Voyages to the Moon and the Sun

by Cyrano de Bergerac

I cannot choose but admit that the sight of so many fair objects tickled me with those agreeable pangs the embryo is said to feel when the soul is infused in it! My old hair fell out and was replaced by thicker and finer tresses; I felt my youth re-lighted, my face grow rosy, my natural heat mingle gently once more with my radical moisture; in fine, my age diminished some fourteen years.

I had walked half a league through a forest of jasmine and myrtles when I perceived something that moved, as it lay in the shade; it was a young man whose majestic beauty compelled me almost to adore him. He arose to restrain me.

"'Tis not to me", he exclaimed loudly, "but to God, that you owe these acts of submission!"

"You see me", I replied, "amazed with so many miracles that I know not how to begin the expression of my wonder. First I come from a world which you here no doubt take to be a Moon; and I thought to reach another, which the people of my country call the Moon, and I find myself in Paradise at the feet of a God who refuses to be adored, of a stranger who speaks my language."

"Except for the attribute of God", he replied, "what you say is true; this Earth is the Moon which you see from your Globe and the place where you walk is Paradise, but it is the Earthly Paradise into which only six people have ever entered: Adam, Eve, Enoch, Myself who am old Elijah, Saint John the Evangelist and you. You know very well how the two first were banished hence but you do not know how they came to your World. Know then that when they had both tasted the forbidden apple, Adam, fearful lest God should be further irritated by his presence and increase his punishment, considered the Moon, your Earth, as the sole refuge wherein he could shelter from the vengeance of his Creator. Well, at that time man's imagination was so strong, being not yet corrupted by debaucheries, by coarse foods or by the weakening of diseases, that when he was excited by a violent desire to reach this refuge his whole body became lightened through the fire of this enthusiasm and he was uplifted just as certain philosophers, whose imagination has been greatly moved by something, have been carried into the air by transports which you call ecstatic. Eve who was weaker and not so hot, because of the infirmity of her sex, doubtless would not have possessed an imagination able to conquer by the mere strength of its will the weight of matter, but since she had been but a little time made out of her husband's body the sympathy which still bound this portion to the original whole carried her after him as he went up, just as amber is followed by a straw, as the loadstone turns to the north from whence it has been torn. And Adam attracted this part of himself as the sea attracts the rivers which are made out of her. When they reached your Earth they took up their abode between Mesopotamia and Arabia; the Hebrews knew him by the name of Adam and the idolaters by the name of Prometheus, feigned by their poets to have stolen fire from Heaven, because the progeny he begot were endowed with a soul as perfect as that which God had filled him with; thus the first man left this world deserted to inhabit yours, but the All-Wise willed that so happy a dwelling-place should not remain uninhabited and a few centuries later he granted Enoch permission to leave the company of mankind, whose innocence had become corrupted. This holy personage considered that no retreat was secure against the ambition of his relatives (who were already cutting each other's throats for the possession of your world) except that happy land whereof Adam, his grandfather, had formerly talked so much. Yet how was he to get there? Jacob's Ladder was not yet invented! The grace of the Most High supplied the deficiency by causing Enoch to observe that the fire from Heaven descended upon the sacrifices of the just and of those who were acceptable before the face of the Lord, according to the word of His mouth: 'The savour of the just man's sacrifices has reached me.' One day when this divine flame was fiercely consuming a victim which he offered to the Eternal, he filled two large vessels with the vapour it gave off, sealed them hermetically and attached them under his arm-pits. The smoke immediately had a tendency to rise straight up to God and, not being able to penetrate the metal save by a miracle, bore the vessels upwards and in the same way carried with them this holy man.[33] When he reached the Moon and looked upon this fair garden an almost supernatural out-pouring of joy showed him that it was the Earthly Paradise wherein his grandfather had formerly dwelt. He promptly loosened the vessels which he had bound like wings on to his shoulders and did so with so much good fortune that he was scarce four toises in the air above the Moon when he took leave of his bladders. However he was sufficiently high up to have been sadly hurt had not the wind borne up the ample skirts of his robe.[34] The ardour of the fire of charity sustained him also. As to the vessels they continued to rise until God set them in the Heavens and they are what you to-day call the Balance, showing us every day that they are still full of the odours of a just man's sacrifice by the favourable influences they exert on the horoscope of Louis the Just, who had the Balance as his ascendant.

