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Updated: May 9, 2025
Its nature therefore they had no opportunity of ascertaining. It began to disappear behind the dark horizon within less than half an hour after the time that M'Nicholl had signalled it. Still, the fact of the uncontested existence of such a phenomenon was a grand one, and of considerable importance in selenographic investigations.
"A grand view to take of it, dear friend Barbican;" replied Ardan, "and a consoling one too. The privilege of roaming at will through God's great universe should make ample amends for missing the Moon!" M'Nicholl fixed his eyes on Barbican admiringly, feebly muttering with hardly moving lips: "Grit to the marrow! Grit to the marrow!"
Ardan neither wrote nor calculated, but kept up an incessant fire of small talk, now with Barbican, who hardly ever answered him, now with M'Nicholl, who never heard him, occasionally with Diana, who never understood him, but oftenest with himself, because, as he said, he liked not only to talk to a sensible man but also to hear what a sensible man had to say.
The moment that the great clock belonging to the works at Stony Hill had struck ten, Barbican, Ardan and M'Nicholl began to take their last farewells of the numerous friends surrounding them. The two dogs intended to accompany them had been already deposited in the Projectile.
"Why!" exclaimed Ardan, with a disconcerted look, after a long and searching examination, "I can't find anybody. Everything is as motionless as a street in Pompeii at 4 o'clock in the morning!" "Good comparison, friend Ardan;" observed M'Nicholl.
He worked at Barbican, however, just as before. M'Nicholl interrupted himself every moment to lay his ear on the breast of the unconscious man. At first he had shaken his head quite despondingly, but by degrees he found himself more and more encouraged to persist. "He breathes!" he whispered at last.
"We shall take possession of the Moon ourselves!" cried Ardan. "Lunarians or no Lunarians!" "We three shall constitute a Republic!" cried M'Nicholl. "I shall be the House!" cried Ardan. "And I the Senate!" answered the Captain. "And Barbican our first President!" shrieked the Frenchman. "Our first and last!" roared M'Nicholl. "No objections to a third term!" yelled Ardan.
Full of such thoughts and intensely interested in them, Barbican, M'Nicholl and Ardan, patient as astronomers at a transit of Venus, watched steadily at their windows, and allowed nothing worth noticing to escape their searching gaze. Ardan's patience first gave out.
Naturally, therefore, the time slipped away in endless conversation. The Moon, of course, was the chief topic. Each one contributed his share of peculiar information, or peculiar ignorance, as the case might be. Barbican and M'Nicholl always treated the subject gravely, as became learned scientists, but Ardan preferred to look on things with the eye of fancy.
"On the contrary, it will be relatively so much the more increased that you can take a stride 15 feet in width as easily as you can now take one of ordinary length." "We shall be all Samsons, then, in the Moon!" cried Ardan. "Especially," replied M'Nicholl, "if the stature of the Selenites is in proportion to the mass of their globe." "If so, what should be their height?"
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