He gives us a gleam of description.

“I was reminded on this excursion of what I have read of the Mammoth Caves; if only I had had a yellow flambeau instead of the pervading blue light, and a solid-looking boatman with an oar instead of a scuttle-faced Selenite working an engine at the back of the canoe, I could have imagined I had suddenly got back to earth.  The rocks about us were very various, sometimes black, sometimes pale blue and veined, and once they flashed and glittered as though we had come into a mine of sapphires.  And below one saw the ghostly phosphorescent fishes flash and vanish in the hardly less phosphorescent deep.  Then, presently, a long ultra-marine vista down the turgid stream of one of the channels of traffic, and a landing stage, and then, perhaps, a glimpse up the enormous crowded shaft of one of the vertical ways.

“In one great place heavy with glistening stalactites a number of boats were fishing.  We went alongside one of these and watched the long-armed Selenites winding in a net.  They were little, hunchbacked insects, with very strong arms, short, bandy legs, and crinkled face-masks.  As they pulled at it that net seemed the heaviest thing I had come upon in the moon; it was loaded with weights—­no doubt of gold—­and it took a long time to draw, for in those waters the larger and more edible fish lurk deep.  The fish in the net came up like a blue moonrise—­a blaze of darting, tossing blue.

“Among their catch was a many-tentaculate, evil-eyed black thing, ferociously active, whose appearance they greeted with shrieks and twitters, and which with quick, nervous movements they hacked to pieces by means of little hatchets.  All its dissevered limbs continued to lash and writhe in a vicious manner.  Afterwards, when fever had hold of me, I dreamt again and again of that bitter, furious creature rising so vigorous and active out of the unknown sea.  It was the most active and malignant thing of all the living creatures I have yet seen in this world inside the moon....

“The surface of this sea must be very nearly two hundred miles (if not more) below the level of the moon’s exterior; all the cities of the moon lie, I learnt, immediately above this Central Sea, in such cavernous spaces and artificial galleries as I have described, and they communicate with the exterior by enormous vertical shafts which open invariably in what are called by earthly astronomers the ‘craters’ of the moon.  The lid covering one such aperture I had already seen during the wanderings that had preceded my capture.

“Upon the condition of the less central portion of the moon I have not yet arrived at very precise knowledge.  There is an enormous system of caverns in which the mooncalves shelter during the night; and there are abattoirs and the like—­in one of these it was that I and Bedford fought with the Selenite butchers—­and I have since seen balloons laden with meat descending out of the upper