“Mille diables!” cried Michel Ardan, “it is cold enough here to freeze white bears!”

Barbicane let half-an-hour go by, more than sufficient time to allow the instrument to descend to the level of the temperature of space.  The thermometer was then rapidly drawn in.

Barbicane calculated the quantity of mercury spilt into the little phial soldered to the lower part of the instrument, and said—­

“One hundred and forty degrees centigrade below zero!” (218 deg.  Fahr.)

M. Pouillet was right, not Fourier.  Such was the frightful temperature of sidereal space!  Such perhaps that of the lunar continents when the orb of night loses by radiation all the heat which she absorbs during the fifteen days of sunshine.

CHAPTER XV.

HYPERBOLA OR PARABOLA.

Our readers will probably be astonished that Barbicane and his companions were so little occupied with the future in store for them in their metal prison, carried along in the infinitude of ether.  Instead of asking themselves where they were going, they lost their time in making experiments, just as if they had been comfortably installed in their own studies.

It might be answered that men so strong-minded were above such considerations, that such little things did not make them uneasy, and that they had something else to do than to think about their future.

The truth is that they were not masters of their projectile—­that they could neither stop it nor alter its direction.  A seaman can direct the head of his ship as he pleases; an aeronaut can give his balloon vertical movement.  They, on the contrary, had no authority over their vehicle.  No manoeuvre was possible to them.  Hence their not troubling themselves, or “let things go” state of mind.

Where were they at that moment, 8 a.m. during that day called upon earth the sixth of December?  Certainly in the neighbourhood of the moon, and even near enough for her to appear like a vast black screen upon the firmament.  As to the distance which separated them, it was impossible to estimate it.  The projectile, kept up by inexplicable forces, has grazed the north pole of the satellite at less than twenty-five miles’ distance.  But had that distance increased or diminished since they had been in the cone of shadow?  There was no landmark by which to estimate either the direction or the velocity of the projectile.  Perhaps it was going rapidly away from the disc and would soon leave the pure shadow.  Perhaps, on the contrary, it was approaching it, and would before long strike against some elevated peak in the invisible atmosphere, which would have terminated the journey, doubtless to the detriment of the travellers.

A discussion began upon this subject, and Michel Ardan, always rich in explanations, gave out the opinion that the bullet, restrained by lunar attraction, would end by falling on the moon like an aerolite on to the surface of the terrestrial globe.