Claude
Allin Shepperson (1867-1921) was a British artist and illustrator. He
trained at Heatherley's and in Paris and was one of a
number of illustrators who worked as a tutor at Percy Bradshaw's Press Art School. Working in most
media, Shepperson's pictures are a masterclass in elegance, grace and
refinement, and scene of high society, often featuring the 'Shepperson Girl,'
were his speciality. He contributed regularly to TheTatler magazine, the ideal
magazine to showcase his work. He illustrated H.G. Well's The First Men in the Moon which was first published in The Strand Magazine 1900 - 1901. A book edition was published in 1901. However, in the book edition only 13 illustrations from The Strand Magaazine were shown.
The First Men in the Moon in The Strand Magazine
I. — MR. BEDFORD MEETS
MR. CAVOR AT LYMPNE
I soon discovered that writing a play was a longer business than
I had supposed; at first I had reckoned ten days for it, and it was
to have a pied-à-terre while it was in hand that I came to
Lympne.
He was a short, round-bodied, thin-legged little man, with a
jerky quality in his motions; he had seen fit to clothe his
extraordinary mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat, and cycling
knickerbockers and stockings. Why he did so I do not know, for he
never cycled and he never played cricket. It was a fortuitous
concurrence of garments, arising I know not how. He gesticulated
with his hands and arms, and jerked his head about and buzzed. He
buzzed like something electric. You never heard such buzzing. And
ever and again he cleared his throat with a most extraordinary
noise.
Then
with a sort of convulsive gesture he turned and retreated with
every manifestation of haste, no longer gesticulating, but going
with ample strides that showed the relatively large size of his
feet—they were, I remember, grotesquely exaggerated in size
by adhesive clay—to the best possible advantage.
He was quite willing to supply information. Indeed, once he was
fairly under way the conversation became a monologue. He talked
like a man long pent up, who has had it over with himself again and
again. He talked for nearly an hour, and I must confess I found it
a pretty stiff bit of listening.
"I begin to see. It's extraordinary how one gets
new points of view by talking over things!"
II. — THE FIRST MAKING
OF CAVORITE
Instantly my coat tails were over my head, and I was progressing
in great leaps and bounds, and quite against my will, towards him.
In the same moment the discoverer was seized, whirled about, and
flew through the screaming air.
I repeated my suggestion of getting back to my bungalow, and
this time he understood. We clung arm-in-arm and started, and
managed at last to reach the shelter of as much roof as was left to
me.
III. — THE BUILDING OF
THE SPHERE
And while he was having his bath I considered the entire
question alone.
An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly
I saw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with
Cavorite liners and spheres deluxe. "Rights of pre-emption," came
floating into my head—planetary rights of pre-emption. I
recalled the old Spanish monopoly in American gold.
At last I got back to bed and snatched some moments of
sleep—moments of nightmare rather—in which I fell and
fell and fell for evermore into the abyss of the sky.
IV. — INSIDE THE
SPHERE
"Go on," said Cavor, as I sat across the edge of
the manhole, and looked down into the black interior of the sphere.
We two were alone. It was evening, the sun had set, and the
stillness of the twilight was upon everything.
V. — THE JOURNEY TO THE
MOON
The little window vanished with a click, another beside it
snapped open and instantly closed, and then a third, and for a
moment I had to close my eyes because of the blinding splendour of
the waning moon.
And as I stood and
stared at the moon between my feet, that perception of the
impossible that had been with me off and on ever since our start,
returned again with tenfold conviction.
Presently he told me he wished to alter our course a little by
letting the earth tug at us for a moment. He was going to open one
earthward blind for thirty seconds. He warned me that it would make
my head swim, and advised me to extend my hands against the glass
to break my fall. I did as he directed, and thrust my feet against
the bales of food cases and air cylinders to prevent their falling
upon me. Then with a click the window flew open. I fell clumsily
upon hands and face, and saw for a moment between my black extended
fingers our mother earth—a planet in a downward sky.
VI. — THE LANDING ON THE
MOON
Then Cavor switched on the electric light, and told me he
proposed to bind all our luggage together with the blankets about
it, against the concussion of our descent. We did this with our
windows closed, because in that way our goods arranged themselves
naturally at the centre of the sphere. That too was a strange
business; we two men floating loose in that spherical space, and
packing and pulling ropes.
We were still alive, and we were lying in the darkness of the
shadow of the wall of the great crater into which we had
fallen.
VII. — SUNRISE ON THE
MOON
Then some huge landslip in the thawing air had caught us, and
spluttering expostulation, we began to roll down a slope, rolling
faster and faster, leaping crevasses and rebounding from banks,
faster and faster, westward into the white-hot boiling tumult of
the lunar day.
