Хью Лофтинг: Doctor Dolittle in the Moon

"He seemed to have brought everything he could need"

As usual he rested only long enough to get a few mouthfuls of food before he set to work. There seemed to be a dozen different apparatuses he wanted to set up at once, some for the testing of sound, others for vibrations, etc., etc. With the aid of a saw and an axe and a few other tools, half a dozen small huts had sprung up in an hour around our camp.

Laying aside for the present all worry on the score of why he had been summoned to the Moon—of why the Animal Kingdom continued to treat us with suspicion, of why the Giant Human so carefully kept out of our way, the Doctor now plunged into the study of plant languages heart and soul.

He was always happy so, working like a demon, snatching his meals and his sleep here and there when he thought of such earthly matters. It was a most exhausting time for the rest of us, keeping pace with this firebrand of energy when he got on an interesting scent. And yet it was well worth while too. In one and a half days he had established the fact that the trees did converse with one another by means of branch gestures. But that was only the first step. Copying and practising, he rigged himself up like a tree and talked in the glade—after a fashion—with these centuries–old denizens of the jungle.

From that he learned still more—that language, of a kind, was carried on by using other means—by scents given out, in a definite way—short or long perfumes, like a regular Morse Code; by the tones of wind–song when branches were set to the right angle to produce certain notes; and many other odd strange means.

Every night, by bed–time, I was nearly dead from the strain and effort of taking notes in those everlasting books, of which he seemed to have brought an utterly inexhaustible supply.

Chee–Chee looked after the feeding of us—Thank goodness!—or I fear we would easily have starved to death, if overwork itself hadn't killed us. Every three hours the faithful little monkey would come to us wherever we were at the moment with his messes of strange vegetables and fruits and a supply of good clean drinking water.

"The faithful monkey would come to us every three hours with his strange vegetables"

As official recorder of the Expedition (a job of which I was very proud even if it was hard work) I had to book all the Doctor's calculations as well as his natural history notes. I have already told you something of temperature, air pressure, time and what not. A further list of them would have included the calculation of distance travelled. This was quite difficult. The Doctor had brought with him a pedometer (that is a little instrument which when carried in the pocket tells you from the number of strides made the miles walked). But in the Moon, with the changed gravity, a pace was quite different from that usual on the Earth. And what is more, it never stayed the same. When the ground sloped downward it was natural to spring a step that quite possibly measured six or seven feet—this with no out–of–the–way effort at all. And even on the up grade one quite frequently used a stride that was far greater than in ordinary walking.

"It was natural to spring a step that measured six or seven feet"

It was about this time that the Doctor first spoke of making a tour of the Moon. Magellan, you will remember, was the first to sail around our world. And it was a very great feat. The Earth contains more water area than land. The Moon, on the contrary, we soon saw, had more dry land than water. There were no big oceans. Lakes and chains of lakes were all the water area we saw. To complete a round trip of this world would therefore be harder, even though it was shorter, than the voyage that Magellan made.

It was on this account that the Doctor was so particular about my booking a strict record of the miles we travelled. As to direction, we had not as yet been so careful about maintaining a perfectly straight line. Because it was by no means easy for one thing; and for another, the subjects we wished to study, such as tree–music, tracks, water supply, rock formation, etc., often led us off towards every quarter of the compass. When I say the compass I mean something a little different from the use of that word in earthly geography. As I have told you, the magnetic compass which John Dolittle had brought with him from Puddleby did not behave in a helpful manner at all. Something else must be found to take its place.

John Dolittle, as usual, went after that problem too with much energy. He was a very excellent mathematician, was the Doctor. And one afternoon he sat down with a note book and the Nautical Almanac and worked out tables which should tell him from the stars where he was and in what direction he was going. It was curious, that strange sense of comfort we drew from the stars. They, the heavenly bodies which from the Earth seemed the remotest, most distant, unattainable and strangest of objects, here suddenly became friendly; because, I suppose, they were the only things that really stayed the same. The stars, as we saw them from the Moon, were precisely as the stars we had seen from the Earth. The fact that they were nearly all countless billions of miles away made no difference. For us they were something that we had seen before and knew.

It was while we were at work on devising some contrivance to take the place of the compass that we made the discovery of the explosive wood. The Doctor after trying many things by which he hoped to keep a definite direction had suddenly said one day:

"Why, Stubbins, I have it.—The wind! It always blows steady—and probably from precisely the same quarter—or at all events with a regular calculable change most likely. Let us test it and see."

So right away we set to work to make various wind–testing devices. We rigged up weather–vanes from long streamers of light bark. And then John Dolittle hit upon the idea of smoke.

"We rigged up weather vanes"

"That is something," said he, "if we only place it properly, which will warn us by smell if the wind changes. And in the meantime we can carry on our studies of the Animal Kingdom and its languages." So without further ado we set to work to build fires—or rather large smoke smudges—which should tell us how reliable our wind would be if depended on for a source of direction.

We went to a lot of trouble working out how we could best place these fires so that they should give us the most satisfactory results. First of all we decided with much care on the exact position where we would build them. Mostly they were on bare knolls or shoulders, where they couldn't spread to the underbrush and start a bush–fire. Then came the question of fuel:—What would be the best wood to build them of?

"Mostly they were on bare knolls"

There were practically no dead trees, as I have said. The only thing to do then was to cut some timber down and let it dry.

This we proceeded to do but did not get very far with it before the Doctor suddenly had qualms of conscience. Trees that could talk could, one would suppose, also feel . The thought was dreadful. We hadn't even the courage to ask the trees about it—yet. So we fell back upon gathering fallen twigs and small branches. This made the work heavier still because, of course, we needed a great deal of fuel to have fires big enough to see and smell for any distance.

After a good deal of discussion we decided that this was a thing which couldn't be hurried. A great deal depended on its success. It was a nuisance, truly, but we had just got to be patient. So we went back into the jungle–lands and set to work on getting out various samples of woods to try.