“Four hundred thousand years!” exclaimed
Michel. “Ah! I breathe again!
I was really frightened. I imagined from listening
to you that we had only fifty thousand years to live!”
Barbicane and Nicholl could not help laughing at their
companion’s uneasiness. Then Nicholl, who
wanted to have done with it, reminded them of the
second question to be settled.
“Has the moon been inhabited?” he asked.
The answer was unanimously in the affirmative.
During this discussion, fruitful in somewhat hazardous
theories, although it resumed the general ideas of
science on the subject, the projectile had run rapidly
towards the lunar equator, at the same time that it
went farther away from the lunar disc. It had
passed the circle of Willem, and the 40th parallel,
at a distance of 400 miles. Then leaving Pitatus
to the right, on the 30th degree, it went along the
south of the Sea of Clouds, of which it had already
approached the north. Different amphitheatres
appeared confusedly under the white light of the full
moon—Bouillaud, Purbach, almost square with
a central crater, then Arzachel, whose interior mountain
shone with indefinable brilliancy.
At last, as the projectile went farther and farther
away, the details faded from the travellers’
eyes, the mountains were confounded in the distance,
and all that remained of the marvellous, fantastical,
and wonderful satellite of the earth was the imperishable
remembrance.
A STRUGGLE WITH THE IMPOSSIBLE.
For some time Barbicane and his companions, mute and
pensive, looked at this world, which they had only
seen from a distance, like Moses saw Canaan, and from
which they were going away for ever. The position
of the projectile relatively to the moon was modified,
and now its lower end was turned towards the earth.
This change, verified by Barbicane, surprised him
greatly. If the bullet was going to gravitate
round the satellite in an elliptical orbit, why was
not its heaviest part turned towards it like the moon
to the earth? There again was an obscure point.
By watching the progress of the projectile they could
see that it was following away from the moon an analogous
curve to that by which it approached her. It
was, therefore, describing a very long ellipsis which
would probably extend to the point of equal attraction,
where the influences of the earth and her satellite
are neutralised.
Such was the conclusion which Barbicane correctly
drew from the facts observed, a conviction which his
two friends shared with him.
Questions immediately began to shower upon him.
“What will become of us after we have reached
the neutral point?” asked Michel Ardan.
“That is unknown!” answered Barbicane.
“But we can make suppositions, I suppose?”
“We can make two,” answered Barbicane.
“Either the velocity of the projectile will
then be insufficient, and it will remain entirely
motionless on that line of double attraction—”