VIII. A LUNAR MORNING
"Life!" And immediately it poured upon us that our vast journey
had not been made in vain, that we had come to no arid waste of
minerals, but to a world that lived and moved! We watched
intensely. I remember I kept rubbing the glass before me with my
sleeve, jealous of the faintest suspicion of mist.
IX. PROSPECTING
BEGINS
He
seemed twenty or thirty feet off. He was standing high upon a rocky
mass and gesticulating back to me. Perhaps he was
shouting—but the sound did not reach me. But how the deuce
had he done this? I felt like a man who has just seen a new
conjuring trick.
It was horrible and delightful, and as wild as a nightmare, to
go flying off in this fashion. I realised my leap had been
altogether too violent. I flew clean over Cavor's head and beheld a
spiky confusion in a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp
of alarm. I put out my hands and straightened my legs.
I stood for a moment
struck by the grotesque effect of his soaring figure—his
dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little round body, his arms
and his knicker-bockered legs tucked up tightly—against the
weird spaciousness of the lunar scene.
X. — LOST MEN IN THE
MOON
Boom... Boom... Boom.
It came from beneath our feet, a sound in the earth. We seemed
to hear it with our feet as much as with our ears. Its dull
resonance was muffled by distance, thick with the quality of
intervening substance. No sound that I can imagine could have
astonished us more, or have changed more completely the quality of
things about us. For this sound, rich, slow, and deliberate, seemed
to us as though it could be nothing but the striking of some
gigantic buried clock.
XI. — THE MOONCALF
PASTURES
A crackling and smashing of the scrub appeared to be advancing
directly upon us, and then, as we squatted close and endeavoured to
judge of the nearness and direction of this noise, there came a
terrific bellow behind us, so close and vehement that the tops of
the bayonet scrub bent before it, and one felt the breath of it hot
and moist. And, turning about, we saw indistinctly through a crowd
of swaying stems the mooncalf's shining sides, and the long line of
its back loomed out against the sky.
He had been a little distance from the edge when the
lid had first opened, and perceiving the peril that held me
helpless, gripped my legs and pulled me backward.
He stood
up as well as he could, putting a hand on my head to steady
himself, which was disrespectful, and stood staring about him,
quite devoid now of any fear of the moon beings.
Almost immediately we must have come upon the Selenites. There
were six of them, and they were marching in single file over a
rocky place, making the most remarkable piping and whining sounds.
They all seemed to become aware of us at once, all instantly became
silent and motionless, like animals, with their faces turned
towards us.
For a moment I was sobered.
"Insects," murmured Cavor, "insects! And they think I'm going to
crawl about on my stomach—on my vertebrated stomach!
XII. — THE SELENITE'S
FACE
There was no nose, and the thing had dull bulging eyes
at the side—in the silhouette I had supposed they were ears.
There were no ears... I have tried to draw one of these heads, but
I cannot. There was a mouth, downwardly curved, like a human mouth
in a face that stares ferociously...
The neck on which the head was poised was jointed in three
places, almost like the short joints in the leg of a crab. The
joints of the limbs I could not see, because of the puttee-like
straps in which they were swathed, and which formed the only
clothing the being wore.
There the thing was, looking at us!
XIII. MR. CAVOR MAKES
SOME SUGGESTIONS
He paused as if he required my assent. But I sat sulking.
"Confound your science!" I said.
I perceived that the foremost and second carried bowls.
One elemental need at least our minds could understand in common.
They were bowls of some metal that, like our fetters, looked dark
in that bluish light; and each contained a number of whitish
fragments. All the cloudy pain and misery that oppressed me rushed
together and took the shape of hunger. I eyed these bowls
wolfishly, and, though it returned to me in dreams, at that time it
seemed a small matter that at the end of the arms that lowered one
towards me were not hands, but a sort of flap and thumb, like the
end of an elephant's trunk.
XIV. EXPERIMENTS IN
INTERCOURSE
We remained passive, and the Selenites, having finished their
arrangements, stood back from us, and seemed to be looking at us. I
say seemed to be, because as their eyes were at the side and not in
front, one had the same difficulty in determining the direction in
which they were looking as one has in the case of a hen or a fish.
I turned on the goad-bearer behind me with a swift threatening
gesture, and he started back. This and Cavor's sudden shout and
leap clearly astonished all the Selenites. They receded hastily,
facing us. For one of those moments that seem to last for ever, we
stood in angry protest, with a scattered semicircle of these
inhuman beings about us.
XV. THE GIDDY
BRIDGE
We seemed to be marching down that tunnel for a long time.
