The Humanisphere Page 3

  If the observations are made when the Moon is in its first quarter, directing the axis of the instrument at the illuminated part, the crests of the mountains reflect the solar light that strikes them obliquely, and one can measure the immense shadows that they project into the valleys. Here and there, in the obscure part, one finds bright spots that are evidently the highest points of the mountain summits.

  Among the men who have occupied themselves most with selenography, it is necessary to cite Helvetius, who adopted the geographical principle for the nomenclature of the Lunar features, and Riccioli, who chose the names of illustrious men to designate the features. All the selenographers of modern times have followed Riccioli’s denominations, and have added to them the names of scientists, dead or still alive, especially for craters and plans closed by circumvolutions. They have similarly conserved for the seas or gray surfaces the bizarre named of the Sea of Sleep, the Lake of Death, The Sea of Putridity, Rainbow Gulf, by allusion to lunar influences then universally admitted. I shall not change any of the denominations accepted thus far, and as for those I shall introduce to designate new points on the lunar surface, I shall try to give them a significative value.

  Such is the ensemble of the knowledge resulting from observations made of the Moon previous to the employment of my telescope. I shall not pause on the consequences that have been drawn from them. Some are true, others false; the description of the planet I shall give in accordance with our work will permit people versed in these matters to distinguish the judicious appreciations from the erroneous opinions.

  It was not until 10 January 1835—which is to say, after three months of work, that we were finally able to commence our observations. We needed that time to establish the immense telescope whose description is given in a special chapter in the full report.

  I owe the local inhabitants thanks for the kind assistance that they procured me, and it is with the greatest pleasure that I inscribe the names of my honorable collaborators, Messrs. Grant (Andrew), Drummond, ship’s lieutenant, Major Muller and Herbert Holms, the expedition’s artist.

  It is, in fact, impossible that their memory will be effaced from human memory so long as the scientific notions endure that we are transmitting regarding the material organization of the globe neighboring our own, the developments of the animate beings that move on its surface, and finally the magnificent creature that Providence has placed there to be its master and rector.

  The Sun had disappeared, the Moon was rising over the horizon, gradually disengaging itself from the vapors that were obscuring its light. The sky still conserved a hint of cerise red in the occident. The direction and inclination of the instrument had been calculated in such a manner that its axis would encounter the circle traced in space by the center of our satellite. An unforeseen accident overtaking the frames of our two lenses endowed with the greatest refractive power prevented us from obtaining the greatest magnification in the observations of the first few days. The lens mounted would permit us a magnification of 5,000.

  Everything was ready, and we were waiting for the moment when the heavenly body would enter the field of the instrument; each of us, during that moment of expectation, projected his thoughts toward the globe that we were finally about to know and travel in every direction, as if a powerful charm were drawing us into its atmosphere less than a mile from its surface. Our imaginations revealed precipices and prairies, volcanoes, rocks, scoria, crevasse and glaciers. Several of us experienced nervous tremors that could not be mastered. All of us had hearts and minds constricted in a condition impossible to describe.

  Finally, a general cry put an end to that anxiety.

  That first night and the following ones were employed in scanning the lunar globe. Conserving the same magnification, it was possible for us to make out the points already known and to identify a large number of others that were to serve as reference points when out most powerful lenses were mounted and the field of vision reduced. That investigation permitted us to revise the lunar maps already known, and to assess the degree of their precision. Those of Messrs. Guillaume Beer and Jean-Henri Muller, of which only two quarters have appeared, are undoubtedly the most accurate.

  Second Fragment: SELENOGRAPHY

  The mountainous countries of the Moon present a constant and invariable configuration. Everywhere, the crests of the mountains embrace curves, either circular or elliptical, almost all of whose points are situated in the same plane. Those crests are redoubled and form several stages, the heights of which decrease as one approaches the center. Those various stages are separated by immense crevasses, whose depth it is impossible to determine. No trace of vegetation can be perceived on those mountains, and the immense banks of rock that compose them have the appearance of volcanic lava congealed by a sudden cooling. From the steep crests of the final stage gigantic rock faces fall almost vertically, and one sees enormous masses of rocks forming steps of a sort at the bases of those walls, which are several miles high. The floors of those immense wells are slightly inclined toward the center, with the result that all the waters on the valley flow to the lowest point of the basin, where they form a great lake, the banks of which must extend or shrink in accordance with the fraction of the water that streams and rivulets bring them they distribute into the atmosphere by evaporation.

  From the center of the lake, in the form of an exceedingly steep cone, one or several almost-crystalline masses rises, affecting various bright colors. The number of these peaks varies between one and five. They are always unequal in height, the tallest only a mile and a quarter. They are very often terminated by conoid surfaces so regular that we were obliged to recognize them immediately as the product of intelligence and to refuse nature the ability to have created them.

