Hugh Lofting

“ I lowered myself down among the deep fur to avoid the pressure of the tearing wind. My groping hands touched something strange. It was the moon-bells. The giant in sending me down to the Earth had thought of the needs of the human. I grabbed one of the big flowers and held it handy to plunge my face in. Bad times were coming, I knew when we must cross the Dead Belt. There was nothing more I could do for the present. I would lie still and take it easy till I reached Puddleby and the little house with the big garden. ”

“ Our world could learn a lot from the Moon, Stubbins—the Moon, its own child whom it presumes to despise! We have no balancing or real protection of life. With us it is, and always has been, ‘dog eat dog.’ ”
The Doctor shook his head and gazed off into space to where the globe of our mother Earth glowed dimly. Just so had I often seen the Moon from Puddleby by daylight. ”

“ In the dim light hundreds, perhaps thousands, of gigantic insects, all invalids, stood about our camp staring at the tiny human physician who had come so far to cure their ailments. Some of these creatures we had not so far seen and never even suspected their presence on the Moon: caterpillars as long as a village street with gout in a dozen feet; immense beetles suffering from an affliction of the eyes; grasshoppers as tall as a three-storey house with crude bandages on their gawky joints; enormous birds with a wing held painfully in an odd position. ”

“ Chee-Chee!—Poor little timid Chee-Chee, who conquered your own fears and volunteered to go ahead of us, alone, into the jungle to find food when our strength was giving out. To the world you were just an organ-grinder’s monkey. But to us whom you saved from starvation, when terror beset you at every step, you will forever be ranked high in the list of the great heroes of all time. ”

“ I could see that even the worldly-wise practical Polynesia was perplexed and upset. And it took a great deal to disturb her. Yet a bird’s senses towards trees and winds are much keener than a man’s. I kept hoping she would venture into the branches of the tree; but she didn’t. And as for Chee-Chee, also a natural denizen of the forest, no power on earth, I felt sure, would persuade him to investigate the mysteries of this strange specimen of a Vegetable Kingdom we were as yet only distantly acquainted with. ”

“ Trees that sang; flowers that could see; butterflies and bees that conversed with one another and with the plants on which they fed, watched over by a parent council that guarded the interests of great and small, strong and weak, alike—the whole community presented a world of peace, goodwill and happiness which no words of mine could convey a fair idea of.
“One thing I don’t quite understand,” said the Doctor to the vines, “is how you manage about seeding. Don’t some of the plants throw down too much seed and bring forth a larger crop than is desirable?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Vanity Lilies Of course on a globe larger than that of the Moon we could never have done as well as we did. When you come to think of it, one man, a boy, a monkey and a parrot, as a staff for the exploration of a whole world, makes the expedition sound, to say the least, absurd. ”

“ In the world we had left we had been accustomed to see the horses and other creatures eating up the grass in great quantities and many further examples of the struggle that continually goes on between the two. Here, on the other hand, the animals (or, more strictly speaking, the insects, for there seemed as yet hardly any traces of other animal species) and the vegetable life seemed for the most part to help one another rather than to fight and destroy. Indeed we found the whole system of Life on the Moon a singularly peaceful business. ”

“ After a while plants began to grow; insects, which had come with the plants, flourished. Birds the same way—they, like me, were determined to survive. A new world was formed. Years after I realized that I was the one to steer and guide its destiny since I had—at that time anyway—more intelligence than the other forms of life. I saw what this fighting of kind against kind must lead to. So I formed the Council. Since then—oh, dear, how long ago!—vegetable and animal species have come to—Well, you see it here. ”

“ Then something large and round seemed to come in view above them in the cleft.
It was now growing dusk. It had taken, we suddenly realized, a whole day for the creatures to gather; and in our absorbed interest we had not missed our meals. One could not be certain of his vision. I noticed the Doctor suddenly half rise, spilling poor old Chee-Chee out upon the ground. The big round thing above the tree-tops grew bigger and higher; it swayed gently as it came forward and with it the forest swayed also, as grass moves when a cat stalks through it. ”

“ We had not fully realized before how soft and gentle was the light of the Moon until that match flared up. It is true that in testing our woods for smoke fuel we had made much larger blazes. But then, I suppose we had been more intent on the results of our experiments than on anything else. Now, as we noticed the lilies suddenly draw back their heads and turn aside from the flare, we saw that the extra illumination of a mere match had made a big difference to the ordinary daylight they were accustomed to. ”

“ How had the Moon Man first realized that the plants were anxious to talk and cooperate with him? What had led him to believe that the bees were in communication with the flowers they fed on? Which fruits and vegetables had he found were good for human food and how had he discovered their nutritious qualities without poisoning himself? ”

“ It seemed strange that they, simple people though they were, accepted my preposterous story of a journey to the Moon with no vestige of doubt or disbelief. I feared there were no other humans in the world—outside of Matthew Mugg, who would so receive my statement. They asked me when I expected the Doctor’s return. I told them what Polynesia had said of the second smoke signal by which John Dolittle planned to notify me of his departure from the Moon. ”

“ That man was living when the Moon separated from the Earth—thousands, maybe millions, of years ago! Golly, what an age!”
“Yes: he’s old enough to know better,” snapped the parrot—“better manners anyway. Just because he’s fat and overgrown is no reason why he should treat his guests with such outrageous rudeness.”
“Oh, but come now, Polynesia,” I said, “we must not forget that this is a human being who has been separated from his own kind for centuries and centuries. And even such civilization as he knew on the Earth, way back in those Stone Age days, was not, I imagine, anything to boast of. ”

