I have told my story—­and now, I suppose, I have to take up the worries of this terrestrial life again.  Even if one has been to the moon, one has still to earn a living.  So I am working here at Amalfi, on the scenario of that play I sketched before Cavor came walking into my world, and I am trying to piece my life together as it was before ever I saw him.  I must confess that I find it hard to keep my mind on the play when the moonshine comes into my room.  It is full moon here, and last night I was out on the pergola for hours, staring away at the shining blankness that hides so much.  Imagine it! tables and chairs, and trestles and bars of gold!  Confound it!—­if only one could hit on that Cavorite again!  But a thing like that doesn’t come twice in a life.  Here I am, a little better off than I was at Lympne, and that is all.  And Cavor has committed suicide in a more elaborate way than any human being ever did before.  So the story closes as finally and completely as a dream.  It fits in so little with all the other things of life, so much of it is so utterly remote from all human experience, the leaping, the eating, the breathing, and these weightless times, that indeed there are moments when, in spite of my moon gold, I do more than half believe myself that the whole thing was a dream....

Chapter 22

The Astonishing Communication of Mr. Julius Wendigee

When I had finished my account of my return to the earth at Littlestone, I wrote, “The End,” made a flourish, and threw my pen aside, fully believing that the whole story of the First Men in the Moon was done.  Not only had I done this, but I had placed my manuscript in the hands of a literary agent, had permitted it to be sold, had seen the greater portion of it appear in the Strand Magazine, and was setting to work again upon the scenario of the play I had commenced at Lympne before I realised that the end was not yet.  And then, following me from Amalfi to Algiers, there reached me (it is now about six months ago) one of the most astounding communications I have ever been fated to receive.  Briefly, it informed me that Mr. Julius Wendigee, a Dutch electrician, who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some method of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a curiously fragmentary message in English, which was indisputably emanating from Mr. Cavor in the moon.

At first I thought the thing was an elaborate practical joke by some one who had seen the manuscript of my narrative.  I answered Mr. Wendigee jestingly, but he replied in a manner that put such suspicion altogether aside, and in a state of inconceivable excitement I hurried from Algiers to the little observatory upon the Monte Rosa in which he was working.  In the presence of his record and his appliances—­and above all of the messages from Cavor that were coming