An Unknown World

by Pierre de Sélènes

  XI. The Arrival

  “May the graces of the Sovereign Spirit descend upon your heads and put joy and serenity into your hearts,” said the sage Rugel, as he penetrated on to the terrace where Marcel and his two friends were standing, contemplating a marvelous spectacle.

  Extended before their eyes was a strange city, the like of which the imagination of Oriental story tellers had never dreamed. Its white habitations, elegant and capricious in form, whose bright and polished walls were heightened by the most vivid colors, artistically disposed, and enriched by mosaics of precious metals, descended in a gently slope to the sea shore.

  The sea too offered an appearance of which earthly seas can give no idea. Its waves, rippled at that moment by a slight breeze, had neither the deep blue of the Mediterranean not the changing green of the Atlantic; as if light were dissolved within in, the water was iridescent, spangled with all the colors of the rainbow. Every movement that the light breath of the wind imparted to the mobile waves caused a thousand subtle rays to pass through them, which melted into a delightful mixture.

  The individual who had just appeared on the terrace offered all the external appearances of a member of the terrestrial human race and seemed to be between forty and forty-five Earthly years old. His tall stature was well-built; all his well-proportioned limbs were supple and vigorous; his free and easy gait revealed the harmony of a well-equilibrated nature. His face, which was framed by long black hair glossy and curly, was imprinted with mildness and gravity. His developed forehead and his keen, penetrating eyes denoted a broad and prompt intelligence. He had a straight nose and a small mouth, habitually formed in a benevolent smile.

  He was dressed in a kind of tunic that hung down to his feet, made of a glossy silken fabric whose azure color was very easy on the eye. It was retained at the waist by a belt, darker in hue, enriched with ornaments reminiscent of the finest embroidery. His feet were shod in sandals made of some kind of woven liana, which were attached to the base of the leg by intersecting ribbons. Over that simultaneously rich and simple costume, a vast dazzlingly white mantle was negligently thrown, fixed at the summit of the chest by a large fastener formed by a substance as brilliant as diamond.

  The three friends stood up. Marcel took a few steps toward the newcomer and bowed gravely.

  “Be welcome,” he said, “you who have initiated us into so many marvels since we have been in this new world.”

  “Jacques and Lord Rodilan had drawn nearer and added their marks of respect and gratitude to Marcel’s.

  “Friends,” said Rugel, “the moment that I announced to you has arrived. You now have a sufficient knowledge of our language to appear before the prudent Aldeovaze, our supreme and venerated leader, and the sages who assist him in the direction of our public affairs. The news of your extraordinary arrival reached him some time ago; our scientists have been occupied with it; he was the one who assigned me to you, with the mission of educating you, in order that you might enter into communication with us.”

  “And you have acquitted that mission with a zeal, a good grace and a kindness that has touched our hearts,” Jacques put in.

  “That’s true,” added Lord Rodilan. “I’ve never encountered in the world where we’ve lived thus far a finer and more intelligent mind, a gentler and more even-tempered character, and a more amiable benevolence than the one you’ve testified to us.”

  Rugel smiled. “I have only fulfilled the task confided to me by the Supreme Council,” he replied, “And you will allow me to tell you, in my turn, that the task has been as pleasant as it as easy. When our Diemides—that, you will remember, is the name we give to the inferior ranks of our humankind—found your vehicle in the cavern where they had gone in search of the shiny stones that serve to ornament our edifices and our vestments, and where the hand of the Sovereign Being had directed your fall, they brought it, via the channel that serves the cavern’s lake as an overflow, to the capital of the neighboring province.

  “Our scientists had already witnessed the attempt made by the inhabitants of the Earth to enter into communication with us, so the magistrate governing the province had no difficulty understanding that the floating house must have served to shelter human beings, who had doubtless come from the Earth. On seeing the traces of impacts and the scratches on the walls, he was alarmed by the thought of the terrible hazards of that fall. It was evident that you had fallen into one of the broad and profound fissures that furrow the surface of our globe. You must have collided with the numerous asperities with which the walls bristle, bouncing and rolling through all its sinuosities until one last leap precipitated you into the lake, which deadened your fall.

  “The cavern of which it forms the bottom is, in fact, situated at a much greater depth than you were able to suspect. The distance that separates it from the surface can be estimated at about a sixtieth of the Moon’s radius.”

  “Which is to say,” Marcel put in, “about sixty of our kilometers.”

  “The magistrate whom chance put in the presence of that strange discovery,” Rugel continued, “expected only to find cadavers in the singular vehicle; finding that it was empty, he understood that the care with which everything had been disposed inside it had protected the voyagers, and judged that, if they had abandoned it temporarily, it was to explore the region to which hazard had brought them and put them in communication with us as quickly as possible. It was therefore necessary to go in search of them, all the more urgently because the voyagers, lost in the darkness, might find themselves in great difficulties, and perhaps exposed to peril.

  “Emissaries were sent in all directions, and ended up discovering you on the shore of the lake where your projectile had been found.”