  Independently of the mountain systems we have just described, the Moon presents immense plains of great fertility; the number of vegetables that we have discovered there merits such special mention that we shall devote several chapters to it.

  The first aspect that struck our gaze was a green rock like certain frequently-irrigated lichens; its hue was not due to a cause of that kind, to judge by its elevated position and its rather rapid slope, which doubtless furnished superabundant dew with an easy, even prompt flow. From the fact that lichens do not participate in that mineral coloration, it ought not to be concluded that another plant of the family of mosses sought its existence there. No, it is certain that the bright color in question was that of stone, and frequent encounters with analogous substances have provide that to us with conclusive evidence.

  Soon, that rock was succeeded by a myriad of small brown, sharp pebbles, a kind of natural mosaic, a sharply-outlined pavement with which we had nothing to compare. Cavities and crests were almost equal in number there, and the former might have served as molds for the latter.

  The rocks were composed of poorly developed, idiosyncratic crystals, with calcareous monads intermingled with micaceous scales. Those lavas had the most incoherent positions.

  In the middle of that sterile, rocky country, among the high rocks deprived of all vegetation, which corresponded to the country that Riccioli, following a rather unfortunate inspiration, called Lacus Somnorium, in a place where it seemed impossible for it to exist, we chanced to recognize a creature among blocks of a granitic appearance, a monster endowed with locomotive faculties. To explain its presence and its modus vivendi would be impossible. Let us limit ourselves to its form.

  The head, a kind of fleshy triangle covered with sky gray leather, bore at its anterior extremity a horn divided into three branches for half its length, estimable at a foot and a half. From that point on it sticks up sharply. The beast had no visible ears, and its eyes, placed on top of its head and protected by a visor of skin that could be withdrawn at will, could see into the rocks and the sky, doubtless to protect it from some voracious bird. Its body, about the girth of that of a wolf, was much more elongated, which gave the head, very disproportionate, and which swung from right to left
, a frightful aspect.

  The animal was bipedal, its legs short and its feet very broad. The skin resembled that of a rhinoceros, and from the rump projected a flat tail articulated by rings, terminated by a bony spatula framed with long spikes, which it used to anchor itself and raise itself upright in the midst of those rugged rocks. We have described that monster because we never saw it again, and it seemed to be born for the nature that surrounded it.

  Soon, the face of the landscape became more varied, and violet flowers were a prelude to the spectacle of the most cheerful nature...

  Third Fragment: INTELLIGENT RACES;

  PHYSIOLOGY; WARS

  The intelligent creature is what we sought most avidly on that globe, open for the first time to the eye of science. As soon as we had encountered it, nothing could detach us from that contemplation. How many times Mr. Hamilton, my noble friend and I, congratulated ourselves on having found for the result of our discoveries not merely the rectification of lunar maps, an advantage already precious, or the acquisition of very interesting astronomical details, which would have been more than sufficient to recompense us for our efforts, but also to have responded to the most noble tendency of our epoch, in aiding by the patent development of science the occult work of the moral amelioration of humans!

  We have recognized, therefore, among the beings whose existence was successively revealed to us, three creatures worthy of being set apart by virtue of their forms and habits, although they do not occupy an equal rank in the scale of creations, and the same functions are not identically assigned to them, as will be observed in due course; but they rise, as much by virtue of their respective functions as by the nature of their physiological constitution, so far above all the others that they appeared to us to be the true representatives of intelligence on the planet, and, in spite of the line of demarcation traced between them by nature, they undoubtedly constitute the “lunar human race.”

  The first of those beings was manifest for the first time to our gaze on the edge of a forest of trees that were reminiscent of both Cupressus and Pinus maritima.3 We had too little time to characterize it; it disappeared so promptly that we mistook it for a large bird.

  Soon, our field of vision embraced a mountain surmounted by a large building—we were in the south of Longrenus. We were undecided at first as to whether to attribute the construction to nature or art, but the reappearance of a legion of beings similar to the one that had caused our surprise settled the question in favor of art.

  Those animals—that is how they are designated in our journal the first time there is mention of them—were agglomerated on a small clear sloping plain. Scarcely had we turned out eyes in their direction than they all disappeared in the same direction, cleaving the air with great beats of the wings that veiled their bodies. They came back thereafter with other beings of the same genre, but not the same species, which we had already perceived a month before, but too vaguely to be able to form any conjectures. We saw them again frequently, always in the same company, and it was as easily as it was flattering for us to identify them as two races of “androselenians.” Only the more perfect of the two conserves that name in our reports.

  Selenians are scarcely more than two feet eight inches in average height. Their body is supple and elongated; their articulations have the appearance of vigor; their shoulders are endowed with vast wings, longer in the female, reminiscent by the nature of the plumage and the joints of the wings of an ostrich. The analogy stops there, for the pinions are longer, and stiff and slender near the edges, like those of a gull, but much longer. Thus, Selenians enjoy a very bold flight; they soar like birds of prey, and maintain themselves above the water over which they pass with celerity.

