Voyages to the Moon and the Sun

by Cyrano de Bergerac

He then pointed out to me something on the mud swollen like a molehill.

"It is", said he, "a boil or, to speak more correctly, a womb which for the last nine months has held the embryo of one of my brothers. I am waiting here for the purpose of acting as his midwife."

He would have gone on had he not perceived the earth palpitating around this clay sod. This, together with the size of the pimple, caused him to judge that the earth was in labour and that this motion was already the effort of the pains of delivery. He left me at once to run to it; and I went off to look for my cabin.

I climbed up the mountain, whence I had descended, and reached its top with some exertion. You may conceive my distress when I found my machine was not where I had left it. I was already sighing for its loss when I saw it fluttering a long way off. I rushed after it at top speed as fast as my legs permitted, and indeed it was an agreeable pastime to contemplate this new method of hunting; for, sometimes when I almost had my hand upon it there would be a slight increase of heat in the glass ball, which drew up the air with more force, and, as this air became swifter, lifted my box above me and made me jump after it like a cat at the hook where it sees a hare hanging. If my shirt had not remained on the roof, and thereby intercepted the force of the mirrors, the box would have gone off on its travels alone.

But to what end do I refresh the memory of an adventure which I cannot recollect now except with a pain such as I then felt? It suffices to know that the box bounded, ran and flew, and that I leaped, walked and strode, until at last I saw it fall at the foot of a very tall mountain. It would very likely have led me further if the shadow of this proud swelling of the earth, which darkened the sky far into the plain, had not spread half a league of darkness around it; for when my box reached these shadows, its glass no sooner felt the coolness than it ceased to create a vacuum, with wind through the hole, and consequently there was no impulse to sustain it; in so much that it fell and would have been broken into a thousand pieces had not the pool into which it fell happily yielded under its weight. I drew it from the water, repaired what was disorganized, and then grasping it with all my strength, carried it to the top of a hill which was close at hand. There, I spread out my shirt around the globe, but I could not clothe it, because the mirrors at once began their office and I perceived my cabin already wriggling to fly. I had only time to step nimbly in and to shut myself up as before.

The sphere of our World appeared to me no more than a planet about the size the Moon appears to us; and, as I continued to rise, it lessened first into a star, then into a spark and then into nothing; this luminous point grew so fine, to equalize itself with that which ended the last ray of my sight, that finally it merged into the colour of the sky. Some may perhaps be astonished that I was not overtaken by sleep during this long voyage; but, since sleep is only produced by the soft exhalation of meats evaporating from the stomach to the brain or by a need felt by Nature to knit up our soul in order to repair during rest the spirits consumed by labour, I had no need to sleep, seeing that I did not eat and that the Sun gave me much more radical heat than I expended. However, I continued to rise and as I approached that burning world I felt a certain joy flowing in my blood, which rectified it and passed into the soul. From time to time I looked up to admire the brightness of the tints which shone in my little crystal dome; and I still remember that as I directed my eyes towards the glass ball I felt with a start something heavy fly out from all the parts of my body. A whirlwind of very thick and almost palpable smoke suffocated my glass with darkness; I stood up to examine this darkness which blinded me and I saw no vessel, no mirrors, no glass, no covering to my cabin. I looked down to see what was making my masterpiece fall in ruins, but in its place and in place of the four sides and the floor I found nothing but the sky about me. What terrified me still more was to feel some invisible obstacle repulsing my arms when I tried to extend them, as if the air had been petrified. It came into my mind then that I had risen so high I must have reached the part of the firmament which certain philosophers and some astronomers have said is solid.

