“The faithful monkey would come to us every three hours with his strange vegetables”
Chee-Chee looked after the feeding of us—Thank goodness!—or I fear we would easily have starved to death, if overwork itself hadn’t killed us. Every three hours the faithful little monkey would come to us wherever we were at the moment with his messes of strange vegetables and fruits and a supply of good clean drinking water.
As official recorder of the Expedition (a job of which I was very proud even if it was hard work) I had to book all the Doctor’s calculations as well as his natural history notes. I have already told you something of temperature, air pressure, time and what not. A further list of them would have included the calculation of distance traveled. This was quite difficult. The Doctor had brought with him a pedometer (that is a little instrument which when carried in the pocket tells you from the number of strides made the miles walked). But in the Moon, with the changed gravity, a pace was quite different from that usual on the Earth. And what is more, it never stayed the same. When the ground sloped downward it was natural to spring a step that quite possibly measured six or seven feet—this with no out-of-the-way effort at all. And even on the up grade one quite frequently used a stride that was far greater than in ordinary walking.
It was about this time that the Doctor first spoke of making a tour of the Moon. Magellan, you will remember, was the first to sail around our world. And it was a very great feat. The Earth contains more water than land. The Moon on the contrary, we soon saw, had more dry land than water. There were no big oceans. Lakes and chains of lakes were all the water area we saw. To complete a round trip would therefore be harder, even though it was shorter, than the voyage that Magellan made.
It was on this account that the Doctor was so particular about my booking a strict record of the miles we traveled. As to direction, we had not as yet been so careful about maintaining a perfectly straight line. Because it was by no means easy for one thing; and for another, the subjects we wished to study, such as tree-music, tracks, water supply, rock formation, etc., often led us off towards every quarter of the compass. When I say the compass I mean something a little different from the use of that word in the earthly geography. As I have told you, the magnetic compass which John Dolittle had brought with him from Puddleby did not behave in a helpful manner at all. Something else must be found to take its place.
“It was natural to spring a step that measured six or seven feet”
John Dolittle, as usual, went after that problem too with much energy. He was a very excellent mathematician, was the Doctor. And one afternoon he sat down with a note book and the Nautical Almanac and worked out tables which should tell him from the stars where he was and in what direction he was going. It was curious, that strange sense of comfort we drew from the stars. They, the heavenly bodies which from the Earth seemed the remotest, most distant, unattainable and strangest of objects, here suddenly became friendly; because, I suppose, they were the only things that really stayed the same. The stars, as we saw them from the Moon, were precisely as the stars we had seen from the Earth. The fact that they were nearly all countless billions of miles away made no difference. For us they were something that we had seen before and knew.