  “And you came to our aid just in time,” said Jacques, with an explosion of gratitude. “Without you, we would have died.”

  “And the most ridiculous and humiliating death for gentlemen,” said Lord Rodilan. “Death by starvation.”

  “Yes,” Rugel went on, mildly. “For on your Earth you are submissive to the necessity of maintaining life within you by the absorption of foreign elements—a necessity from which we are fortunately liberated.”

  “We were, indeed, at the limit of our strength,” said Marcel. “Our despair had been immense when we discovered the disappearance of our shell. That very disappearance proved that the Moon was inhabited, as we had thought, and that it was at the very moment of reaching our goal that we were about to expire. We did not want to leave that location, on the assumption that those who had already been there would come back, but need had exhausted us, and we were going to sleep for the last time when we were snatched from certain death.”

  The conversation continued for a little while longer in that tone of cordiality and amiable confidence; then Rugel took his leave of his guests, after informing them that their reception by the supreme magistrate of the lunar society had been fixed for the time when the Earth would be in its first quarter.

  Since our three voyagers, having been miraculously saved, had been living in the bosom of lunar humankind, they had been continually and completely delighted. The people who had taken them in had found them unconscious on the shore of the lake in the dark cavern, and when their eyes had opened again, when they had been recalled to life by intelligent care, they thought they had been transported into a supernatural world.

  They were lying on rich cushions in a vast hall, the large bay windows of which were open to a warm and seemingly-embalmed air. Pressing around them were beings whose beardless faces, long hair, mild features and long loose robes had betrayed their sex. Their voices were soft and they were conversing with one another in a sonorous and harmonious language whose rhythmically-cadenced accents caressed the ears.

  Soon reanimated, Marcel and his two companions felt the tortures of hunger reawakening within them. They had despaired of making those surrounding them understand when Lord Rodilan, looking around, had recognized, piled up in the room where they were, various
objects that had garnished the shell in which they had accomplished their astonishing voyage. He had pointed to a square box that they had hastened to bring him, and which he had opened with considerable effort. He and his two friends had started devouring the biscuits that they took out of it with a gluttonous avidity that Jacques, in his capacity as a physician, was not long delayed in moderating. The women surrounding them had given signs of the most complete amazement at that spectacle, evidently new to them.

  “Why are they looking at us like that?” Lord Rodilan grumbled. “One would think that they’d never seen an honest Englishman satisfying his appetite.”

  And, as the little nourishment he had taken had restored his strength, he got up and went to fetch a bottle of old burgundy, of which he poured generous draughts for himself and his two companions.

  On seeing them absorb that liquid, unknown to them, the inhabitants of the moon had passed from amazement to the most complete bewilderment.

  “Singular individuals!” Marcel murmured.

  Such had been the entrance of our three voyagers to the unknown world they had come so far to visit.

  XII. The Lunar World

  Their ignorance of the indigenes’ language had at first been a source of embarrassment and difficulties, but all three of them had minds too agile for such an obstacle to be able to stop them for long.

  Their arrival had caused a great sensation. People came from all over to see the representatives of such a similar humankind; they wanted to know what they were like, whether they were intelligent, good and gentle; they wanted to know how they had come, and never stopped asking questions about the circumstances in which they had been discovered.

  The entire lunar world was in turmoil, and, without the precautions with which the governor of the province had surrounded them, the newcomers would probably have suffered a curiosity that was sometimes inconvenient. The news had been quickly transmitted to the capital of the Lunar State, where the Head of State and the Supreme Council were resident.

  The sages making up the Council had decided that before presenting the three strangers to the depository of sovereign authority, it would be appropriate to teach them the country’s language, in order that they could be questioned and furnish useful explanations of the world whose messengers they were.

  It was thus that the wise and knowledgeable Rugel, one of the members of the Council, had been placed with them in order to prepare them for the solemn reception that was reserved for them.

  Intelligent as they were, they had not taken long to familiarize themselves with the language spoken by the inhabitants of the Moon. That language, with soft and musical inflections, was logical in its extreme simplicity. The grammar and syntax, founded on clear rules in conformity with the very laws of thought, stripped of any unnecessary complication and all the exceptions that embarrass our European languages, were clear and straightforward. That sobriety of essential forms did not exclude richness however; the vocabulary was abundant and each of the most delicate nuances of thought had a precise term to express it, easy to remember, which, as often as not, formed an image, the melodious sound of which charmed the ear.

  The same spirit of methodical exactitude presided over the script that served to represent the words of the language.

  In fact, lunar humanity presented a single race, always subject to the same influences of temperature and environment. Its members had, therefore, only ever spoken a single language, which had been improved over time as civilization progressed and the conquest of science had brought new elements of thought. In that language one did not encounter the variety of radicals originating from different sources and the complexities of orthography that so many dead languages have left us. The words were depicted phonetically by a small number of characters, easy to grasp and trace. Everyone spoke well and everyone wrote well.

