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, and the air travels

through the great sponge of galleries, in accordance with simple physical

laws. The caverns of the moon, on the whole, are very windy places. As the

sunlight comes round the moon the air in the outer galleries on that side

is heated, its pressure increases, some flows out on the exterior and

mingles with the evaporating air of the craters (where the plants remove

its carbonic acid), while the greater portion flows round through the

galleries to replace the shrinking air of the cooling side that the

sunlight has left. There is, therefore, a constant eastward breeze in the

air of the outer galleries, and an upflow during the lunar day up the

shafts, complicated, of course, very greatly by the varying shape of the

galleries, and the ingenious contrivances of the Selenite mind....

259

The First Men In The Moon