(原版)澳大利亞語文第四冊(cè) LESSON 25

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LESSON 25 A JOURNEY TO THE MOON

A JOURNEY TO THE MOON

“ALL aboard for the Moon!” shouted Jim to his brothers and sisters. He had just finished reading a startling book [1] which told the wonderful adventures of a party of travellers, who were supposed to go round the Moon in eighty days. So Jim was eager to follow in the same track.

His Uncle heard him. “How do you propose to get there?” said his Uncle. “You cannot sail there, in the same way as you could to America or Japan or Scotland. There is no water for your ship to go on. You cannot walk there, for, although boys learn to tread water, they cannot yet tread air. You cannot take the train to the Moon, because there is no railway. If you had wings you might fly there, but do you know how long the journey is?”

“About a hundred miles,” guessed Jim.

“I only thought it was at the top of a tree,” chimed in his sister Bessie, “and if you could only climb a high tree on the top of a high hill you might—” she stopped.

Uncle laughed heartily. “Why,” he said, “it is 240,000 miles away; more than nine times the distance round our Earth.

FULL MOON (FROM PHOTO, TAKEN AT THE LICK OBSERVATORY)

DONATI’S COMET, 1858

HALLEY’S COMET, 1835: REAPPEARED IN 1910

If you walked 20 miles a day it would take you 33 years to walk to the Moon, even if you did not lose your way!”

“We could not do that,” said Bessie, “it is straight up in the sky!”

“But if the Moon goes round the Earth,” said her Uncle, “would it not be straight down, sometimes?”

Bessie looked puzzled. “I thought it was hung up there, Uncle.”

“It is not hung up at all,” said Jim, with superior knowledge. “There is nothing to hang it to. Besides it is moving all the time, isn’t it, Uncle?”

“It is moving three ways at once,” Uncle replied.

“However is that?” they all asked.

“First of all, it moves round on its own axis in 27 days 7 hours. Secondly, it travels, or revolves, round the Earth once in every 27 days 7 hours. Thirdly, it travels round the sun along with the earth once every year. There is a fourth motion, too, for the Moon, along with the whole solar system, is moving slowly but surely towards some yet unrevealed goal in the heavens. So that your proposed trip to the Moon is by no means easy. Even if we knew the direction to take,” concluded Uncle, “it would be a difficult journey, and I don’t see how you could go.”

“Why not ride a comet [2] there?” said Cecil, who was sharp at suggestions. “There would be room for Uncle on the back, and the rest of us on the tail.”

LORD ROSSE’S TELESCOPE (PARSONSTOWN, IRELAND)

“But how about getting home again?” was the discomforting query of Uncle. “Even if our comet called in at the Moon it might not come back, and we would be left!”

“Would nobody take us in?” asked Bessie. “Is no one living there?”

“Of course there is,” said Harry, who had once seen the Moon through a telescope; “have you not heard of the Man in the Moon?”

“Yes, but he is only make-believe,” answered Bessie, promptly. “But, really, he is not there, is he, Uncle?”

“I think not,” said Uncle; “we do not know for certain whether the Moon is inhabited. There seem to be long straight canals there, and enormous volcanoes, but no atmosphere (at least on the side which we always see), and no water. No clouds are ever seen there, and when the Moon on her heavenly path travels over a star, the star disappears at once. If there were an envelope of air round the Moon the star would seem to linger on the edge and fade gradually from view. If there is no water and no air, there can be no life as we know it, so I think the Moon is quite dead.” His listeners all looked sad.

“How big is it, Uncle?” asked Bessie, at last.

“It is only a small body,” was the reply, “about 2,150 miles in diameter. It would take fifty moons in bulk to make our Earth, and sixty million moons all lumped together to make one Sun.”

“Did you not tell a nursery rhyme once, Uncle, about the Cow jumping over the Moon?”

“Yes,” said Uncle, “but some people say that these four lines are really a poem of the evening. The ‘cat and the fiddle’ are some times the prevailing sounds at eventide. The ‘cow’ means a cloud, as it often does in old legends, and ‘jumped over the moon’ means ‘passed across its face.’ The ‘little dog’ is ‘Canis minor,’ a constellation [3] in the sky, that laughs and twinkles when the sun has gone down.”

“But what about the dish and the spoon?” asked Jim, who spoke for all the others.

“The dish,” explained Uncle, “is the hollow vault of the sky, like a big dish turned upside down. People long ago thought that the sky revolved round the fixed flat surface of the earth, carrying the sun and stars with it. And the ‘spoon’ is another constellation, which dipped below the horizon [4] when night came on. But how about this trip, Jim, on which you are so eager to start?”

“It is too far,” Jim replied, “I don’t think we’ll go.”

So they put off the journey; but Jim that night dreamed he was speeding on a meteor [5] towards the Moon at an incredible rate per minute, and it looked as though in five minutes he could not help crashing into the shining orb. But he suddenly awoke. The big round sun was streaming in at his window, so he thought it was high time to get up.

—E. W. H. F.

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[1] startling book: From the Earth to the Moon and a Trip Round It, written by Jules Verne (1828-1905).

[2] comet: A heavenly body having a broad tail or train of light.

[3] constellation: A group of stars.

[4] horizon: Where sky and earth seem to meet.

[5] meteor: Called also a shooting-star.