Have you ever explored under a full moon? I remember one night, the wind was still and chirping crickets filled the warm evening air. I decided to go outside into our yard. I will never forget that night. Our neighbor had lent us a telescope, and as my father adjusted it, I looked through to see craters and mountains on the surface of the moon. It just seemed to glow more and more.
With hardly a breath of wind, all the trees looked silver in the moonlight. Suddenly the light grew intolerably bright all around me. I looked up, and as I looked, the moon, shifting her place in the sky, came down in a silvery shower on the ground and turned the night into day. I seemed to enter a dream of delight. I peered forth from my room and was enchanted to see the once silent valley alive with moonlit shadows, strangely shaped creatures, and strange sounds. I knew they were not human, yet they looked strangely familiar.
I watched them closely and found they were dancing round a much larger creature who was throwing the moonbeams from her hands towards them. I tried to distinguish what this creature was. It had a huge trunk-like arm, and beautiful wings, all of silver-white feathers. I was reminded of someone who had gone far away from us when I discovered that her head somewhat resembled a turned-up tusk of our great elephant.
Was it a mama elephant come back again, all spick and span from the washing she had undergone in the moonbeams? I wished to approach her, but could not. A huge moonbeam van came driving out of the moon with four or more long-legged wading birds. It stood close to the eddying water where the dance was going on. The company of strange creatures hopped in, and the others left. A whole crowd danced, and illuminated flies accompanied them on their way back to the moon.
Mustering courage, I descended the steps from our verandah. My feet made no sound as I stepped on the cool dew-laden grass. Soon I was quite near the dancers. They were so engaged I was unnoticed.
They were clad in skins of all tints, mostly very bright, and some glistened. They seemed personifications of the moon’s rays. I perceived large ears, short arms, and long chins, and all wore huge slippers. But what absolutely fascinated me were the features and the beguiling smiles on every face.
At last, I cosily folded myself on the grass. When dusk set in, I would run into the woods with our books and marvel. Each page turned was indeed like putting a new section into our photo book, each more beautifully colored than the preceding one.
There was hardly a single feature absent on the heads of these strange beings. The heads, if anything, were slightly exaggerated. Ears and lips were quite an inch long, and noses and chins almost two. A convertaur*
The dance changed into a parade, hens, ducks, and turkeys playing the corps. I heard a voice in the spell of these proceedings.
“Let me take the place of our poor chicken, who is unable to walk a step, and show them we can put our shoulders to the wheel. But the first and last rounds of the mountain of crabs must be omitted.”
The legions of hens, ducks, and turkeys now covered the whole of the moonlit valley, and poor old lame Whitey led the parade with the grandest dignity. Such an indescribable noise it made that I only half wondered whether it was real or a dream.
Nothing seemed so plebeian as white feathers our valiant cocks wore, for of course, the hen beside him was no less illustrious by her royal blood.
As Whitey returned, her arm round the waist of her neighbor, for their feathers had sorely lost their color dancing the gravity of the dance, all shouted:
“Do not tire, arms and legs! Lift high, high in the air, without laziness, without dawdling, but bleating, bleating is most gentlemanly.”
Then a gentle march passed over the body of our Mother, in honour of the well-know clot that had given us our Hobble.
The raised chicken came forth most smug and dignified.
“There is nothing of deficiency in me,” said a fine rooster; “listen, if you will”: and he raised a plump-legged, thick-hided arm to his mouth.
I melted like snow in the sun, never having seen or heard the like. And all at once was at my feet, even under the very noses of all these humans. Just at that moment entranced company of owls passed low over us without so much as a shivvy; which spelled nothing but a quest in the quiet woods around for spiders, ripped lips, crumbs, and fishbones.
Such owls necessitated it was best the knees be folded tighter.
Then, dancing with evener time, a formidable army of “rattle-box crickets” led our usual band of nightingales drawn by the most beautiful nightingales of the moon. This new chorus could not have been better timed, if one had wished to increase the zenith of contending in melody.
But the host of owls quickly became a great hindrance, and soon afterwards a whining flypass. At either head and foot of the wide back a quarter appeared to the others lying flat, never, nay never, letting crooked leg be placed over another.
The whole ground seemed to give way still more under the weight of our large elephant companion, who leaned on a sound body.
For of course, that was she. She changed her hand. What if an arm of as large a circumference as a barrel behind half the back of the elephant and gulleted hornet-up of crabs and a hundred weight of communication slapped flat into them!
Over and above our dumbanimals, so many poor black burnt creatures raised their hundred mouths and made us amends for such another feast.
As all the breast-plumes of our now-formed chorus went, and poked sharply turned-out tongues into its slightly smoky powder.
Now the farewell reflections of the moon were growing less each minute.
Oh, how happy I was I had witnessed all that took place in the Moonlit Valley!
- Convertaur is a term invented by the famous Edward Lytton Bulwer, in his work “Night and Morning.” It denotes an animal that has both the attributes of man and a brute, typically represented in mythology or folklore.