The First Men in the Moon quotes

I had gone to Lympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place in the world. “Here, at any rate,” said I, “I shall find peace and a chance to work!”

And this book is the sequel. So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.

I may perhaps mention here that very recently I had come an ugly cropper in certain business enterprises. Sitting now surrounded by all the circumstances of wealth, there is a luxury in admitting my extremity.

Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he never played cricket. It was a fortuitous concurrence of garments, arising I know not how. He gesticulated with his hands and arms, and jerked his head about and buzzed.

He buzzed like something electric. You never heard such buzzing.

And ever and again he cleared his throat with a most extraordinary noise.

He stopped dead. He regarded me gravely.

“Can it be,” he said, “that I have formed a Habit?”

“Well, it looks like it. Doesn’t it?”

And quite insensibly, in the way such projects grow, the understanding of a Cavorite monopoly grew up between us.

He was to make the stuff, and I was to make the boom.

I stuck like a leech to the “we”—“you” and “I” didn’t exist for me.

He extended a muddy lump of hand, and staggered a pace towards me. His face worked with emotion, little lumps of mud kept falling from it.

He looked as damaged and pitiful as any living creature I have ever seen, and his remark therefore amazed me exceeding. “Gratulate me,” he gasped; “gratulate me!”

“Congratulate you!” said I. “Good heavens! What for?”

“Not exactly into space,” said Cavor, “but as bad—practically.

It would have whipped the air off the world as one peels a banana, and flung it thousands of miles.

It would have dropped back again, of course—but on an asphyxiated world! From our point of view very little better than if it never came back!”

But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were disembodied.

It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream.

Came a click, and then a window in the outer case yawned open. The sky outside was as black as the darkness within the sphere, but the shape of the open window was marked by an infinite number of stars.

Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine its appearance when the vague half-luminous veil of our air has been withdrawn.

The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise the meaning of the hosts of heaven!

It was like a miracle, that growth. So, one must imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the desolation of the new-made earth.

Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, the stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes.

Conceive it all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, wherever there was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow.

I had forgotten that on the moon, with only an eighth part of the earth’s mass and a quarter of its diameter, my weight was barely a sixth what it was on earth. But now that fact insisted on being remembered.

“We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now,” he said.

With a guarded effort I raised myself to the top, and moving as cautiously as a rheumatic patient, stood up beside him under the blaze of the sun. The sphere lay behind us on its dwindling snowdrift thirty feet away.

I became aware of Cavor’s little round face peering over a bristling hedge. He shouted some faded inquiry. “Eh?” I tried to shout, but could not do so for want of breath. He made his way towards me, coming gingerly among the bushes.

“We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “This moon has no discipline. She’ll let us smash ourselves.”

He helped me to my feet. “You exerted yourself too much,” he said, dabbing at the yellow stuff with his hand to remove it from my garments.

It was also unexpectedly difficult to express. After a momentary attempt to understand me—I remember wondering if the fungus had made my eyes as fishy as his—he set off upon some observations on his own account.

“We are,” he announced with a solemn hiccup, “the creashurs o’ what we eat and drink.”

He repeated this, and as I was now in one of my subtle moods, I determined to dispute it. Possibly I wandered a little from the point. But Cavor certainly did not attend at all properly.

“And about that geometry. After all, their way is a way of understanding, too. They begin with the elements of life and not of thought. Food. Compulsion. Pain.

They strike at fundamentals.

”

“Yes. They must have carried us from outside.”

“I’d rather be carried by a fly across a ceiling.”

I resumed my destruction of the fungi. Then suddenly I saw something that struck me even then.

“It isn’t one man in a million has that twist.

Most men want⁠—well, various things, but very few want knowledge for its own sake.

I don’t, I know perfectly well. Now, these Selenites seem to be a driving, busy sort of being, but how do you know that even the most intelligent will take an interest in us or our world?

Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No!

Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.

Let him find it out for himself again—in a thousand years’ time.”

The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem. What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, to risk even a reasonable certainty of death?

It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused.

Almost any man, if you put the thing to him, not in words, but in the shape of opportunities, will show that he knows as much. Against his interest, against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things.

I thought only of finding Cavor again. I was half inclined to go back into the moon without him, rather than seek him until it was too late. I was already halfway back towards our handkerchief, when suddenly—

I did not find it so much as it found me.

It was lying much further to the westward than I had gone, and the sloping rays of the sinking sun reflected from its glass had suddenly proclaimed its presence in a dazzling beam.

Then indeed was I alone.

Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the Eternal; that which was before the beginning, and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence⁠—the infinite and final Night of space.

The sense of solitude and desolation became the sense of an overwhelming presence that stooped towards me, that almost touched me.

I flung the crumpled paper from me, scrambled back to the crest to take my bearings, and then, with all the will that was in me, leapt out towards the mark I had left, dim and distant now in the very margin of the shadow.

Leap, leap, leap, and each leap was seven ages.

Before me the pale serpent-girdled section of the sun sank and sank, and the advancing shadow swept to seize the sphere before I could reach it.

I was two miles away, a hundred leaps or more, and the air about me was thinning out as it thins under an air-pump, and the cold was gripping at my joints.

But had I died, I should have died leaping.

Once, and then again my foot slipped on the gathering snow as I leapt and shortened my leap;

I saw Bedford in many relations—as an ass or as a poor beast, where I had hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very spirited or rather forcible person.

I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses.

I reviewed his schooldays and his early manhood, and his first encounter with love, very much as one might review the proceedings of an ant in the sand.

I went to the sphere, stooped, crept in, and presently they had the Selenites’ crowbars and the broken chain before them. If I had not been so horribly fagged I could have laughed at them.

It was like kittens round a beetle.

They didn’t know what to do with the stuff. The fat little man stooped and lifted the end of one of the bars, and then dropped it with a grunt. Then they all did.

“You don’t really mean—” began the youngest young man, in the tone of one who speaks to an obstinate child.

“Just pass me that toast-rack,” I said, and shut him up completely.

“But look here, I say,” began one of the others. “We’re not going to believe that, you know.”

And so I got away to Italy, and there it is I am writing this story.

If the world will not have it as fact, then the world may take it as fiction. It is no concern of mine.

And now that the account is finished, I am amazed to think how completely this adventure is gone and done with.

I have told my story—and now I suppose I have to take up the worries of this terrestrial life again.

Even if one has been to the moon, one has still to earn a living.

So I am working here at Amalfi, on the scenario of that play I sketched before Cavor came walking into my world, and I am trying to piece my life together as it was before ever I saw him.

As they pulled at it that net seemed the heaviest thing I had come upon in the moon; it was loaded with weights—no doubt of gold—and it took a long time to draw, for in those waters the larger and more edible fish lurk deep.

The fish in the net came up like a blue moonrise⁠—a blaze of darting, tossing blue.

“Among their catch was a many-tentaculate, evil-eyed black thing, ferociously active, whose appearance they greeted with shrieks and twitters, and which with quick, nervous movements they hacked to pieces by means of little hatchets.

There are no books, no records of any sort, no libraries or inscriptions. All knowledge is stored in distended brains much as the honey-ants of Texas store honey in their distended abdomens.

The lunar Somerset House and the lunar British Museum Library are collections of living brains.⁠ ⁠…

“The less specialised administrators, I note, do for the most part take a very lively interest in me whenever they encounter me. They will come out of the way and stare at me and ask questions to which Phi-oo will reply.