Voyages to the Moon and the Sun

by Cyrano de Bergerac

When he had brought it, the young man seized it by the arm and whipped it for a long quarter of an hour.

"Now, rascal", he continued, "as a punishment for your disobedience you shall be a laughing stock to everybody for the rest of the day and so I order you to walk on two feet only all day."

The poor old man went out very mournfully and his son continued: "Gentlemen, I beseech you to excuse the rogueries of this hot-head. I hoped to make something good of him, but he takes advantage of my kindness. For my part I think the rogue will be the death of me; indeed on more than ten occasions I have been on the point of giving him my malediction."

Although I bit my lips I had great difficulty to keep myself from laughing at this world upside down. To break off this burlesque pedagogy, which no doubt would have made me burst forth in the end, I begged him to tell me what he meant by the journey of the Town he had just spoken of, whether the houses and the walls could move. He replied:

"My dear friend, our cities are divided into the mobile and the sedentary. The mobile, like that in which we are now, are constructed as follows: the architect builds each palace, as you see, of very light wood and inserts four wheels underneath it. In the thickness of one of the walls he places large and numerous bellows, whose nozzles pass in a horizontal line through the upper story from one gable to the other. When it is desired to move the town somewhere (for we change our air at every season), each one hangs out a number of large sails from one side of his house in front of the bellows; then he winds up a spring to make them play and in less than eight days the continuous blasts vomited by these windy monsters against the sails carry their houses, if they wish, more than a hundred leagues.

"The architecture of the second kind, which we call sedentary, is as follows: the houses are almost like your towers, except that they are made of wood and that in the middle they have a large strong screw which goes from the cellar to the roof to raise or lower them at will. Well, the earth underneath is hollowed out as deep as the building is high, and the whole thing is constructed in this manner so that when the frosts begin to fall cold from the sky, they can lower their houses to the bottom of the hole by turning them; and then they cover the tower and the hollow part about it with large skins and so shelter themselves from the inclemency of the air. But as soon as the soft breath of Spring makes the air milder, they return to the daylight by means of the large screw of which I spoke."

I think he wished to stop speaking there, but I began thus:

"Faith, sir, I should never have thought so expert a mason could be a philosopher, did I not have you as witness. For this reason, since we are not going to-day, you will have plenty of leisure to explain to us this eternal origin of the world with which you entertained us just now. In recompense, I promise you that as soon as I return to the Moon, whence my instructor"—I pointed to my demon—"will prove to you that I came, I will disseminate your fame by relating the fine things you tell me. I see that you laugh at this promise, because you do not believe the Moon is a world and still less that I am one of its inhabitants. But I can assure you that the people of that World take this one for a Moon and will laugh at me when I say their Moon is a World, that it has fields and inhabitants."

He only replied by a smile, and then he began to speak as follows:

"When we try to go back to the origin of this Great All we are forced to run into three or four absurdities, and so it is reasonable to take the path which makes us stumble least. The first obstacle that stops us is the Eternity of the World. Men's minds are not strong enough to conceive it and, because they are not able to imagine that so vast, so beautiful, so well regulated an Universe could have made itself, they take refuge in Creation. But, like one who plunges into a river for fear of being wet with rain, they run from the arms of a dwarf to the pity of a giant; and they do not even escape the difficulty, for they give to God the eternity they took from the world because they could not understand it. As if it were easier to imagine it in the one than in the other! This absurdity, then, or this giant of which I spoke, is Creation; for, tell me truly, has it ever been conceived how something could be made from nothing? Alas! There are such infinite differences between Nothing and one single atom that the acutest brain could not penetrate them. To escape this inexplicable labyrinth you must admit a Matter co-eternal with God, and then it is unnecessary to admit a God, since the World could have existed without Him. But, you will say, even if I grant you this Eternal Matter, how did this chaos become order of itself? Well, I shall explain it to you.