Nicholl, Barbicane, and Michel Ardan were definitively
walled up in their metal vehicle.
Who could predict the universal emotion then at its
paroxysm?
The moon was rising in a firmament of limpid purity,
outshining on her passage the twinkling fire of the
stars; she passed over the constellation of the Twins,
and was now nearly halfway between the horizon and
the zenith.
A frightful silence hung over all that scene.
There was not a breath of wind on the earth!
Not a sound of breathing from the crowd! Hearts
dared not beat. Every eye was fixed on the gaping
mouth of the Columbiad.
Murchison watched the needle of his chronometer.
Hardly forty seconds had to elapse before the moment
of departure struck, and each one lasted a century!
At the twentieth there was a universal shudder, and
the thought occurred to all the crowd that the audacious
travellers shut up in the vehicle were likewise counting
these terrible seconds! Some isolated cries were
heard.
“Thirty-five!—thirty-six!—thi
rty-seven!—thirty—eight!—thirty-nine!
—forty! Fire!!!”
Murchison immediately pressed his finger upon the
electric knob and hurled the electric spark into the
depths of the Columbiad.
A fearful, unheard-of, superhuman report, of which
nothing could give an idea, not even thunder or the
eruption of volcanoes, was immediately produced.
An immense spout of fire sprang up from the bowels
of the earth as if from a crater. The soil heaved
and very few persons caught a glimpse of the projectile
victoriously cleaving the air amidst the flaming smoke.
CLOUDY WEATHER.
At the moment when the pyramid of flame rose to a
prodigious height in the air it lighted up the whole
of Florida, and for an incalculable moment day was
substituted for night over a considerable extent of
country. This immense column of fire was perceived
for a hundred miles out at sea, from the Gulf and
from the Atlantic, and more than one ship’s
captain noted the apparition of this gigantic meteor
in his log-book.
The discharge of the Columbiad was accompanied by
a veritable earthquake. Florida was shaken to
its very depths. The gases of the powder, expanded
by heat, forced back the atmospheric strata with tremendous
violence, passing like a waterspout through the air.
Not one spectator remained on his legs; men, women,
and children were thrown down like ears of wheat in
a storm; there was a terrible tumult, and a large
number of people were seriously injured. J.T.
Maston, who had very imprudently kept to the fore,
was thrown twenty yards backwards like a bullet over
the heads of his fellow-citizens. Three hundred
thousand people were temporarily deafened and as though
thunderstruck.
The atmospheric current, after throwing over huts
and cabins, uprooting trees within a radius of twenty
miles, throwing the trains off the railway as far
as Tampa, burst upon the town like an avalanche and
destroyed a hundred houses, amongst others the church
of St. Mary and the new edifice of the Exchange.
Some of the vessels in the port were run against each
other and sunk, and ten of them were stranded high
and dry after breaking their chains like threads of
cotton.
