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answer. I could shut my eyes, think of my answer, and almost forget that
the the Grand Lunar has no face....
"When I had descended again to my proper place the Grand Lunar asked how
we sheltered ourselves from heat and storms, and I expounded to him the
arts of building and furnishing. Here we wandered into misunderstandings
and cross-purposes, due largely, I must admit, to the looseness of my
expressions. For a long time I had great difficulty in making him
understand the nature of a house. To him and his attendant Selenites it
seemed, no doubt, the most whimsical thing in the world that men should
build houses when they might descend into excavations, and an additional
complication was introduced by the attempt I made to explain that men had
originally begun their homes in caves, and that they were now taking their
railways and many establishments beneath the surface. Here I think a
desire for intellectual completeness betrayed me. There was also a
considerable tangle due to an equally unwise attempt on my part to explain
about mines. Dismissing this topic at last in an incomplete state, the
Grand Lunar inquired what we did with the interior of our globe.
"A tide of twittering and piping swept into the remotest corners of that
great assembly when it was at last made clear that we men know absolutely
nothing of the contents of the world upon which the immemorial generations
of our ancestors had been evolved. Three times had I to repeat that of all
the 4000 miles of distance between the earth and its centre men knew only
to the depth of a mile, and that very vaguely. I understood the Grand
Lunar to ask why had I come to the moon seeing we had scarcely touched our
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