The Moon Hoax

by Richard Adams Locke

The light of day was dull and obscured. Masses of opaque matter floated through the atmosphere as thickly as dust specks float through a ray of sunlight in a darkened room.[3] The hot air, thick and dull, hung a listless mist over the face of the earth, which was even then almost without form and void. When the sun went down, dense darkness covered the earth. There was no lesser light to rule the night; dim twinklings in the far distance, hardly piercing the pall which wrapped our planet, were the only contrasts to the Egyptian blackness of the dark hours.

But the internal fires which sprung from the vitals of the earth almost supplied the want of a nocturnal luminary. It is probable that there were but few spots on the globe which were out of view of some flaming volcano. We count the active volcanoes by integers. When we have enumerated Etna, Vesuvius, Hecla, Jorullo, Colima, and one or two others, we have reached the end of our list. In the days of Homer the volcanoes were counted by scores; in the carboniferous age they may have, must have, flourished by hundreds and thousands. That vast incandescent mass, of which the crust only had cooled, kept boiling up every few hours, and furiously pouring out the vials of its wrath upon an earth inhabited by transitory creatures. Go where the traveller may, he will still find traces of this terrible age. That tell-tale rock—"the trap"—is peculiar to no meridian; and from the Hudson's Bay territories nearly to Cape Magellan, from Spitzbergen to Borneo, either this, or some mountain range of volcanic origin, here with scoriæ disseminated through the more regular formations, there with copper or gold held in a native state in half-decayed quartz, tell a very legible story of the time when all the component parts of the earth were in a fluid state, and were thrown off by the boiling mass beneath as a kettle throws off froth and scum.

There came a day when the under crust could no longer bear the weight of the mass which, after being thrown off daily, returned, by the force of gravitation, to the surface of its parent. A time came when the incandescent and inchoate planet—if so daring a figure may be ventured—felt the necessity of unusually strenuous measures. It gathered all its fiery energies, and mustered all its fearful strength. The effect was universal, not local. With such bodies distances of 25,000 miles must be trifling, and the earth's meridian—a paltry 8000 miles—not worth mentioning. One can imagine the purpose and effort being common to the entire molten and raging mass.

It came at last. After throes of inconceivable agony, with a roar and a convulsion which must have destroyed every living thing then existent upon the face of the planet, in the midst of general chaos, confusion, and desolation, the earth relieved itself. It tore from its half-cooled surface immense masses, and projected them with monstrous force into space; not on one side alone, but on all. Lumps of earth four and five miles in thickness, and thousands of miles long and wide, were in an instant forced upwards with such force as to pass beyond the circle of the earth's attraction. These various masses, thus launched into space, soon felt the attraction of each other, and assembled together. They met, and, agreeably to the sublime law of celestial bodies, remained suspended in space at the point where the attraction of the earth meets that of the sun. That other celestial law which forbids the torpidity of any atom of matter compelled the aggregated mass to revolve, and the revolution forced the mass into a spherical shape.

Thus the moon came into being. An offshoot from the earth, it pays homage to its parent by revolving round it, and reflecting back to it a part of the sun's light during the period when that luminary is obscured to us. Had the force with which its substance was expelled from the body of the earth been less, it would have returned to our surface, just as those fragments of matter called aerolites do at regular intervals; had that force been greater, it would have entered upon the vast area which is the domain of the sun, and would have been attracted to that great cosmical body, and been fused by its intense heat. It was sent abroad with precisely the force necessary to sustain it in equilibrio between the earth and the sun, and hence it is "the lesser light which rules the night."

This is not the only service which it renders us. By its creation it caused great hollows in the surface of the earth. Into these hollows the waters which lay on the face of the deep naturally gathered, and became oceans, lakes, seas, and rivers. The cavities drained the earth of the moisture which had rendered it unfit for the habitation of the higher order of vertebrated creatures. Thus by degrees were formed the great Atlantic and Pacific, the Northern and the Southern oceans, leaving here and there tracts of cool, dry land for man to inhabit at the word of his Creator. Nor did the office of the moon stop here. While it was upheld in space by the attraction of the earth, it returned the compliment by exercising a reciprocal attraction upon the waters for which it had created beds. With the beautiful regularity which is the characteristic of heavenly bodies, it affected them at uniform intervals, causing the tides to flow and to ebb, and to vibrate between the spring and the neap flow. Lastly, it relieved the earth of a vast quantity of superincumbent matter, equal, in fact, to over one-fiftieth of the whole bulk of the planet. One must imagine the earth in the condition of a gentleman who has dined copiously, and whose interior is troubled by an unusual burden; the convulsion which led to the creation of the moon is similar to the effect of the dose which the gentleman, if he be wise, will instantly take.

In departing from us, and setting up for herself, the moon forgot some articles of baggage which were essential to her future comfort and prosperity. Among these were air and water. How we came by these two useful commodities it were hard to say.

This is made quite certain by the discoveries of astronomers. Rains, dews, oceans, lakes, hail, snow, clouds, are all unknown to the moon. Nothing shields its surface from the burning rays of the sun. Wherever the light of that fierce luminary penetrates the moon's surface is incessantly hot.

Of volcanic origin, the moon is true to its descent. It is full of volcanoes, most of which, however, perhaps from a conviction of the uselessness of further action—there being nothing to destroy, and no one even to see their explosions—are now silent and torpid. But they wrought out their destiny so long and so faithfully, that the surface of the moon is frightfully disfigured and uneven. Switzerland is a prairie compared to the smoothest part of the moon's surface. It is nothing but incessant mountain and hollow. Lunar Alps and Rocky Mountains intersect every few miles of the surface. The Himalayas would be unnoticed among the gigantic ranges which ornament the lunar superficies. And the projections, mighty as they are, are but trifling in comparison with the hollows. It would seem as though the moon, with apish weakness, had tried to imitate the earth in throwing off space for rivers and oceans—forgetting that it contained no water to fill the cavities. Astronomers have made the most extraordinary discoveries in reference to these lunar hollows. Some of them appear to be about fifty miles deep, and a hundred miles or so wide, with precipitous sides; Mitchell has vividly described these terrible places. Those who have looked over a precipice a few hundred feet in depth may perhaps form some rude idea of what it must be to gaze down into a hole fifty miles deep—so deep that the bottom would almost escape the eye, were there an intervening atmosphere—a great, monstrous cave, with no vegetation either on the borders or on the top, or on the sides or on the bottom; no life of any kind, not even, the least sound, to break the endless monotony of silence—everywhere dull, warm scoriæ, lava, and stones of volcanic origin. But even these are the smallest of the lunar cavities. Latterly, acute astronomers, with improved instruments, have gazed into holes in the moon's surface, and estimated them to be no less than two hundred and fifty and three hundred miles deep, with fissures in them through which the sunlight penetrated.

Fancy the scene! Well may it have been termed the abomination of desolation. Surely this fair earth, with all its gloomy places and all its dreary scenes, contains nothing so overwhelming in its terrible despair as the moon. And who, gazing at its mild white face as it emerges from the cover of a cloud, would deem it so sad and desolate a sphere?