IN a little while it seemed to me as though I had always been alone on the moon. I hunted
for a time with a certain intentness, but the heat was still very great, and the thinness of
the air felt like a hoop about one's chest. I came presently into a hollow basin bristling
with tall, brown, dry fronds about its edge, and I sat down under these to rest and cool. I
intended to rest for only a little while. I put down my clubs beside me, and sat resting my
chin on my hands. I saw with a sort of colourless interest that the rocks of the basin,
where here and there the crackling dry lichens had shrunk away to show them, were all
veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded and wrinkled gold
projected from among the litter. What did that matter now? A sort of languor had
possession of my limbs and mind, I did not belive for a moment that we should ever find
the sphere in that vast desiccated wilderness. I seemed to lack a motive for effort until the
Selenites should come. Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying that unreasonable
imperative that urges a man before all things to preserve and defend his life, albeit he
may preserve it only to die more painfully in a little while.
Why had we come to the moon?
The thing presented itself to me as a perplexing problem. What is this spirit in man that
urges him for ever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in
danger, to risk even a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the
moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about
being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Almost any man, if you put the
thing to him, not in words, but in the shape of opportunities, will show that he knob as
much. Against his interest, against his happiness, he is constantly being driven to do
unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him, and go he must. But why?
Why? Sitting there in the midst of that useless moon gold, amidst the things of another
world, I took count of all my life. Assuming I was to die a castaway upon the moon, I
failed altogether to see what purpose I had served. I got no light on that point, but at any
rate it was clearer to me than it had ever been in my life before that I was not serving my
own purpose, that all my life I had in truth never served the purposes of my private life.
Whose purposes, what purposes, was I serving? ... I ceased to speculate on why we had
come to the moon, and took a wider sweep. Why had I come to the earth? Why had I a
private life at all? ... I lost myself at last in bottomless speculations. ...
My thoughts became vague and cloudy, no longer leading in definite directions. I had not
felt heavy or weary - I cannot imagine one doing so upon the moon - but I suppose I was
greatly fatigued. At any rate I slept.
Slumbering there rested me greatly, I think, and the sun was setting and the violence of
the heat abating, through all the time I slumbered. When at last I was roused from my
slumbers by a remote clamour, I felt active and capable again. I rubbed my eyes and
stretched my arms. I rose to my feet - I was a little stiff - and at once prepared to resume
