“These moon people behaved exactly as a human crowd might have done in similar circumstances:  they jostled and thrust one another, they shoved one another aside, they even clambered upon one another to get a glimpse of me.  Every moment they increased in numbers, and pressed more urgently upon the discs of my ushers”—­Cavor does not explain what he means by this—­“every moment fresh shapes emerged from the shadows and forced themselves upon my astounded attention.  And presently I was signed and helped into a sort of litter, and lifted up on the shoulders of strong-armed bearers, and so borne through the twilight over this seething multitude towards the apartments that were provided for me in the moon.  All about me were eyes, faces, masks, a leathery noise like the rustling of beetle wings, and a great bleating and cricket-like twittering of Selenite voices.”

We gather he was taken to a “hexagonal apartment,” and there for a space he was confined.  Afterwards he was given a much more considerable liberty; indeed, almost as much freedom as one has in a civilised town on earth.  And it would appear that the mysterious being who is the ruler and master of the moon appointed two Selenites “with large heads” to guard and study him, and to establish whatever mental communications were possible with him.  And, amazing and incredible as it may seem, these two creatures, these fantastic men insects, these beings of other world, were presently communicating with Cavor by means of terrestrial speech.

Cavor speaks of them as Phi-oo and Tsi-puff.  Phi-oo, he says, was about 5 feet high; he had small slender legs about 18 inches long, and slight feet of the common lunar pattern.  On these balanced a little body, throbbing with the pulsations of his heart.  He had long, soft, many-jointed arms ending in a tentacled grip, and his neck was many-jointed in the usual way, but exceptionally short and thick.  His head, says Cavor—­apparently alluding to some previous description that has gone astray in space—­“is of the common lunar type, but strangely modified.  The mouth has the usual expressionless gape, but it is unusually small and pointing downward, and the mask is reduced to the size of a large flat nose-flap.  On either side are the little eyes.

“The rest of the head is distended into a huge globe and the chitinous leathery cuticle of the mooncalf herds thins out to a mere membrane, through which the pulsating brain movements are distinctly visible.  He is a creature, indeed, with a tremendously hypertrophied brain, and with the rest of his organism both relatively and absolutely dwarfed.”

In another passage Cavor compares the back view of him to Atlas supporting the world.  Tsi-puff it seems was a very similar insect, but his “face” was drawn out to a considerable length, and the brain hypertrophy being in different regions, his head was not round but pear-shaped, with the stalk downward.  There were also litter-carriers, lopsided beings, with enormous shoulders, very spidery ushers, and a squat foot attendant in Cavor’s retinue.