“Shield your eyes, earth beings, for the intensity of the Lunar Rays may damage them!”
The Airship makes a sudden sweeping turn and there is a thump and scrape as they toboggan along the rough terrain, the faintly lit, cratered surface rushing past the portholes. Some of it is electricity, Harry decides, powered by the Falls not so many miles away, driving the Airship along some sort of rail past sets that have been artfully created. Some is only lantern projections, a horizontal strip, perhaps, or a turret revolved to give the sense of motion. Whether the ship moves past the landscape or the landscape past the ship, it is, with the rocking and buffeting and blasting of air, enormously effective.
“The inhabitants of the realm we have intruded upon are known as the Selenites,” says the guide, turning to them and deepening his voice in sober warning. “They are thought to be friendly to visitors, but please, if we should encounter any members of the race, be careful not to provoke them.”
The crew members help the voyagers out of the Airship and onto the moon’s craggy surface then, Harry refusing the proffered hand. The ground feels spongy underfoot, and his walking stick leaves tiny dents in it as they head away from the craft.
Above their heads hangs a carpet of stars. They are led around the raised lip of a large crater, stepping carefully, till they reach a small hill with a large cavern opening at the base of it.
“This is the Grotto of the City of the Moon. I must plead that we be allowed egress.” The guide steps ahead and cups his hands around his mouth, calling into the dark abyss. “Hello! We hail from Buffalo, on the planet Earth! May we enter?”
A gasp of surprise then, as a large-headed, spiky-backed creature in a green and red outfit and sharply pointed slippers appears at the mouth of the grotto. Harry estimates that the fellow barely comes up to his hip. He looks the passengers and crew over for a long moment, then holds a tiny hand straight out to them in greeting.
“Hail, Erse-Dwellairs!” he calls in a strange, high-pitched voice. “I welcome you to ze City of ze Moon.”
If Harry is not mistaken the Selenite has a touch of a French accent.
There are more little Selenites inside as they descend into the twisting, turning grotto, weaving through eerily glowing stalactites and stalagmites on a green concrete floor, past towering columns carved with the faces of fierce and unearthly creatures, some of the little inhabitants toiling away with miniature picks and crowbars, revealing veins of glistening gold or jewels gleaming in unimaginable colors. Among them glide lovely Moon-Maids of more human stature, dark-haired beauties dressed in diaphanous robes who stare at the visitors shyly with their huge eyes. They are led into a large chamber, and suddenly there is music, the liquid rippling of a harp, a sweet mandolin, and voices now, as the tiny Selenites and ghostly Moon-Maids join in a melody—
My sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon
I’m going to marry him soon
T’would fill me with bliss just to give him one kiss
But I know that a dozen I never would miss!
Harry and the other visitors, slightly embarrassed, look to the dozen or so children in their party, the only ones still rapt in the illusion now that they have left the realms of Galactic Flight for that of Music Hall. There are adults, he knows, who will only visit the movie parlors if they bring their children with them, some lingering unease at giving themselves up to the gossamer images on the screen.
I’ll go up in a great big balloon
And see my sweetheart in the moon
Then behind some dark cloud, where no one’s allowed
I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon!
They lose Harry in the Palace. It is only a proscenium, however elaborately decorated, the giants seemingly bored, the tumbling dwarves no better than circus performers, the Moon Pageant replete with shifting scenery and flashing colored lights but without dramatic tension, the greenish gorgonzola offered by beaming Moon-Maids more than he can stomach this early in the day. Moving, projected views, he thinks, to replace the lantern slides. They can only be tinted, of course, till the color problem is solved, but think of the illusion, think of the impact, if while you are being moved forward in a vehicle all that you see from the front and side portals has been filmed in some foreign capital or natural vista! You could tour the streets of Mexico from any city in the States, and never step out of the carriage.
The show ends with a promise of friendship between peoples. “Just as the nations of North and South America have come together at this great Exposition,” says the Man in the Moon, “thus shall the citizens of my realm be ever bonded with those of your planet Earth.”
They exit through the shadowy gorge and jaws of a dragon-like creature called a Moon Calf onto the raucous, steaming Midway. Just one entrance down is the Old Plantation, a glimpse, as the brochure describes it, of the sunny South before the War. Sweat begins to run down Harry’s forehead from his hat brim. He wonders how they keep it so cool on the moon. Dozens of spectators, yankees, are flowing through the doorway of the “mansion” that fronts the exhibit. Harry checks his pocket watch, digs out a quarter, and follows them in.
Pretty, ringletted girls in stiff pastel dresses greet the visitors, all smiles and coquetry. Harry has been to gala occasions something like the one presented in the chandeliered ballroom they pass into, Sally’s coming out for one, though never with a colored band playing Dixie, and certainly never with so many colorful fans fluttering in ladies’ hands. There are unpainted slave quarters out back, along with log cabins claimed to have been occupied by Abraham Lincoln and Jeff Davis, and a swarm of negroes unlike any he’s ever encountered, even in South Carolina. Cotton-headed old uncles, pipe-smoking aunties doing wash and spinning yarn, clean but raggedy children running everywhere. Men and women stoop and pick cotton in several rows planted at the far end of the compound, several pale women with parasols watching intently. One knot of white visitors gathers around two little boys doing a frantic, barefoot buck-and-wing to the ministrations of a grinning banjo player, while others ring an old man sitting on a porch chuckling and giggling and slapping his knee with every response to their queries. Harry drifts over by a young fellow filling buckets of water from a hand pump.
“Good morning.”
“Mornin to you, Cap’m,” replies the young man, touching two fingers to his forehead in salute but continuing to pump.
“Where you folks from?”
“Oh,” he sighs, straightening to look around at his fellow Plantation dwellers, “mostly it’s Georgia, Alabama, M’ssippi. Me, I’m fum Valdosta.”
“You stay here at night?”
“Mostly, yassuh.”
Harry looks over toward the pickers. “That cotton,” he says, “what happens when it’s all been harvested?”
The hint of a smile tugs at the water boy’s mouth. “Well, Mr. Skip who run the Plantation, he bring in another patch by’an’by, but most mornins we gots to get up an stick them bolls back in the plants fore they open up the fair.”
“That seems like an awful lot of trouble.”
“Yessuh, an that’s why he got him some perfessional niggers like us. You see them what’s wanderin around the Midway, fum this yere Buffalo? That ain but amaters.”
“I see.” They both turn as the toothless old man on the porch emits a particularly high-pitched cackle, rocking back and forth in mirth as he entertains a growing crowd of yankees.
“That Laughin’ Ben. He ain right,” says the water boy, touching his temple with a finger. “But the white fokes sure love him.”