“ Breathing was still kind of difficult. We were compelled for the moment to keep the “moon-bells” handy. These were the great orange-colored flowers that the moth had brought down for us. It was their perfume (or gas) that had enabled us to cross the airless belt that lay between the Moon and the Earth. A fit of coughing was always liable to come on if one left them too long. But already we felt that we could in time get used to this new air and soon do without the bells altogether.
“Zip!—The spring was made”
The gravity too was very confusing. ”

“ The Magellan of the Moon 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. ”

“ And it was then for the first time we heard about the Council.
“Proceeded with his conversation with the vines”
“Oh,” said they, “you mustn’t get the idea that one species of plant is allowed to make war for its own benefit regardless of the lives or rights of others. Oh, dear, no! We folk of the Moon have long since got past that. There was a day when we had constant strife, species against species, plants against plants, birds against insects, and so on. But not any more.”
“Well, how do you manage?” asked the Doctor, “when two different species want the same thing?” ”

“ The vines swayed slightly with a rustling sound that might easily have been a titter of amusement.
“You have forgotten, Doctor,” said they, “that news travels fast in the Moon. Your gardening experiments were seen and immediately reported to the Council. And after you had gone back to your camp every single seed that you had planted was carefully dug up by long-billed birds and destroyed. The Council is awfully particular about seeds. It has to be. If we got overrun by any plant, weed or shrub all of our peaceful balance would be upset and goodness knows what might happen. ”

“ Plants spread like everything. Birds laid too many eggs. Bees swarmed too often. Terrible!—You’ve seen that down there on the Earth, I imagine, have you not?”
“Yes, yes, to be sure,” said the Doctor. “Go on, please.”
“Well, there isn’t much more to that. We just made sure, by means of the Council, that there should be no more warfare.”
“Humph!” the Doctor grunted. “But tell me: how is it you yourself have lived so long? No one knows how many years ago it is that the Moon broke away from the Earth. And your age, compared with the life of Man in our world, must be something staggering.” ”

“ It is this thing here, this Council of Life—of life adjustment—that could have saved the day and brought happiness to all.”
“Yes, Doctor,” said I, “but listen: compared with our world, they have no animal life here at all, so far as we’ve seen. Only insects and birds. They’ve no lions or tigers who have to hunt for deer and wild goats to get a living, have they?”
“True, Stubbins—probably true,” said he. “But don’t forget that that same warfare of species against species goes on in the Insect Kingdom as well as among the larger carnivora. ”

“ One of the things that John Dolittle had feared was that we should find a heat that was unbearable or a cold that was worse than Arctic. But except for the difficulty of the strange new quality of the air, no human could have asked for a nicer climate. A gentle steady wind was blowing and the temperature seemed to remain almost constantly the same.
We looked about everywhere for tracks. As yet we knew very little of what animal life to expect. But the loose sand told nothing, not even to Chee-Chee, who was a pretty experienced hand at picking up tracks of the most unusual kind. ”

“ I think I could not do better, in trying to give you an idea of the Doctor’s communication with the Vegetable Kingdom of the Moon, than to set down from my diary, word for word, some parts of the conversation between him and the Vanity Lilies as he translated them to me for dictation at the time. Even so, there are many I am sure who will doubt the truth of the whole idea: that a man could talk with the flowers. ”

“ The Doctor as we went forward spoke very little; when he did it was almost always on the same subject: “the absence of decay,” as he put it.
“I am utterly puzzled, Stubbins,” said he, in one of his longer outbursts when we were resting. “Why, there is hardly any leaf-mould at all!”
“What difference would that make, Doctor?” I asked.
“Well, that’s what the trees live on, mostly, in our world,” said he. “The forest growth, I mean—the soil that is formed by dying trees and rotting leaves—that is the nourishment that brings forth the seedlings which finally grow into new trees. But here! ”

“ Those who said the Moon had flown off from the flanks of the Earth had given up worshiping the Sun. They held that if the Earth had the power to shoot off another world like that, that it should be adored, as the Mother Earth from which we got everything, and not the Sun. ”

“ The Doctor seemed rather glad of this excuse to end a fruitless controversy, and soon we moved on in search of something which would enable us to explore the waters of the lake. A march of a mile further along the shore brought us to the woods that were not so heavy. Here the immense asparagus forests gave way to a growth of smaller girth; and the Doctor’s hatchet soon felled enough poles for us to make a raft from. We laced them together with thongs of bark and found them sufficiently buoyant when launched to carry us and our small supply of baggage with ease. ”

“ But that, with the speed so easy in moon marching, means a much greater distance than it does on the Earth. From this camp where the Doctor had set up his apparatus for his special botanical studies, we had now for nearly a week been making daily expeditions in search of the various new species that the Vanity Lilies had described for us. But we always got back before nightfall. Well, this noon the Doctor was leaning back, munching a large piece of yellow yam—a vegetable we got from the edges of the jungle and which we had found so nourishing we had made it almost our chief article of diet. ”

“ Throughout all our investigations of the Moon’s Vegetable Kingdom we could not get away from the idea that the animal life was still, for some unknown reason, steering clear of us. By night, when we were settling down to sleep, we’d often get the impression that huge moths, butterflies or beetles were flying or crawling near us. ”