Round the Moon quotes

“Very well!” cried Michel Ardan good-humouredly; “in twenty-six minutes lots of things can be done. We can discuss grave moral or political questions, and even solve them.

Twenty-six minutes well employed are worth more than twenty-six years of doing nothing.

A few seconds of a Pascal or a Newton are more precious than the whole existence of a crowd of imbeciles.”

But his companions were no longer listening to him, and they were making their last preparations with all the coolness imaginable. They looked like two methodical travellers taking their places in the train and making themselves as comfortable as possible.

One wonders, indeed, of what materials these American hearts are made, to which the approach of the most frightful danger does not add a single pulsation.

Three beds, thick and solidly made, had been placed in the projectile. Nicholl and Barbicane placed them in the centre of the disc that formed the movable flooring. There the three travellers were to lie down a few minutes before their departure.

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.

“A good journey to you!” cried Michel Ardan, uttering a sigh of satisfaction. “

Is not infinitude large enough to allow a poor little bullet to go about without fear?

What was that pretentious globe which nearly knocked against us?”

Her mountains and plains, or any object in relief, were not seen more plainly than from the earth; but her light across the void was developed with incomparable intensity. The disc shone like a platinum mirror.

The travellers had already forgotten all about the earth which was flying beneath their feet.

It was Captain Nicholl who first drew attention to the vanished globe.

At that epoch the earth was in her perihelion, and the month of December is so propitious to these shooting stars that astronomers have counted as many as 24,000 an hour.

But Michel Ardan, disdaining scientific reasoning, preferred to believe that the earth was saluting with her finest fireworks the departure of her three children.

This was all they saw of the globe lost in the darkness, an inferior star of the solar world, which for the grand planets rises or sets as a simple morning or evening star!

Upon earth, houses in the town or cottages in the country feel every shock upon the surface of the globe. At sea, ships, rocked by the waves, are in perpetual movement. In the air, balloons incessantly oscillate upon the fluid strata of different densities.

This projectile alone, travelling in absolute void amidst absolute silence, offered absolute repose to its inhabitants.

The sleep of the three adventurers would have, perhaps, been indefinitely prolonged if an unexpected noise had not awakened them about 7 a.m. on the 2nd of December, eight hours after their departure.

“I daresay,” answered Barbicane, “but if the earth had been full the moon would have been new—that is to say, invisible amidst the irradiation of the sun.

It is better for us to see the goal we want to reach than the place we started from.

”

On one side the sun, like the mouth of a fiery furnace, shone upon the dark background of the heavens. On the other side the moon, reflecting back his fires, seemed motionless amidst the starry world.

Then a large spot, like a hole in the firmament, bordered still by a slight thread of silver⁠—it was the earth.

Here and there nebulous masses like large snowflakes, and from zenith to nadir an immense ring, formed of an impalpable dust of stars—that milky way amidst which the sun only counts as a star of the fourth magnitude!

No movement indicated its journey through space. However rapidly change of place may be effected, it cannot produce any sensible effect upon the organism when it takes place in the void, or when the mass of air circulates along with the travelling body.

What inhabitant of the earth perceives the speed which carries him along at the rate of 68,000 miles an hour?

Movement under such circumstances is not felt more than repose. Every object is indifferent to it. When a body is in repose it remains so until some foreign force puts it in movement.

“Why should we not succeed?” repeated Michel Ardan. “Why should we not arrive?

We are on the road; there are no obstacles before us, and no stones on our route.

It is free—freer than that of a ship that has to struggle with the sea, or a balloon with the wind against it!

“Old fellow,” answered Michel, “you have an answer to everything, and I bow before your wisdom.

There is one hypothesis I would rather believe than the others, and that is that the Selenites being older than we are wiser, and have not invented gunpowder at all.

”

“No. It would be much better to compare.

A billion signifies nothing. An object of comparison explains everything.

Example—When you tell me that Uranus is 76 times larger than the earth, Saturn 900 times larger, Jupiter 1,300 times larger, the sun 1,300,000 times larger, I am not much wiser.