I began to feel I should remain enshrined there, but the horror which overwhelmed me at the strangeness of this accident was increased by those which followed; for, as my sight ranged here and there, it fell on my breast and, instead of stopping at the outer surface of my body, passed through it; then a moment afterwards I perceived that I was looking backwards with hardly any interlapse. As if my body had become nothing but an organ of sight I felt my flesh, purged of its opacity, carry objects to my eyes, and my eyes to objects by its means. At last, after striking a thousand times without seeing them, the roof, the floor and the walls of my chair, I understood that my cabin and I had become transparent, owing to some secret necessity of light at its source. Although it was diaphanous I might still have perceived it, since we clearly perceive glass, crystal and diamonds, which are also diaphanous; but I imagine that in a region so near the Sun that luminary purges bodies much more perfectly of their opacity by arranging the imperceptible channels of matter straighter than in our world, where its strength is almost exhausted by so long a journey and is scarcely capable of transpiring its light into precious stones; yet on account of the interior equality of their superficies it causes them to cast back through their glasses (as if through little eyes) either the green of emeralds, the scarlet of rubies or the violet of amethysts as the different pores of the stone, whether straighter or more sinuous, extinguish or rekindle this enfeebled light by the quantity of the reflections. One difficulty may embarrass the reader, which is how I could see myself and yet not see my box, since I had become as diaphanous as it was. To this I reply that the Sun doubtless acts differently upon living than upon inanimate bodies, since no portion of my flesh, of my bones, or of my entrails lost its natural colour though they were transparent; on the contrary, my lungs preserved their soft delicacy in an incarnadine red; my heart, still vermilion, swung easily between the systole and the diastole; my liver seemed to burn in a fiery purple and heating the air I breathed continued the circulation of my blood; in short, I saw, touched and smelt myself the same and yet I was not the same.

While I considered this metamorphosis my journey grew continually shorter, but at that time much more slow on account of the serenity of the ether, which grew rarefied the nearer I approached the source of the daylight; for, since at this stage matter is very subtle on account of the great amount of void with which it is filled, and since this matter is consequently very idle because of the void which is not active, the air, as it passed through the hole of my box, could only produce a little wind barely able to sustain me.

I never think of the malicious caprices of Fortune, who continued to oppose the success of my enterprise with such obstinacy, but I wonder how it was my brain was not turned. But hearken now a miracle, which future ages will find it difficult to believe. Shut up in a transparent box, of which I had lost sight, with my movement so slackened that I did well not to fall back, in a state where all that the whole machine of the world encloses was powerless to aid me, I was reduced to the height of extreme misfortune; yet, just as when we are dying we are inwardly moved to desire to embrace those who gave us our being, so did I lift my eyes to the Sun, our common father. This ardour of my will not only bore up my body, but hurled it toward the thing which it desired to embrace. My body thrust on my box and in this fashion I continued my journey. As soon as I perceived this I stiffened all the faculties of my soul with more attention than ever to attach them in the imagination to what attracted me, but the efforts of my will forced me against the roof in spite of myself and the weight of my cabin on my head so incommoded me that finally the burden forced me to grope for its invisible door. Fortunately I found it, opened it and threw myself outside; but that natural apprehension of falling, which all animals have when they find themselves supported by nothing, made me stretch out my arm suddenly to catch hold of it. I was only guided by Nature, which cannot reason, and therefore Fortune, her enemy, maliciously thrust my hand against the crystal roof. Alas! What a thunder-clap it was in my ears when I heard the noise of the icosahedron breaking into fragments! So great a disorder, so great a misfortune, so great a terror are beyond all expression. The mirrors attracted no more air, for there was no more vacuum; the air ceased to become a wind by hastening to fill it; the wind ceased to urge my box upwards; in short, soon after this breakage I saw it falling far across the vast fields of the world and in that region it regained the opaque darkness it had exhaled. Since the energetic strength of the light diminished there, the box eagerly rejoined the dark density which was, as it were, essential to it, just as we see souls long after their separation return to seek their bodies, and, in trying to rejoin them, wander about their sepulchres for a hundred years. I surmise that it lost its transparency in this way, for I saw it afterwards in Poland in the same state as it was when I first entered it. I have since learned that it fell in the Kingdom of Borneo, under the equinoctial line; that a Portuguese merchant bought it from the islander who found it and that, passing from hand to hand, it came into the possession of the Polish engineer who now flies in it.[59]

Thus suspended in the airy regions of the sky, filled with consternation at the death I expected by my fall, I turned my sad eyes to the Sun, as I have already told you. My sight carried my thought with it and my looks fixedly attached to its globe marked out a way whose traces were followed by my will to lift my body there. This vigorous bound of my soul will not be incomprehensible to any one who will consider the most simple effects of our will; it is well known, for example, that when I wish to leap, my will, borne up by my fantasy, raises the whole microcosm and tries to carry it to the point desired, and if it does not always reach this, the reason is that the principles of Nature, which are universal, prevail over individuals, and, since the power of will is peculiar to sentient things and that of falling to the centre is common to all matter, my leap is forced to end when its mass, having conquered the insolence of the will which surprised it, draws near the point to which it tends.