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Updated: May 22, 2025
At the same moment, the three friends became instantaneously conscious of a slight shock experienced by the Projectile. They looked at each other, speechless, breathless, for about as long as it would take you to count five: the silence so intense that they could easily hear the pulsation of their hearts. Ardan was the first to break it. "Are we falling or are we not?" he asked in a loud whisper.
"According to calculations," answered Barbicane, "that would develop a heat equal to that produced by 1,600 globes of coal, equal in volume to the terrestrial globe." "A good increase of temperature for the sun," replied Michel Ardan, "of which the inhabitants of Uranus or Neptune will probably not complain, for they must be dying of cold on their planet."
There you twisted us both around your finger, and induced us to follow you blindly on the most formidable journey ever undertaken by man! And now you refuse to tell us what it was all for!" "I don't refuse, dear old Barbican! To you, at least, I can't refuse anything!" cried Ardan, seizing his friend's hands and wringing them violently.
The position we assume must be important too we must prevent the blood rushing too violently to our heads." "That is true," said Nicholl. "Then," answered Michel Ardan, always ready to suit the action to the word, "we will stand on our heads like the clowns at the circus." "No," said Barbicane; "but let us lie on our sides; we shall thus resist the shock better.
"It is a happy thing that brave men like you two did not meet sooner! we should now have been mourning for one or other of you. But, thanks to Providence, which has interfered, there is now no further cause for alarm. When one forgets one's anger in mechanics or in cobwebs, it is a sign that the anger is not dangerous." Michel Ardan then told the president how the captain had been found occupied.
The transition was so abrupt, so unexpected, without the slightest shading off, from dazzling effulgence to Cimmerian gloom, that the Moon seemed to have been suddenly extinguished like a lamp when the gas is turned off. "Where's the Moon?" cried Ardan in amazement. "It appears as if she had been wiped out of creation!" cried M'Nicholl. Barbican said nothing, but observed carefully.
"On again, then," replied Ardan; "Herschel, in 1787, observed a great number of luminous points on the moon's surface, did he not?" "Yes! but without offering any solution of them. Herschel himself never inferred from them the necessity of a lunar atmosphere.
Michel Ardan did not find any answer to make. Maston and he resumed their interrupted walk. From time to time they shouted; they called either Barbicane or Nicholl; but neither of the two adversaries answered. Joyful flocks of birds, roused by the noise, disappeared amongst the branches, and some frightened deer fled through the copses. They continued their search another hour.
But who can assert that this attraction was powerful enough to exert the same influence at the epoch when the Earth herself was only a fluid substance? In fact, who can even assert that the Moon has always been the Earth's satellite?" "Ah, who indeed?" exclaimed Ardan. "And who can assert that the Moon did not exist long before the Earth was called into being at all?
The velocity of the Projectile was fortunately great enough to carry it barely above the dangerous point; and in a flash the terrible bolide disappeared rapidly several hundred yards beneath the affrighted travellers. "Good bye! And may you never come back!" cried Ardan, hardly able to breathe. "It's perfectly outrageous!
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