“ ‘I had the birds bring me reports of your movements’ ”
“The lottery to decide who should go,” the Moon Man explained. “I told you: we drew lots. Jamaro Bumblelily was the moth who drew the ticket which gave the task to him.”
“Oh, I see,” said the Doctor—“Jamaro. Yes, yes. You give your insects names in this land. Very natural and proper of course, where they are so large and take such an important part in the life and government of the community. You can no doubt tell all these insects one from another, even when they belong to the same species?”
“Certainly,” said the Moon Man. “We have, I suppose, several hundreds of thousands of bees in the Moon. But I know each one by his first name, as well as his swarm, or family name. Anyhow, to continue: it was then Jamaro Bumblelily who drew the ticket that gave him the job of going to the Earth after you. He was very sportsmanlike and never grumbled a bit. But we were naturally anxious. It is true that creatures had come, at rare intervals, from the Earth to our world. But so far none had gone from us to the Earth. We had only the vaguest idea of what your world would be like—from the descriptions of the kingfisher. And even in getting those we had been greatly handicapped by language. It had only been after days and weeks of work that we had been able to understand one another in the roughest way. So we had arranged with Jamaro Bumblelily that as soon as he landed he was to try and find some way to signal us to let us know he was all right. And we were to signal back to him. It seems he made a bad landing and lay helpless in your garden for some days. For a long while we waited in great anxiety. We feared he must have perished in his heroic exploit. Then we thought that maybe if we signaled to him he would be encouraged and know that we were still expecting his return. So we set off the smoke smudge.”
“Yes,” said the Doctor. “I saw it, even if Jamaro didn’t. But tell me: how did you manage to raise such an enormous smudge? It must have been as big as a mountain.”
“True,” said the Moon Man. “For twenty days before Jamaro’s departure I and most of the larger birds and insects had gathered the Jing-jing bark from the forest.”
“Gathered the what?” asked the Doctor.
“ ‘I set the pile off with a live ember’ ”
“The Jing-jing bark,” the Moon Man repeated. “It is a highly explosive bark from a certain tree we have here.”