me time. It is clear, however, that these vertical
shafts and the vegetation of the surface must play an essential role in
ventilating and keeping fresh the atmosphere of the moon. At one time, and
particularly on my first emergence from my prison, there was certainly a
cold wind blowing _down_ the shaft, and later there was a kind of sirocco
upward that corresponded with my fever. For at the end of about three
weeks I fell ill of an indefinable sort of fever, and in spite of sleep
and the quinine tabloids that very fortunately I had brought in my pocket,
I remained ill and fretting miserably, almost to the time when I was taken
into the presence of the Grand Lunar, who is Master of the Moon.

"I will not dilate on the wretchedness of my condition," he remarks,
"during those days of ill-health." And he goes on with great amplitude with
details I omit here. "My temperature," he concludes, "kept abnormally high
for a long time, and I lost all desire for food. I had stagnant waking
intervals, and sleep tormented by dreams, and at one phase I was, I
remember, so weak as to be earth-sick and almost hysterical. I longed
almost intolerably for colour to break the everlasting blue..."

He reverts again presently to the topic of this sponge-caught lunar
atmosphere. I am told by astronomers and physicists that all he tells is
in absolute accordance with what was already known of the moon's
condition. Had earthly astronomers had the courage and imagination to
push home a bold induction, says Mr. Wendigee, they might have foretold
almost everything that Cavor has to say of the general structure of the
moon. They know now pretty certainly that moon and earth are not so much
satellite and primary as smaller and greater sisters, made out of one
mass, and consequently made of the same material. And since the density of
the moon is only three-fifths that of the earth, there can be nothing for
it but that she is hollowed out by a great system of caverns. There was no
necessity, said Sir Jabez Flap, F.R.S., that most entertaining exponent of
the facetious side of the stars, that we should ever have gone to the moon
to find out such easy inferences, and points the pun with an allusion to
Gruyere, but he certainly might have announced his knowledge of the
hollowness of the moon before. And if the moon is hollow, then the
apparent absence of air and water is, of course, quite easily explained.
The sea lies within at the bottom of the caverns,