The manner in which Phi-oo and Tsi-puff attacked the problem of speech was fairly obvious.  They came into this “hexagonal cell” in which Cavor was confined, and began imitating every sound he made, beginning with a cough.  He seems to have grasped their intention with great quickness, and to have begun repeating words to them and pointing to indicate the application.  The procedure was probably always the same.  Phi-oo would attend to Cavor for a space, then point also and say the word he had heard.

The first word he mastered was “man,” and the second “Mooney”—­which Cavor on the spur of the moment seems to have used instead of “Selenite” for the moon race.  As soon as Phi-oo was assured of the meaning of a word he repeated it to Tsi-puff, who remembered it infallibly.  They mastered over one hundred English nouns at their first session.

Subsequently it seems they brought an artist with them to assist the work of explanation with sketches and diagrams—­Cavor’s drawings being rather crude.  “He was,” says Cavor, “a being with an active arm and an arresting eye,” and he seemed to draw with incredible swiftness.

The eleventh message is undoubtedly only a fragment of a longer communication.  After some broken sentences, the record of which is unintelligible, it goes on:—­

“But it will interest only linguists, and delay me too long, to give the details of the series of intent parleys of which these were the beginning, and, indeed, I very much doubt if I could give in anything like the proper order all the twistings and turnings that we made in our pursuit of mutual comprehension.  Verbs were soon plain sailing—­at least, such active verbs as I could express by drawings; some adjectives were easy, but when it came to abstract nouns, to prepositions, and the sort of hackneyed figures of speech, by means of which so much is expressed on earth, it was like diving in cork-jackets.  Indeed, these difficulties were insurmountable until to the sixth lesson came a fourth assistant, a being with a huge football-shaped head, whose forte was clearly the pursuit of intricate analogy.  He entered in a preoccupied manner, stumbling against a stool, and the difficulties that arose had to be presented to him with a certain amount of clamour and hitting and pricking before they reached his apprehension.  But once he was involved his penetration was amazing.  Whenever there came a need of thinking beyond Phi-oo’s by no means limited scope, this prolate-headed person was in request, but he invariably told the conclusion to Tsi-puff, in order that it might be remembered; Tsi-puff was ever the arsenal for facts.  And so we advanced again.

“It seemed long and yet brief—­a matter of days—­before I was positively talking with these insects of the moon.  Of course, at first it was an intercourse infinitely tedious and exasperating, but imperceptibly it has grown to comprehension.  And my patience has grown to meet its limitations, Phi-oo it is who does all the talking.  He does it with a vast amount of meditative provisional ‘M’m—­M’m’ and has caught up one or two phrases, ‘If I may say,’ ‘If you understand,’ and beads all his speech with them.