours.”
“These savages!” Jonanthan Farenheit protested.
“These savages,” the old man replied, coldly, “have the advantage of inhabiting a world much older than ours.”
The American stamped his heel furiously—which gesture, to his profound surprise, made a profound dent, in which his leg sank up to the calf. He stifled an oath. “Always that accursed sextuple strength!” he muttered.
“May we know the reason for this excessive anger, Mr. Farenheit?” asked Gontran.
“Well,” Farenheit retorted, “didn’t Monsieur Ossipoff just say that the Moon is a much older world than Earth?”
“Yes I said that and I repeat it.”
“But wasn’t the Moon formed from the Earth?”
“That’s scientifically exact.”
“Isn’t the Moon just a parcel of the gaseous globe rotating on its axis, which cooled gradually, and which we baptized with the name of Earth?”
“A parcel detached from the terrestrial equator by the effect of centrifugal force,” added Fricoulet.
“My dear Mr. Farenheit,” Ossipoff declared, “you’re absolutely right; the Moon is exactly what you say it is—but what of it?”
“Simply this, by God! Since it’s true that the Moon is a subsidiary part of the Earth, how can you claim that the world is older than the one from which it was born?”
While the American was speaking, Gontran looked at Fricoulet and nodded his head approvingly. “He’s right,” he murmured. “I was just thinking the same thing…”
“Shut up!” the engineer whispered in his ear. “What you’re saying is stupid.”
The young Comte was about to protest when Ossipoff, replying to Farenheit’s observation, declared: “You haven’t taken into account, my dear Farenheit, that the Moon has only a quarter of the Earth’s diameter.”
“Well, what does that matter?”
“What! What does it matter?” repeated the aged scientist. “The small matter of the fact that the Moon is 49 times smaller than the Earth.”
With slightly pursed lips, the American retorted: “There’s no need to tell me that the size of a world depends on its diameter—but, with respect to the matter in hand, I don’t see what its size has to do with its age.”
Ossipoff manifested his impatience in a slight shrug of the shoulders. Oh, these ignoramuses! he thought. Aloud, he said: “But it’s precisely because of its small size that the little sun that the Moon once was cooled and crusted over so rapidly, while the Earth’s temperature was still too high to permit life to become manifest and to develop. It follows that vital evolution was much more rapid here than on Earth, and that, while the latter was still the abode of gigantic animals, humankind was blossoming on the Moon and making rapid progress toward its apogee.”
Doubly humiliated, the American fell silent and lowered his head.
At that moment, the Selenite came back in, carrying a kind of box on his shoulder, which he set down on the ground. He beckoned to the Terrans to come closer. He pointed to their ears while pointing to the box, then to their eyes while pointing at the wall of the room in front of them.
“Do you understand what he’s saying?” Gontran asked Fricoulet.
The latter could not suppress a gesture of impatience. “If you were less intent on contemplating Mademoiselle Selena’s face,” he grumbled, “and were paying more attention to what this man is saying…”
“This Selenite, you mean,” the young Comte rectified. Then, with a smile, he added: “But you haven’t answered my question.”
“Well, he’s undoubtedly asking us to listen to the box and watch the wall.”
While the young engineer was speaking, the Selenite had placed metal cylinders engraved with indecipherable characters in the box; then he had stood a sort of wooden screen against the wall. The screen was covered with white fabric pinned to the wood. Once this equipment was disposed, he made a clicking noise with his tongue to attract the attention of his audience and, seeing that their eyes were fixed on the panel, as he had instructed, he released a small switch.
Immediately, the box emitted a clear and perfectly comprehensible voice, similar in every respect to a human voice, save that it was monotonous—which is to say, invariant in pitch. At the same time, symbols similar to the shadow-figures of a Chinese lantern appeared on the screen.
“What’s that?” asked Selena, pointing at the wall in amazement.
On hearing the young woman’s voice, the Selenite touched the box, which stopped speaking, and the panel became white again, as before.
“That’s bizarre,” murmured Fricoulet, then added, abruptly: “If I’m not mistaken, the symbols that appeared must be representations of the syllables or words pronounced by that sort of music box. The system is intended to increase the rapidity of education by teaching a pupil how to pronounce and write words at the same time.”
