(continued)

Chapter 25

The Grand Lunar

The penultimate message describes, with occasionally elaborate detail, the encounter between Cavor and the Grand Lunar, who is the ruler or master of the moon.  Cavor seems to have sent most of it without interference, but to have been interrupted in the concluding portion.  The second came after an interval of a week.

The first message begins:  "At last I am able to resume this—" it then becomes illegible for a space, and after a time resumed in mid-sentence.

The missing words of the following sentence are probably "the crowd." There follows quite clearly:  "grew ever denser as we drew near the palace of the Grand Lunar—if I may call a series of excavations a palace.  Everywhere faces stared at me—blank, chitinous gapes and masks, eyes peering over tremendous olfactory developments, eyes beneath monstrous forehead plates;  and undergrowth of smaller creatures dodged and yelped, and helmet faces poised on sinuous, long-jointed necks appeared craning over shoulders and beneath armpits.  Keeping a welcome space about me marched a cordon of stolid, scuttle-headed guards, who had joined us on our leaving the boat in which we had come along the channels of the Central Sea.  The quick-eyed artist with the little brain joined us also, and a thick bunch of lean porter-insects swayed and struggled under the multitude of conveniences that were considered essential to my state.  I was carried in a litter during the final stage of our journey.  This litter was made of some very ductile metal that looked dark to me, meshed and woven, and with bars of paler metal, and about me as I advanced there grouped itself a long and complicated procession.

"In front, after the manner of heralds, marched four trumpet-faced creatures making a devastating bray;  and then came squat, resolute-moving ushers before and behind, and on either hand a galaxy of learned heads, a sort of animated encyclopedia, who were, Phi-oo explained, to stand about the Grand Lunar for purposes of reference.  (Not a thing in lunar science, not a point of view or method of thinking, that these wonderful beings did not carry in their heads!)  Followed guards and porters, and then Phi-oo's shivering brain borne also on a litter.  Then came Tsi-puff in a slightly less important litter;  then myself on a litter of greater elegance than any other, and surrounded by my food and drink attendants.  More trumpeters came next, splitting the ear with vehement outcries, and then several big brains, special correspondents one might well call them, or historiographers, charged with the task of observing and remembering every detail of this epoch-making interview.  A company of attendants, bearing and dragging banners and masses of scented fungus and curious symbols, vanished in the darkness behind.  The way was lined by ushers and officers in caparisons that gleamed like steel, and beyond their line, so far as my eyes could pierce the gloom, the heads of that enormous crowd extended.

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