to hand—­my lingering doubts vanished.  I decided at once to accept a proposal he made to me to remain with him, assisting him to take down the record from day to day, and endeavouring with him to send a message back to the moon.  Cavor, we learnt, was not only alive, but free, in the midst of an almost inconceivable community of these ant-like beings, these ant-men, in the blue darkness of the lunar caves.  He was lamed, it seemed, but otherwise in quite good health—­in better health, he distinctly said, than he usually enjoyed on earth.  He had had a fever, but it had left no bad effects.  But curiously enough he seemed to be labouring under a conviction that I was either dead in the moon crater or lost in the deep of space.

His message began to be received by Mr. Wendigee when that gentleman was engaged in quite a different investigation.  The reader will no doubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arising out an announcement by Mr. Nikola Tesla, the American electrical celebrity, that he had received a message from Mars.  His announcement renewed attention to fact that had long been familiar to scientific people, namely:  that from some unknown source in space, waves of electromagnetic disturbance, entirely similar those used by Signor Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the earth.  Besides Tesla quite a number of other observers have been engaged in perfecting apparatus for receiving and recording these vibrations, though few would go so far to consider them actual messages from some extraterrestrial sender.  Among that few, however, we must certainly count Mr. Wendigee.  Ever since 1898 he had devoted himself almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample means he had erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a position singularly adapted in every way for such observations.

My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as they enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee’s contrivances for detecting and recording any disturbances in the electromagnetic conditions of space are singularly original and ingenious.  And by a happy combination of circumstances they were set up and in operation about two months before Cavor made his first attempt to call up the earth.  Consequently we have fragments of his communication even from the beginning.  Unhappily, they are only fragments, and the most momentous of all the things that he had to tell humanity—­the instructions, that is, for the making of Cavorite, if, indeed, he ever transmitted them—­have throbbed themselves away unrecorded into space.  We never succeeded in getting a response back to Cavor.  He was unable to tell, therefore, what we had received or what we had missed; nor, indeed, did he certainly know that any one on earth was really aware of his efforts to reach us.  And the persistence he displayed in sending eighteen long descriptions of lunar affairs—­as they would be if we had them complete—­shows how much his mind must have turned back towards his native planet since he left it two years ago.