"Enoch nevertheless was not yet in this garden; he arrived there some time later. This was during the flood when the waters which engulfed your world rose to so prodigious a height that the Ark swam in the Heavens beside the Moon. The human beings within saw this globe through the window but the light reflected from this great opaque body was weakened because they were so near that they shared it and so each of them thought it was a part of the Earth not yet flooded. One daughter of Noah, named Achab, alone maintained tooth and nail that it was positively the Moon, perhaps because she had noticed they had approached this body as the ship rose. They pointed out to her that the sounding-line marked but fifteen fathoms of water; she only replied that the lead must have touched the back of a whale which they took for Earth and that for her part she was well assured it was the Moon in person they were about to board. In fine, since each one follows the opinion of his like, all the other women in turn grew convinced of it and in spite of the men's prohibition they launched the skiff on the water. Achab was the most daring and desired to be the first to affront the peril. She threw herself gaily into the boat and would have been followed by all those of her sex had not a wave separated her from the ship. They called to her, said she was a hundred times lunatic, vowed that through her every woman would one day be reproached for having a quarter of the Moon in her head—she did but flout them. There she was sailing outside the world. The animals followed her example, for most of the birds, impatient at the first prison that had ever restrained their liberty, flew thither if they felt their wings strong enough to risk the journey. The boldest of the quadrupeds even began to swim. More than a thousand got out before Noah's sons could shut the stables which were kept open by the crowd of animals rushing through. Most of them reached this new world. As for the skiff, it grounded upon a very pleasant hill where the courageous Achab landed. Delighted at having recognised that this Earth was indeed the Moon she was unwilling to embark again and join her brothers. She spent some time in a cave and one day as she was walking out, debating whether she were sorry or very glad to have lost the company of her relatives, she saw a man knocking down acorns. The joy of such a meeting made her fly to embrace him, and she received the like from him, for it was still longer since the old man had seen a human face. It was Enoch the Just. They lived together, begat posterity and had he not been obliged to withdraw into the woods by the original sin of his children and the pride of his wife, they would have passed the remainder of their days together with all the comfort God bestows as a blessing upon the marriage of the Just. There, every day in the wildest retreats of these terrible solitudes he offered up to God with a purified spirit his heart as a sacrifice. One day the Tree of Knowledge, which as you know is in this garden, dropped an apple in the river on whose bank it is planted and the fruit was carried out of Paradise by the waves to a place where poor Enoch was fishing to gain his scanty subsistence. This beautiful fruit was caught in his net and he ate it. Immediately he knew where the Earthly Paradise was and he came to live in it by secret means which you cannot conceive if you have not eaten, as he did, the Apple of Knowledge.

"Now I must tell you the manner in which I came here myself. You have not forgotten, I suppose, that my name is Elijah, for I told you so just now. You must know then that I was in your world and that I dwelt with Elisha, a Hebrew like myself, on the banks of the Jordan where I spent among books a life pleasant enough not to make me regret that it was continually passing away. However, as the enlightenment of my spirit increased, the knowledge of the enlightenment I did not possess increased also. Whenever our priests reminded me of Adam I could not forbear sighing at the recollection of that perfect Philosophy he had possessed. I despaired of being able to acquire it, when one day, after I had sacrificed to expiate the sins of my mortal Being, I fell asleep and the Angel of the Lord appeared to me in a dream. As soon as I awoke I failed not to labour at those things he had commanded me; I took of loadstone two square feet and cast it into a furnace, and when it was purged, precipitated and dissolved, I drew out the attractive principle, calcined the whole elixir and reduced it to the bulk of a medium-sized ball.

"Following upon these preparations I had made a very light chariot of iron and some months later, all my engines being completed, I entered my ingenious cart. Perhaps you will ask what was the use of this appliance? Know then that the Angel told me in my dream that if I desired to acquire the perfect knowledge I wished for I should rise from the world to the Moon, where I should find the Tree of Knowledge in Adam's Paradise and as soon as I had tasted its fruit my soul would perceive all the truths a created mind can perceive. For this voyage I had built my chariot. I got into it and when I was well and firmly seated in it I cast the loadstone ball high into the air. Now I had expressly made my iron machine thicker in the middle than at the ends and so it was lifted immediately in perfect equilibrium because it moved always more eagerly in that part. Thus, directly I arrived where the loadstone had drawn me I threw up the ball again in the air above me."

"But", I interrupted, "how did you throw the ball so straight above your chariot that it never went sideways?"

"I see nothing astounding in this adventure", said he, "for when the loadstone was cast into the air it attracted the iron straight to it and consequently it was impossible that I should rise sideways. I must tell you that I held the ball in my hand and continued to rise because the chariot rushed always towards the loadstone which I held above it; but the movement of the iron to join with the ball was so vigorous that it bent my body double and I dared not attempt the new experiment more than once. In truth it was a very surprising spectacle to behold, for I had polished the steel of this flying house carefully and it reflected on all sides the light of the Sun so keenly and sharply that I myself thought I was being carried away in a chariot of fire. At length after I had many times thrown the ball upwards and had flown after it, I arrived (as you did) at a place where I began to fall towards this world; and because at that moment I happened to be holding the loadstone ball tightly in my hands my chariot pressed against me to approach the body which attracted it and therefore did not leave me. All I had to fear now was breaking my neck, but to preserve myself from that I threw up the ball from time to time so that my machine, feeling itself attracted back, would rest and so break the force of my fall. Finally, when I was about two or three hundred toises above the ground I threw the ball out on either side level with the chariot, sometimes in the one direction and sometimes in the other, until my eyes discovered the Earthly Paradise. Immediately I failed not to throw my loadstone above it and, when the machine followed, I let myself fall until I saw I was about to be hurled against the ground; then I threw the ball upwards a foot only above my head and this little cast diminished altogether the speed I had acquired in falling so that my descent was no more violent than if I had jumped down my own height. I will not describe to you my amazement at the sight of the marvels which are here, because it was very similar to that which I perceive has just perturbed you.