THE CONQUEST OF THE MOON

Andre Laurie 1844-1909

Norbert Mauny, scientist, adventurer, explorer, entrepreneur, and astronomer is visiting his friends the Kersains in the town of Suakim, Egypt near the Red Sea. Present are the ambassador, Mr. Kersain, his daughter Gertrude,  her uncle Dr. Briet, and Bucephalus Coghill, another explorer.  Mauny has a plan;  he has identified a large mountain of ferrous pyrite in the middle of the Bayouda desert and intends to magnetize it with the use of solar-powered generators to attract the moon down to the Earth's surface so he can explore it and identify economic resources therein that could be commercially useful.  Mauny persuaded a large corporation to finance his endeavor, and has persuaded Gertrude and Bucephalus to go along.  Also in the company are Virgil, an old Sahara hand, and three representatives of the corporation:  Wagner, Vogel and Gryphins.  They are ostensibly present to supervise and regulate expenditures.  After Virgil arranges for 800 camels to convey the massive amount of materiel, the group begins the trek across the desert, but are soon delayed by a local sheik who demands a toll.  Kaddour, the sheik's vizier, demands an outrageous fee for the caravan to pass, but eventually the two parties come to terms and the explorers are allowed to continue on their way.

The Tehbaldi plain has a 5000 foot high mountain made of "bisulphides of iron" that is Norbert's goal.  He plans to level the top of it and install his generators around the base and thereby magnetize the prominence using sunlight.  But first he has to isolate the pile from the underlying sand, so he drills a hole from the top downward to the bottom and uses the gensets to melt the sand into glass which he plans on pouring down the hole;  the idea is to spread it out at the bottom so as to form an insulating barrier to keep the electrical fluid from dissipating in the earth below.  Meanwhile, the three "commissioners", Vogel, Wagner and Gryphins, do all they can to frustrate Norbert's schemes because they believe it's all a waste of money.  They spend all their time playing cards and drinking.

This all takes place in the 1870's, when the Mahdi is about to initiate a Jihad to wipe the earth clean of unbelievers.  But his forces have been temporarily pushed south, so operations continue post-haste at the mountain.  But Kaddour appears with another army, intending to halt progress and grab all the machinery and money for himself.  Norbert makes friends with him, however, and he joins the company of adventurers.  

The moon approaches and everything is ready to get underway.  At its closest point, the generators are fired up and the resulting magnetic field does indeed begin to pull the moon closer.  Suspense mounts until a gigantic earthquake is felt and the voyagers pass out.  Since they've had the forethought to build themselves a series of leak-proof buildings on the mountain-top, they all live through the transition to the moon's surface when it collided with the Earth.  The moon resumes its usual orbit and the party wakes to find themselves on the moon.

Over the next few weeks, they explore the surface, finding the remnants of huge temples and statues, apparently created by an extinct race of giants, all made out of gold.  Norbert has designed oxygen tanks for walking on the surface.  They consist of tanks full of air connected to face masks via tubes that carry the gas through a sort of squeeze box carried under the left arm.  They are squashed by the upper arm when flow is needed.  In the 1/6 gravity, Norber, Gertrude and the others dance around the many craters and walls in sheer delight.  Later, Norbert travels to the dark side and is awed at the lightless panorama of stars. 

When they decide to return to Earth, the three commissioners, who have behaved badly, sabotaging and damaging the equipment in their attempt to destroy Norbert's plans, are jailed because they've tried to take a lot of the gold back with them.  For various reasons, they are left on the moon along with Kaddour when the mountain, driven by the gensets, returns home.  It is explained that two of the malefactors had kidnapped Kaddour when he was young and forced him to act in a circus for years during which he nursed irrevocable hatred for them.  On the edge of departure, he refuses to let them aboard and since time is of the essence, the others are forced to leave him behind.

Back on Earth, they are picked up by members of the British armed forces who are floating down the Nile on their way to the encampment.  After proving who they are, however, the luniacs are still not credited, the authorities believing that stress and dire experiences have warped their brains.  In the end, Nobert and Gertrude marry and they all live happily ever after.  Upon reaching England, they learn that the savior of Khartoum, General Gordon, has been slain by the Mahdi's forces along with all his troops and they express their gratitude that they escaped that holocaust.

I wrote to India to get a copy of this book, as it's the only other one by Laurie that i could find that had been translated into English.  The printing was not very well done, with pages 18-31 missing, much of the lettering was smeared so as to be illegible, and quite a few pages duplicated.  On the other hand, it was great to be able to get a copy at all.  Laurie wrote many books and it's a mystery to me why some one hasn't translated some of them, as he is in actuality a veritable second Verne.  Imaginative, descriptive and easily comprehensible, both of his books that i've read have held me glued to the page to see what was going to happen next.  i'd recommend his work to anyone, if they could manage to find it...

P.S.:  FeS2d, FeS, are sometimes magnetic, depending on what other molecular additions are included in the crystal matrices, so Laurie's not totally off the wall with this idea.  On the other hand, he certainly had been at some point exposed to Newton's inverse squared law, describing the attenuation of gravity and magnetic waves over distance, so his idea that any source on earth could have had an effect on the moon was sheer invention...  but an interesting idea nonetheless...