(continued)

And he goes on from that point to say that "We came to a difficult passage with them, and Bedford mistaking certain gestures of theirs"—pretty gestures they were!—"gave way to a panic violence.  He ran amuck, killed three, and perforce I had to flee with him after the outrage.  Subsequently we fought with a number who endeavoured to bar our way, and slew seven or eight more.  It says much for the tolerance of these beings that on my recapture I was not instantly slain.  We made our way to the exterior and separated in the crater of our arrival, to increase our chances of recovering our sphere.  But presently I came upon a body of Selenites, led by two who were curiously different, even in form, from any of these we had seen hitherto, with larger heads and smaller bodies, and much more elaborately wrapped about.  And after evading them for some time I fell into a crevasse, cut my head rather badly, and displaced my patella, and, finding crawling very painful, decided to surrender—if they would still permit me to do so.  This they did, and, perceiving my helpless condition, carried me with them again into the moon.  And of Bedford I have heard or seen nothing more, nor, so far as I can gather, any Selenite.  Either the night overtook him in the crater, or else, which is more probable, he found the sphere, and, desiring to steal a march upon me, made off with it—only, I fear, to find it uncontrollable, and to meet a more lingering fate in outer space."

And with that Cavor dismisses me and goes on to more interesting topics.  I dislike the idea of seeming to use my position as his editor to deflect his story in my own interest, but I am obliged to protest here against the turn he gives these occurrences.  He said nothing about that gasping message on the blood-stained paper in which he told, or attempted to tell, a very different story.  The dignified self-surrender is an altogether new view of the affair that has come to him, I must insist, since he began to feel secure among the lunar people;  and as for the "stealing a march" conception, I am quite willing to let the reader decide between us on what he has before him.  I know I am not a model man—I have made no pretence to be.  But am I that?

However, that is the sum of my wrongs.  From this point I can edit Cavor with an untroubled mind, for he mentions me no more.

It would seem the Selenites who had come upon him carried him to some point in the interior down "a great shaft" by means of what he describes as "a sort of balloon."  We gather from the rather confused passage in which he describes this, and from a number of chance allusions and hints in other and subsequent messages, that this "great shaft" is one of an enormous system of artificial shafts that run, each from what is called a lunar "crater," downwards for very nearly a hundred miles towards the central portion of our satellite.  These shafts communicate by transverse tunnels, they throw out abysmal caverns and expand into great globular places;  the whole of the moon's substance for a hundred miles inward, indeed, is a mere sponge of rock.  "Partly," says Cavor, "this sponginess is natural, but very largely it is due to the enormous industry of the Selenites in the past.  The enormous circular mounds of the excavated rock and earth it is that form these great circles about the tunnels known to earthly astronomers (misled by a false analogy) as volcanoes."

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