"Trickle, trickle," went the flowing light very softly, and our
footfalls and their echoes made an irregular paddle, paddle. My
mind settled down to the question of my chains. If I were to slip
off one turn
so, and then to twist it
so...
My mailed hand seemed to go clean through him. He smashed
like—like some softish sort of sweet with liquid in it! He
broke right in! He squelched and splashed. It was like hitting a
damp toadstool.
I stopped and looked back, and I heard the pad, pad of Cavor's
feet receding. Then he stopped also. "Bedford," he whispered;
"there's a sort of light in front of us."
XVI. POINTS OF
VIEW
I plucked up half a dozen and flung them against the rocks,
and then sat down, laughing bitterly, as Cavor's ruddy face came
into view.
At any rate, we had now
the comforting knowledge of the enormous muscular superiority our
birth in another planet gave us. In other minute I was clambering
with gigantic vigour after Cavor's blue-lit heels.
XVII. THE FIGHT IN THE
CAVE OF THE MOON BUTCHERS
And lying in a
line along its length, vanishing at last far away in that
tremendous perspective, were a number of huge shapes, huge pallid
hulls, upon which the Selenites were busy.
I realised Cavor's utter incapacity for the fight we had in
hand. For a moment I hesitated. Then I rushed past him whirling my
crowbars, and shouting to confound the aim of the Selenite. He was
aiming in the queerest way with the thing against his stomach.
"Chuzz!" The thing wasn't a gun; it went off like cross-bow more,
and dropped me in the middle of a leap.
I remember I seemed to be wading among those
leathery, thin things as a man wades through tall grass, mowing and
hitting, first right, then left; smash. Little drops of moisture
flew about. I trod on things that crushed and piped and went
slippery.
XVIII. IN THE
SUNLIGHT
I stood up. "We must get a fixed point we can recognise—we
might hoist a flag, or a handkerchief, or something—and
quarter the ground, and work round that."
I was on the
point of asking him to shake hands—for that, somehow, was how
I felt just then—when he put his feet together and leapt away
from me towards the north. He seemed to drift through the air as a
dead leaf would do, fell lightly, and leapt again. I stood for a
moment watching him, then faced westward reluctantly, pulled myself
together, and with something of the feeling of a man who leaps into
icy water, selected a leaping point, and plunged forward to explore
my solitary half of the moon world.
XIX. MR. BEDFORD
ALONE
I could see my handkerchief far off, spread out on
its thicket of thorns.
I saw the sphere!...
I threw up my arms, shouted a ghostly shout, and set off in vast
leaps towards it. I missed one of my leaps and dropped into a deep
ravine and twisted my ankle, and after that I stumbled at almost
every leap. I was in a state of hysterical agitation, trembling
violently, and quite breathless long before I got to it.
I set myself to decipher this.
"I have been injured about the knee, I think my kneecap is hurt,
and I cannot run or crawl," it began—pretty distinctly
written.
Then less legibly: "They have been chasing me for some time, and
it is only a question of"—the word "time" seemed to have been
written here and erased in favour of something
illegible—"before they get me. They are beating all about
me."
I was a dozen yards from it. My eyes had become dim. "Lie down!"
screamed despair; "lie down!"
I touched it, and halted. "Too late!" screamed despair; "lie
down!"
I fought stiffly with it. I was on the manhole lip, a stupefied,
half-dead being. The snow was all about me. I pulled myself in.
There lurked within a little warmer air.
XX. MR. BEDFORD IN
INFINITE SPACE
I was in darkness, save for the
earthshine and the glitter of the stars below me. Everything was so
absolutely silent and still that I might indeed have been the only
being in the universe, and yet, strangely enough, I had no more
feeling of loneliness or fear than if I had been lying in bed on
earth.
XXI. MR. BEDFORD AT
LITTLESTONE
The sphere hit the water with a huge splash: it must have sent
it fathoms high. At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open.
Down I went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere
pressing against my feet, and so drove up again as a bubble drives.
And at the last I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the
sea, and my journey in space was at an end.
"I want help," I said hoarsely. "I want to get some
stuff up the beach—stuff I can't very well leave about." I
became aware of three other pleasant-looking young men with towels,
blazers, and straw hats, coming down the sands towards me.
Evidently the early bathing section of this Littlestone.
The sea, which had been smooth, was rough now with hurrying
cat's-paws, and all about where the sphere had been was tumbled
water like the wake of a ship. Above, a little puff of cloud
whirled like dispersing smoke, and the three or four people on the
beach were bring up with interrogative faces towards the point of
that unexpected report.
I gesticulated convulsively. He receded a step as though I had
threatened him. I made a bolt through them into the hotel.