  That aggregation of faculties in a single being confirmed the opinions we had already formed in advance; it is impossible, in fact, not to suppose that the lunarian humans must accomplish all, or at least the greater part, of their functions in the atmosphere. What are those functions? Apart from the difficulty of extending our inductions as far as phenomena so different from those accomplished for us on Earth, the field of observations is too extensive for us to permit us to indulge in metaphysical conjectures, less interesting because they are less positive, and because they would contribute in a less direct manner to astronomical progress.

  Later, however, we shall develop considerations on that subject that can only be born from experience.

  It is important, in order to distinguish the beings that occupy us presently from the one that will shortly be the object of our analysis, to remember that, similar to the wings of the ostrich, those of the Selenians are covered with plumes, and that those plumes, attached uniquely to the wings, contrast with the absolute nudity of the rest of the body, on which hair cannot be detected. It is to that absence of a pilous system in Selenians that we must attribute the perfect knowledge we have acquired, satisfying to the highest degree, of the whiteness of their skin. By an admirable contrast, their eyes are dark, and the hair on the head black. That hair, in falling backwards, frames with its bushy mass the two wings, when they are deployed, and nothing equals the beauty that results from the accord in question.

  We have said that alongside the beings that appeared to us to occupy the first rank on the satellite, our objective manifested a second, similar to the other in certain respects, and distant from it in many others.

  That new race has wings like the first, but deprived of feathers; and in that regard, if the Androselenians offered us an analogy with the ostrich, the species that we shall designate by the name of Vespertilio presented us one with bats.

  Vespertilios are about four feet tall, and rise up by means of their wings into the high atmosphere, but it seems to us that they are less at home there than the Selenians, for they do not have the faculty, as the latter do, of traversing very considerable distances without exhausting themselves. It seems that their aerial faculties are less important; they have only received from the Creator half the power attributed to the Selenians. They rest frequently, doubtless by necessity, and we have often remarked that, with the objective of renewing the vigor of their membranous wings by means of an astringent immersion after a relatively brief flight, they alight on a river or a lake and steep themselves therein.

  Only that hygienic motive has explained the frequency of those baths to us.

  Vespertilios are brownish gray. Can one not believe that the Creator, with regard to that feature, wanted to establish the most exaggerated contrast between them and the androselenians? The field of philosophy has always been vast, and has become even more so since study has delivered the secrets of our satellite to us. I bequeath the conjectures to those who will follow me; my mission is limited at present to divulging my astronomical observations, and that is already important enough.

  The constitution of the Vespertilios does not differ from that of humans with regret to the other organs, but they bear all the external signs of their intellectual authority. Their facial angle is less developed than that of the Selenians; the head is flat, the neck slender and elongated; and if we cast a glance over the physiognomic appearance in general, we find that it is far from presenting the signs of domination that are the prerogative of the Selenian race, properly speaking.

  The female Vespertilio is difficult to distinguish from the male when one only considers them from the viewpoint of form. She differs in that from the female Selenian, who, as much by the length of her wings as by the color of her plumage, is essentially separate from the individual of the other sex.

  The female Selenian has, moreover, the greater delicacy of the limbs, with which she combines the vigor that results from the harmony of her proportions. The female Vespertilio, on the contrary, is heavy and well-muscled. We attribute that physical development to a thousand causes, but principally to the industrial exercises and base functions that are shared without distinction between the two sexes of that race.

  On exploring more attentively than we had yet done the characteris
tics appropriate to each sex, we obtained for a result the most curious of singularities. If we have deferred making it known until now, it is because, far from constituting a general law, it is subject to numerous exceptions. The female Vespertilio is not veritably gray, but a gray that approaches black in its dark hue. We were deceived momentarily by that bizarrerie, and were on the point of believing in a new race of humans when irrefutable and scrupulous observations brought us back to the truth.

  It is time to say that before those two races we had discovered a third, of which I have put off until now furnishing a description because it only occupies the third rank on the satellite—that, at least, results not only from the attentive examination of its physical being but also the analysis of the functions to which is habitually devotes itself.

  The Beaver—we are all agreed in giving it that name—appeared to us for the first time on the edge of a lake or broad stream surrounded by small gray eminences of which we were unable at first to determine the nature; but a thick smoke escaping from them did not leave us in doubt for long, especially when we saw a large number of Beavers leaving the edge of the lake to go to those monticules and, at the moment when we had the greatest desire to follow them, suddenly vanish. We therefore concluded that the eminences could only be their huts, and that they entered or exited therefrom on the side opposite to the direction of our instrument. The smoke enabled us to presume, moreover, that the Beavers were intelligent, and you shall soon see that that presumption was not long in being converted into a certainty.