f water--"no doubt containing some
phosphorescent organism"--that flowed ever more abundantly downward
towards the Central Sea. And as he descended, he says, "The Selenites also
became luminous." And at last far below him he saw, as it were, a lake of
heatless fire, the waters of the Central Sea, glowing and eddying in
strange perturbation, "like luminous blue milk that is just on the boil."

"This Lunar Sea," says Cavor, in a later passage "is not a stagnant ocean;
a solar tide sends it in a perpetual flow around the lunar axis, and
strange storms and boilings and rushings of its waters occur, and at times
cold winds and thunderings that ascend out of it into the busy ways of the
great ant-hill above. It is only when the water is in motion that it
gives out light; in its rare seasons of calm it is black. Commonly, when
one sees it, its waters rise and fall in an oily swell, and flakes and big
rafts of shining, bubbly foam drift with the sluggish, faintly glowing
current. The Selenites navigate its cavernous straits and lagoons in
little shallow boats of a canoe-like shape; and even before my journey to
the galleries about the Grand Lunar, who is Master of the Moon, I was
permitted to make a brief excursion on its waters.

"The caverns and passages are naturally very tortuous. A large proportion
of these ways are known only to expert pilots among the fishermen, and not
infrequently Selenites are lost for ever in their labyrinths. In their
remoter recesses, I am told, strange creatures lurk, some of them terrible
and dangerous creatures that all the science of the moon has been unable
to exterminate. There is particularly the Rapha, an inextricable mass of
clutching tentacles that one hacks to pieces only to multiply; and the
Tzee, a darting creature that is never seen, so subtly and suddenly does
it slay..."

He gives us a gleam of description.

"I was reminded on this excursion of what I have read of the Mammoth
Caves; if only I had had a yellow flambeau instead of the pervading blue
light, and a solid-looking boatman with an oar instead of a scuttle-faced
Selenite working an engine at the back of the canoe, I could have imagined
I had suddenly got back to earth. The rocks about us were very various,
sometimes black, sometimes pale blue and veined, and once they flashed and
glittered as though we had come into a mine of sapphires. And below one
saw the ghostly phosphorescent fishes flash and vanish in the hardly less