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.

CHAPTER XXVII.

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.