Round the Moon

When ten o’clock struck, Michel Ardan, Barbicane, and Nicholl said goodbye to the numerous friends they left upon the earth. The two dogs, destined to acclimatise the canine race upon the lunar continents, were already imprisoned in the projectile. The three travellers approached the orifice of the enormous iron tube, and a crane lowered them to the conical covering of the bullet.

There an opening made on purpose let them down into the aluminium vehicle. The crane’s tackling was drawn up outside, and the mouth of the Columbiad instantly cleared of its last scaffolding.

As soon as Nicholl and his companions were in the projectile he closed the opening by means of a strong plate screwed down inside. Other closely-fitting plates covered the lenticular glasses of the skylights. The travellers, hermetically enclosed in their metal prison, were in profound darkness.

“And now, my dear companions,” said Michel Ardan, “let us make ourselves at home. I am a domestic man myself, and know how to make the best of any lodgings. First let us have a light; gas was not invented for moles!”

“Yes, five short minutes!” replied Michel Ardan. “And we are shut up in a bullet at the bottom of a cannon 900 feet long! and under this bullet there are 400,000 lbs. of guncotton, worth more than 1,600,000 lbs. of ordinary powder! And friend Murchison, with his chronometer in hand and his eye fixed on the hand and his finger on the electric knob, is counting the seconds to hurl us into the planetary regions.”

“Enough, Michel, enough!” said Barbicane in a grave tone. “Let us prepare ourselves. A few seconds only separate us from a supreme moment. Your hands, my friends.”

“Yes,” cried Michel Ardan, more moved than he wished to appear.

The three bold companions shook hands.

“God help us!” said the religious president.

Michel Ardan and Nicholl lay down on their beds in the centre of the floor.

“Thirteen minutes to eleven,” murmured the captain.

Twenty seconds more! Barbicane rapidly put out the gas, and lay down beside his companions.

The profound silence was only broken by the chronometer beating the seconds.

Suddenly a frightful shock was felt, and the projectile, under the impulsion of 6,000,000,000 litres of gas developed by the deflagration of the pyroxyle, rose into space.

At the very moment when Barbicane was going to abandon one window to set clear the opposite one, his attention was attracted by the approach of a shining object. It was an enormous disc the colossal dimensions of which could not be estimated. Its face turned towards the earth was brilliantly lighted. It looked like a small moon reflecting the light of the large one. It advanced at prodigious speed, and seemed to describe round the earth an orbit right across the passage of the projectile. To the movement of translation of this object was added a movement of rotation upon itself. It was therefore behaving like all celestial bodies abandoned in space.

“Eh!” cried Michel Ardan. “Whatever is that? Another projectile?”

Barbicane did not answer. The apparition of this enormous body surprised him and made him uneasy. A collision was possible which would have had deplorable results, either by making the projectile deviate from its route and fall back upon the earth, or be caught up by the attractive power of the asteroid.

President Barbicane had rapidly seized the consequences of these three hypotheses, which in one way or other would fatally prevent the success of his attempt. His companions were silently watching the object, which grew prodigiously larger as it approached, and through a certain optical illusion it seemed as if the projectile were rushing upon it.

“Ye gods!” cried Michel Ardan; “there will be a collision on the line!”

The three travellers instinctively drew back. Their terror was extreme, but it did not last long, hardly a few seconds.

Until now the travellers, though they had remarked that this action diminished little by little, had not yet perceived its total absence. But that day, about 11 a.m., Nicholl having let a tumbler escape from his hand, instead of falling, it remained suspended in the air.

“Ah!” cried Michel Ardan, “this is a little amusing chemistry!”

And immediately different objects, weapons, bottles, etc., left to themselves, hung suspended as if by miracle. Diana, too, lifted up by Michel into space, reproduced, but without trickery, the marvellous suspensions effected by Robert-Houdin and Maskelyne and Cook.

The three adventurous companions, surprised and stupefied in spite of their scientific reasoning, carried into the domain of the marvellous, felt weight go out of their bodies. When they stretched out their arms they felt no inclination to drop them. Their heads vacillated on their shoulders. Their feet no longer kept at the bottom of the projectile. They were like staggering drunkards. Imagination has created men deprived of their reflection, others deprived of their shadows! But here reality, by the neutrality of active forces, made men in whom nothing had any weight, and who weighed nothing themselves.

Suddenly Michel, making a slight spring, left the floor and remained suspended in the air like the good monk in Murillo’s Cuisine des Anges. His two friends joined him in an instant, and all three, in the centre of the projectile, figured a miraculous ascension.

“Is it believable? Is it likely? Is it possible?” cried Michel. “No. And yet it exists! Ah! if Raphael could have seen us like this what an Assumption he could have put upon canvas!”

This shooting star suddenly appeared in the darkness at a distance of at least 100 leagues, and measured, according to Barbicane’s estimate, a diameter of 2,000 metres. It moved with the speed of about thirty leagues a minute. It cut across the route of the projectile, and would reach it in a few minutes. As it approached it grew larger in an enormous proportion.

If possible, let the situation of the travellers be imagined! It is impossible to describe it. In spite of their courage, their sangfroid, their carelessness of danger, they were mute, motionless, with stiffened limbs, a prey to fearful terror. Their projectile, the course of which they could not alter, was running straight on to this burning mass, more intense than the open mouth of a furnace. They seemed to be rushing towards an abyss of fire.

Barbicane seized the hands of his two companions, and all three looked through their half-closed eyelids at the red-hot asteroid. If they still thought at all, they must have given themselves up as lost!

Two minutes after the sudden appearance of the bolis, two centuries of agony, the projectile seemed about to strike against it, when the ball of fire burst like a bomb, but without making any noise in the void, where sound, which is only the agitation of the strata of air, could not be made.

Nicholl uttered a cry. His companions and he rushed to the port-lights.