Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was surprised to find that we were not all volunteers.  Some, in fact, complained pitifully.  They had, they said, been going about their business a day or two before, and suddenly a mysterious captain had laid hold of them, and pressed them to sail this unknown sea.  Thus, without a word of warning, they had been compelled to leave behind them all they held dear.  This, one felt, was a little hard of the captain; but those of us whose position was exactly the reverse, who had friends on the other side, all whose hopes indeed were invested there, were too selfishly expectant of port to be severe on the captain who was taking us thither.

There were three friends I had especially set out to see:  two young lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon just after their marriage, and there was another.  What a surprise it would be to all three, for I had written no letter to say I was coming.  Indeed, it was just a sudden impulse, the pistol-flash of a long desire.

I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they were now living.  I asked the captain, and he answered with a sad smile that it would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.

‘Oh, well then,’ I thought, ’I know what it will be like.  There shall be a great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds for ever ruffling the sails of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell.  And the shaggy tossing water shall be bounded on either bank with high granite walls, and on one bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with the smell of tar and the sea.  O captain! will it be morning or night when we come to my city?  In the morning my city is like a sea-blown rose, in the night it is bright as a sailor’s star.

’If it be early morning, what shall I do?  I shall run to the house in which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted again, and kiss my hand to their shrouded window; and then I shall run on and on till the city is behind and the sweetness of country lanes is about me, and I shall gather flowers as I run, from sheer wantonness of joy; and then at last, flushed and breathless, I shall stand beneath her window.  I shall stand and listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through the heavy curtains, and the hushed garden and the sleeping house will bid me keep silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to the morning star, and say, “No, I will not keep silence.  Mine is the voice she listens for in her sleep.  She will wake again for no voice but mine.  Dear one, awake, the morning of all mornings has come!"’

As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from the great canvas of the sky.  She seems beautiful with the beauty of all the eyes that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears of all those eyes; like a silver bowl brimming with the tears of dead lovers she seems.  Yes, there are seaports in the moon; there are ships to take us there.