“The presumptuous beings on earth have the impudence to tell their children that the Moon is made of green cheese,” quoth the mammoth.
“Indeed, sir, but that is very true,” answered Bob. “When I was a boy I believed it was only a big cheese, and I can safely say that when I’ve seen it in the water, up at Bathurst, where we lived, I’ve been silly enough to wade into the water arter it, thinking to take it home and have my supper off it.”
“Ah, it’s rare fun to watch the moon-rakers try to grasp my shadow, Bob.”
“I believe you, sir. Lord, how you must laugh in your sleeve at ’em! Your Moonship must look down upon many a strange sight,” said the shepherd reflectively.
The Man in the Moon smiled widely. “Humph! I look upon all kindred of the terrestrial world,” he answered gravely. “I am but the pale reflection of the great luminary, the Sun, whose slave I am. When he fadeth from the surface of the globe, I borrow his beams and become the watchman of the night. The mighty human beings, and the lowly; rich and poor; the sinful and the good, are all beneath my vision. I watch the murderer crawling with stealthy feet towards his victim, and I note the robber lying in wait to plunder; I haunt the gloom where guilt and misery lie huddled together in rags. Wickedness in high places cannot escape me. Over the deep sleep of toiling millions my beams hold watch and ward, kissing the rosy lips of innocence, where yet lingers the soft breath of prayer. Hovering o’er the sighing maiden and the restless miser, weaving fancies which fill the poet’s brain with unutterable poesy, and with such shapes as live only in dreams of age and infancy, and vanish with the light of morn. Cuddlephum! Bobberish—Baa-lamb! Bo!”
“Just so,” said Bob, opening wide his eyes at the strange words. “I begs to say that French wasn’t taught at the school I went to. Howsoever, I’m quite willing to dine with you, if that’s what you mean. I’m beginning to feel pereshious hungry, I can tell yer.”
“Hungry! Base mortal, there is no such word known here,” echoed the monster.
“Good heavens! No eating!” cried Bob, aghast.
“None.”
“Scissors! I’m afraid visitors from Australia won’t overrun Moonland, if that’s the case.”
“Peace! Follow me, and thou shalt taste nectar, which shall banish the cravings of thy vulgar race.”
The Man in the Moon bounded away over the pumice-stone crags like a gigantic kangaroo, followed by Bob. Chaos and desolation were everywhere visible around them. Sad indeed and supremely melancholy looked the place. Mountains riven asunder; vast ravines and valleys choked with bleached bones of monsters unknown to men; immense plains, scattered thickly with the fossil remnants of ages; mingled dust and huge mounds of bony fragments of animal and reptile, which a thousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed. Up the rugged zigzags with tremendous leaps, echoless, shadowless, and across the dust, silent to their footfall, went the lunarian and the mortal.
“This is a dreary place, sir,” muttered the latter, almost breathless in his haste.
“Peace, or perchance the forms of these dead monsters will rise to rebuke thee!” answered his companion solemnly. “Here, where thou art standing, these enormous animals of the first period lived and roved at will. The human mind cannot conceive their colossal proportions, for they were extinct many ages before the advent of man.”
The shepherd followed his conductor in silence, wondering if it were possible that these mighty dead could take shape again and swallow him at one snap. Jonah had been bolted by a whale, but the skeletons of these creatures appeared large enough to engulf a hundred whales a day, and twice that number of Jonahs into the bargain.
Bob was almost ready to sink down amid the Golgotha when the Man in the Moon halted before a very high mountain. Making a sign to his companion to follow, he quickly disappeared from view. At first it seemed as if the mammoth had vanished within the mountain, but the mortal saw an opening at the base which he entered. What a study for a geologist! In the dim ages of the past, when the satellite of our Earth seethed and boiled as a vast crater, the solid intestines of this cone, yielding to some great power below it, had been riven in twain, leaving an unmeasurable grotto of winding galleries. Toiling along in the wake of the lunarian, the captive trod on a broad aisle, on each side of which rose a series of arches succeeding each other, like the noble arcades of some Gothic cathedral. Obelisk-like massive pillars stood out from the rent wall like mighty sentinels guarding the wreck. Had our hero been a mineralogist, armed with his hammer, his steel pointer, his magnetic needles, and his blow pipe, what a fund of information he might have gleaned here to place before the spectacles of professors and philosophers! Nay, had he but possessed the faintest idea of the science of building, what patterns, what studies around and above him, for every form of the art to hereafter confound architects of the nineteenth century!
Poor Bob was neither a mineralogist nor an architect, so he passed by these things without a second glance, and entered a vaulted chamber, upon whose round, jagged dome rested the whole weight of the mountain; the dented projections and the sharp points on wall and roof spun into an endless network of lines and seams, luminous as all things here seemed to be, and changing colour from silver-grey to deep crimson.
Wonder had lost its functions for Bob the shepherd, otherwise he would have stood aghast at the strange forms moving to and fro within this chamber; round in shape, and taller than giants of long ago, with arms and legs evidently telescoped at the joints, so that they could lengthen or shorten them at will, and each shedding their quota of refulgence to illuminate the scene. Monster glow-worms, gigantic fire-flies, with the trickery of monkeys, and the strength of bears, seized the shrinking man, and rose with him to the dome, which opened instantly and engulfed them. Amidst a circle of light, which changed quicker than the sparkles of a diamond, the poor shepherd found he was being borne upward and hemmed in by a ring of these natives of the Moon—upward and yet upward, without will to pause or stop, the mad whirlwind of light ever changing, red, blue, grey, yellow, white, azure, and the legion gathering in increased numbers every moment round him until the climax came, and the crater, that had been silent for countless ages, once more opened its ponderous jaws, casting him forth as a rocket, where—amidst fiery rings and bars, and blazing stars of light—he fell down, down, down into darkness and oblivion!
* * *
“I say, mate, how far is it to the Blue Mountains Inn?”
Old Bob, the shepherd, rubbed his eyes and looked up at the questioner. He was a stout, thick-set fellow, with a heavy swag on his back, and a black billy-can in his hand.
The man had to repeat his query ere the herdsman found speech.
“Why, surely, you’re not the Man in the Moon, eh?” asked Bob, with a wild stare.
The swagman stepped backward a pace or two, and regarded our hero with more attention.
“Man in the Moon!” he repeated. “Why, the old fellow’s gone off his head.”
“ ‘WHY, SURELY, YOU’RE NOT THE MAN IN THE MOON?’ ”
“Where’s the others with the long legs and arms?” and the shepherd shuddered.
“He’s cranky, sure enough,” muttered the traveller audibly. “The coves as you were asking arter are all gone,” he said aloud. “You get up on your pins, or they’ll be back again Here’s a bob; come now, hook it, or they’ll have you,” saying which the swagman went on his way.
Our hero raised himself into a sitting posture. Before him lay the verdant slopes and ridges of the mountain, bathed in sunlight. Yonder his sheep fed peacefully, watched by the faithful Patch. Then the old man raised his vision higher than the earth and thanked Heaven that he was still safe and sound on terra firma.