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Updated: May 28, 2025
From occasional newspapers which he had received, he had learnt that fogs, dense as ever, continued to envelop both hemispheres, so that he was assured that the existence of the comet was utterly unknown elsewhere; and the ignorance of the world as to the peril that threatened it averted the panic that would have followed the publication of the facts, and left the philosopher of Formentera in sole possession of the great secret.
I was expecting M. Biot at Valencia, he having undertaken to bring some new instruments with which we were to measure the latitude of Formentera. I shall take advantage of these short intervals of repose to insert here some details of manners, which may, perhaps, be read with interest.
Anyone else would have hurried from the solitude of Formentera in sheer fright; but, without communicating a word of his startling discovery, he remained resolutely at his post.
"As to rest," said Servadac, "we shall take none; we shall keep on our way continuously; by traveling day and night without intermission, we shall not be more than three days in reaching Formentera."
It was completely desert; not so much as a single point of rock relieved the bare uniformity of its surface. "Are we not considerably to the west of Formentera?" asked Servadac, after examining the chart. "Most likely," replied Procope.
It was begun by Delambre and Mechain, from Dunkirk to Barcelona, and thence extended, by Biot and Arago, to the island of Formentera near Minorea. Its length was nearly twelve and a half degrees. Besides this method of direct measurement, the figure of the earth may be determined from the observed number of oscillations made by a pendulum of invariable length in different latitudes.
And as briefly as he could, he related all that had happened since the memorable night of the thirty-first of December; how they had experienced the shock; how the Dobryna had made her voyage; how they had discovered nothing except the fragments of the old continent at Tunis, Sardinia, Gibraltar, and now at Formentera; how at intervals the three anonymous documents had been received; and, finally, how the settlement at Gourbi Island had been abandoned for their present quarters at Nina's Hive.
He was still pacing there when an hour or so before sunset some fifteen hours after setting out they stood before the entrance of a long bottle-necked cove under the shadow of the cliffs of Aquila Point on the southern coast of the Island of Formentera.
He secured the services of a former assistant, and dispatched him to a high peak on the coast of Spain, where he had to superintend a reverberator, which, with the aid of a glass, could be seen from Formentera.
Although it had proved that not a single creature either at Gourbi Island, Gibraltar, Ceuta, Madalena, or Formentera had received any injury whatever at the time of the first concussion, there was nothing in the least to make it certain that a like immunity from harm would attend the second.
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