XXII. THE ASTONISHING
COMMUNICATION OF MR. JULIUS WENDIGEE
...there reached me (it is now about six months
ago) one of the most astounding communications I have ever been
fated to receive. Briefly, it informed me that Mr. Julius Wendigee,
a Dutch electrician, who has been experimenting with certain
apparatus akin to the apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America, in
the hope of discovering some method of communication with Mars, was
receiving day by day a curiously fragmentary message in English,
which was indisputably emanating from Mr. Cavor in the moon.
XXIII. AN ABSTRACT OF
THE SIX MESSAGES
FIRST RECEIVED FROM MR. CAVOR
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."
As they pulled at it that net seemed the
heaviest thing I had come upon in the moon; it was loaded with
weights—no doubt of gold—and it took a long time to
draw, for in those waters the larger and more edible fish lurk
deep. The fish in the net came up like a blue moonrise—a
blaze of darting, tossing blue.
XXIV. THE NATURAL
HISTORY OF THE SELENITES
Finding he would not walk even under the goad, they carried him
into darkness, crossed a narrow, plank-like bridge that may have
been the identical bridge I had refused, and put him down in
something that must have seemed at first to be some sort of lift.
This was the balloon—it had certainly been absolutely
invisible to us in the darkness—and what had seemed to me a
mere plank-walking into the void was really, no doubt, the passage
of the gangway.
"It was an incredible crowd. Suddenly and violently there was
forced upon my attention the vast amount of difference there is
amongst these beings of the moon.
"Indeed, there seemed not two alike in all that jostling
multitude. They differed in shape, they differed in size, they rang
all the horrible changes on the theme of Selenite form! Some bulged
and overhung, some ran about among the feet of their fellows.
He seems to have grasped their intention
with great quickness, and to have begun repeating words to them and
pointing to indicate the application. The procedure was probably
always the same. Phi-oo would attend to Cavor for a space, then
point also and say the word he had heard.
...but some of the profounder scholars are altogether
too great for locomotion, and are carried from place to place in a
sort of sedan tub, wabbling jellies of knowledge that enlist my
respectful astonishment. I have just passed one in coming to this
place where I am permitted to amuse myself with these electrical
toys, a vast, shaven, shaky head, bald and thin-skinned, carried on
his grotesque stretcher.
One, I
remember very distinctly: he left a strong impression, I think,
because some trick the light and of his attitude was strongly
suggestive a drawn-up human figure. His fore-limbs were long,
delicate tentacles—he was some kind of refined
manipulator—and the pose of his slumber suggested a
submissive suffering. No doubt it was a mistake for me to interpret
his expression in that way,...
XXV. THE GRAND
LUNAR
"In front, after the manner of heralds, marched four
trumpet-faced creatures making a devastating bray; and then came
squat, resolute-moving ushers before and behind, and on either hand
a galaxy of learned heads, a sort of animated encyclopedia, who
were, Phi-oo explained, to stand about the Grand Lunar for purposes
of reference.
Higher and higher these steps appear to go as one draws nearer
their base. But at last I came under a huge archway and beheld the
summit of these steps, and upon it the Grand Lunar exalted on his
throne.
"He was seated in what was relatively a blaze of incandescent
blue. This, and the darkness about him gave him an effect of
floating in a blue-black void. He seemed a small, self-luminous
cloud at first, brooding on his sombre throne; his brain case must
have measured many yards in diameter.
I became aware of a faint wheezy noise. The Grand Lunar was
addressing me. It was like the rubbing of a finger upon a pane of
glass.
"The iris was quite a new organ to the Grand Lunar. For a time
he amused himself by flashing his rays into my face and watching my
pupils contract. As a consequence, I was dazzled and blinded for
some little time...
When I had done he ordered cooling sprays upon his brow, and
then requested me to repeat my explanation conceiving something had
miscarried.
I told, too, of the past, of invasions and massacres, of the
Huns and Tartars, and the wars of Mahomet and the Caliphs, and of
the Crusades. And as I went on, and Phi-oo translated, and the
Selenites cooed and murmured in a steadily intensified emotion.
XXVI. THE LAST MESSAGE
CAVOR SENT TO THE EARTH
For my own part a
vivid dream has come to my help, and I see, almost as plainly as
though I had seen it in actual fact, a blue-lit shadowy dishevelled
Cavor struggling in the grip of these insect Selenites, struggling
ever more desperately and hopelessly as they press upon him,
shouting, expostulating, perhaps even at last fighting, and being
forced backwards step by step out of all speech or sign of his
fellows, for evermore into the Unknown—into the dark, into
that silence that has no end...
END
Wir zeigen hier noch die Buchillustrationen, da sie etwas besser sind als diejenigen im Strand-Magazin.
Scene sur un banc (Pierrot)
