“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, [[215]]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.” [[216]]
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.