  In any case, the curiosity of the explorers was overexcited by everything they saw, and the desire to learn, already natural to those elite minds, was singularly increased. All the forces of their intelligence were extended to understand and admire the world, in which everything seemed superior to the one with which they were familiar.

  They went from one astonishment to another.

  That humankind, which seemed to have won the right to live in a strange environment by force of science and determination; those beings of a more subtle nature, freed from the material care of maintaining their life on a daily basis by crude nourishment; those arts and industries, far more advanced than our own, which had already stolen from nature secrets that we scarcely suspect, and disciplined forces of which we are far from extracting all that is possible; that civilization, so advanced that it had succeeded in simplifying the conditions of existence, and achieving the disappearance of the rivalries and dissents that divide Earthly humans; their high moral culture, their enlightened love of good, their practical wisdom exempt from grim austerity and narrow rigor; and finally, those gentle mores in which affability and benevolence rendered all relationships amiable and facile, all enchanted and delighted them.

  Marcel was in a perpetual state of excitement and enthusiasm. Jacques had not forgotten his love for Hélène, but in the midst of that milieu full of serenity, he thought about it without bitterness and with pleasurable hope. Even Lord Rodilan, reattached to life, had been cured of his spleen and did not regret having avoided death.

  To complete their instruction in haste, Rugel had taken them traveling through the various regions in which lunar humankind lived, the number of whose inhabitants was no greater than twelve million.

  The rest of the country was occupied by a sea of dimensions almost equal to our Mediterranean. The surface of that interior sea was strewn with numerous islands, some of very restricted dimensions and grouped into pleasant archipelagos, others larger and isolated, attaining the proportions of small continents. States such as Greece, Belgium or Portugal could have been accommodated there without difficulty.

  Around those shores, which were hollowed out by numerous gulfs or extended by picturesque peninsulas, extended vast regions furrowed by numerous watercourses, along which flourishing cities were scattered, where populations much less dense than those crowded into our stifling cities lived at their ease.

  The ground rose up at a gradual slope to a region of inaccessible mountains, overhanging rocks and unfathomable precipices, whose inhospitable flanks no one had ever climbed. It was beyond that impenetrable circle that the granite foundations rose up, simultaneously forming the wall and the vault of the colossal cavern that enclosed a world.

  That environment, where the sun’s rays never penetrated, was illuminated by a even and constant light produced by the diffusion in the atmosphere of an electric glow, the unexpected sight of which had surprised the three voyagers so strangely. That continuity of illumination, unvaried by any alternation of day and night, gave the inhabitants of the lunar world an existence very different from ours. Life there was not divided into two parts of unequal length, one of which is filled with fever, agitations and fervent contests, while the other is plunged in darkness, in which nature and humanity seem entombed.

  The surface of the ground was always full of life, as if smiling. Everyone devoted the necessary time to their occupations, without worrying about temporal divisions, since light never ceased to fill space, and they went to sleep when they felt the need to restore their exhausted strength.

  Nature, ever logical in its foresight, had disposed animal life in view of the environment in which it had to develop. Like humans, the inferior creatures were organized in such a fashion as to maintain life by respiration alone. The struggle for existence did not arm against one another either the individuals of one species or those of different species. Thus, the gaze was not afflicted by the spectacle of those incessant combats in which the weak, always sacrificed, serve to nourish the stronger. There was no danger that that absence of relentless enemies would allow the various animal species to develop excessively; their limited fecundity wa
s sufficient to fill the gaps left in their ranks by natural death without any of them being able to become invasive.

  Animals, not having to defend themselves against incessantly renascent enemies, nor having to attack others in order to live, had no need of the arsenal of various weapons with which nature has gratified them on our world: no sharp claws, menacing teeth or venomous stings. Malevolent species were unknown there.

  Mild and inoffensive creatures, never being forced to suffer the unjust attacks of humans, and, in consequence, to fear or mistrust them, and also being closer to them in their intelligence and instincts of an almost sociable kind, lived with them in a state intermediate between independence and domestication.

  The species that seemed to hold the primary rank in that life of an inferior order offered striking analogies with our canine species. Simultaneously more delicate and stronger, slimmer and more elegant in form, its members lived in proximity with humans as affectionate and submissive companions.

  In a narrower intimacy with the inhabitants of the Moon lived another animal, smaller in size, lest lively in its behavior, charming, supple and caressant in form, which was like an assiduous house-guest. Its coat, with long and silky fur, offered the most varied and sparkling colors. Like the plumage of our tropical birds, it was sometimes uniform and bright, sometimes variously hued, but always easy on the eye and pleasant to behold. Familiar and placid in their habits, the animals in question had none of the ferocious egotism and hypocrisy of our feline species. They seemed to have made humans the sacrifice of their liberty, and their eyes, soft and expressive, showed that they were sensible to the affection of which they were the object.

  Other animals, whose stature and form were reminiscent of those of our hinds, stags and gazelles, the variegated coats of which were sometimes striped or capriciously spotted, like those of our tigers and leopards—of which they had neither the ferocity nor the bloodthirsty instincts—populated the rural areas.