“

Ah, what hundreds of volumes we might fill with what we don’t know!

” exclaimed Michel. “But I say,” he continued, “what time is it?”

They climbed the elevated peaks. They descended to the bottom of the large amphitheatres. Here and there they thought they saw vast seas scarcely kept together under an atmosphere so rarefied, and streams of water that poured them their tribute from the mountains.

Leaning over the abyss they hoped to catch the noise of this orb forever mute in the solitudes of the void.

This last day left them the liveliest remembrances. They noted down the least details. A vague uneasiness took possession of them as they approached their goal. This uneasiness would have been doubled if they had felt how slight their speed was.

Michel Ardan allowed himself to be convinced in a certain measure.

He agreed that the thing was difficult, but not “impossible;” that was a word he never uttered.

The conversation passed from this subject to another, and never languished an instant. It seemed to the three friends that under these conditions ideas came into their heads like leaves in the first warm days of spring.

The conversation passed from this subject to another, and never languished an instant.

It seemed to the three friends that under these conditions ideas came into their heads like leaves in the first warm days of spring.

Amidst the questions and answers that crossed each other during this morning, Nicholl asked one that did not get an immediate solution.

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.

“That is a pity,” replied Michel. “

There is nothing like positive people for recalling you brutally to reality!

”

“I would not give half a dollar to know! We have deviated, that is a fact.

It does not matter much where we are going. We shall soon find out.

As we are being carried along into space we shall end by falling into some centre of attraction or another.”

Some remarks on the orographical disposition of the moon must conclude the description of its continents, chains of mountains, isolated mountains, amphitheatres, and watercourses.

The moon is like an immense Switzerland⁠—a continual Norway, where Plutonic influence has done everything.

This surface, so profoundly rugged, is the result of the successive contractions of the crust while the orb was being formed. The lunar disc is propitious for the study of great geological phenomena.

It was, therefore, in circumstances highly favourable for solving the great question of the habitability of the moon. Yet the solution of this question escaped him still. He could only distinguish the deserted beds of the immense plains, and, towards the north, arid mountains.

No labour betrayed the hand of man. No ruin indicated his passage.

No agglomeration of animals indicated that life was developed there, even in an inferior degree. There was no movement anywhere, no appearance of vegetation anywhere.

Suppose that animals people these continents and seas? Suppose that man still lives under those conditions of habitability? How many questions there were it would have been interesting to solve! What solutions might have been drawn from the contemplation of that hemisphere!

What delight it would have been to glance at that world which no human eye has seen!

The disappointment of the travellers in the midst of this darkness may be imagined. All observation of the lunar disc was prevented.

… firmament from the Southern Cross to the North Star, those two constellations which will in 12,000 years, on account of the succession of equinoxes, resign their roles of polar stars, the one to Canopus in the southern hemisphere, the other to Wega in the northern.

Imagination lost itself in this sublime infinitude, amidst which the projectile was moving like a new star created by the hand of man.

From natural causes these constellations shone with a soft lustre; they did not twinkle because there was no atmosphere to intervene with its strata unequally dense, and of different degrees of humidity, which causes this scintillation.

when these craters vomited torrents of lava and stones, with clouds of smoke and sheets of flame? What a prodigious spectacle formerly, and now what a falling off!

This moon is now only the meagre case of fireworks, of which the rockets, serpents, suns, and wheels, after going off magnificently, only leave torn pieces of cardboard.

Who can tell the cause, reason, or justification of such cataclysms?”

“And who can say,” exclaimed Michel Ardan, “that the moon did not exist before the earth?”

Imagination began to wander in the indefinite field of hypotheses.

Barbicane wished to hold them in.

“That is your business!

If artillerymen are not masters of their bullets they are no longer artillerymen. If the projectile commands the gunner, the gunner ought to be rammed instead into the cannon!

Fine savants, truly! who don’t know now what to do after having induced me—”