Flammermont shook his head. “That’s very nice,” he said, “but when I’ve spent entire hours in front of this Barbary-organ-cum-magic-lantern, how much further forward will I be? I understand how to pronounce a word and I know how to write it, but do I know what it signifies? And when I can repeat, like a parrot, the thousands of words of which these people’s language consists…well, what then?”
The young engineer compressed his lips into a dubious moue, and silence reigned again in the room while everyone remained plunged in these reflections.
The Selenite, who had listened to this dialogue patiently, thought that his pupils were ready to resume their lesson and pressed the switch again. Then the box began to speak, and the characters reappeared on the board—but at the same time, the Selenite brought an object out of a case, which he showed to the Terrans.
“A cup!” exclaimed Jonathan Farenheit.
The Selenite pronounced a guttural word, pointing successively at the object it held, the box and the board.
Selena clapped her hands. “I understand!” she said, joyfully. “I understand!”
“And what have you understood?” asked Ossipoff.
“The box pronounces a word, the board writes it and the Selenite displays the object to which it applies.” And, with a marvelous linguistic surety, she repeated the word that the Selenite had pronounced. The latter smiled gently, and also repeated the word, nodding his head several times.
With this procedure, the lessons made rapid progress—all the more rapidly because, once the Sun had disappeared over the horizon, the voyagers had nothing else to do but listen to their professor’s lessons through the long night.
First, the Selenite taught his pupils the names of the most familiar objects—each of which Mikhail Ossipoff carefully recorded in his notebook, with its Russian, French and English translation, so that it constituted, as Gontran jokingly observed “a little pocket dictionary.”
After four lessons, the professor passed on to the mechanics of the language and Selenian grammar. When that was done, the Terragenes were soon able to converse with the inhabitants of the satellite.
As he had promised the American, Mikhail Ossipoff rapidly assimilated the warm and sonorous language, which was reminiscent of Hindustani and the dialects of India. He put so much ardor into his studies that it he soon longed to quit the interior of the crater to launch himself upon the exploration of the unknown face of the world, to which he has aspired for so many long years.
One day, while riffling through the volumes of the library put at their disposal—which is to say, making use of the music box, or rather the phonograph, which took the trouble not merely to speak aloud but to reproduce the appearance of the page he was reading, he succeeded in finding a map of the Moon. He hastened to make a sketch of the very clear silhouette projected on the panel—in order, he said, to be able to trace the itinerary of his excursion at a later date.
As on the visible hemisphere of the Moon, the invisible side was sprinkled with large grey patches—“seas” or “oceans”—but were they really expanses of liquid or merely dry plains? That was what Ossipoff yearned to know.
There were also numerous c
raters, high mountain chains and streaks, as on the visible face. In places, too, there were points marked on the map in a special fashion. On being questioned, Telinga replied that these were cities.
“Cities!” cried Gontran, in amazement. “There are cities in the Moon—doubtless we’ll find branches of Bon Marché and Belle Jardinière in these cities. I really need to renew my stock of gloves.”
Ossipoff, however, who had not neglected to include a calendar among the most precious objects with which he had equipped the vehicle, consulted it with an impatience equal to that of his companions. If he was anxious to commencing his voyage of exploration, he was no less anxious than Farenheit and Gontran were to see the sunlight reappear.
Finally, the old man announced that the night was ending. “In two hours,” he said, “the Sun will rise.” Addressing Telinga, he said: “I request an audience with your leader.”
“Whenever you like,” replied the Selenite.
“Immediately, then, for there’s no time to lose.”
A few minutes later, Ossipoff and his companions were led into a room, at the back of which half a dozen Lunarians were sitting on bizarrely formed chairs, which Fricoulet declared to be carved out of lava.
“Friends,” said one of them, “Speak, ambassadors that the Revolver 64 has sent to its little worldlet, and your desires will be satisfied.”
“We’d like to leave this place,” replied the old man.
“Leave? Why?”
“Do you think,” Ossipoff asked, “that we have left the Earth and traveled 90,000 leagues, braving the most extreme perils, to reside indefinitely in a crater on your world? The Moon is only the first stage of the celestial voyage we have undertaken, nothing but a station in the exploration of the entire Solar System that we dreamed of carrying out. But before we launch ourselves toward the planets that shine radiantly in your pure sky, we want to visit your world. That’s why we’re in a hurry to leave here.”
“Have you a destination in mind?”
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 30
