“It’s the sun!” said Michel again.

“It’s the moon!” retorted Nicholl.

An idle dispute began, which Barbicane put an end to by saying—­

“My friends, it is neither the fault of the sun nor the moon.  It is the projectile’s fault for deviating from its course instead of rigorously following it.  Or, to be juster still, it is the fault of that unfortunate asteroid which so deplorably altered our first direction.”

“Good!” answered Michel Ardan; “as that business is settled let us have our breakfast.  After a night entirely passed in making observations, we want something to set us to rights a little.”

This proposition met with no contradiction.  Michel prepared the repast in a few minutes.  But they ate for the sake of eating.  They drank without toasts or hurrahs.  The bold travellers, borne away into the darkness of space without their accustomed escort of rays, felt a vague uneasiness invade their hearts.  The “farouche” darkness, so dear to the pen of Victor Hugo, surrounded them on all sides.

In the meantime they talked about this interminable night, 354 hours, or nearly 15 days, long, which physical laws have imposed upon the inhabitants of the moon.  Barbicane gave his friends some explanation of the causes and consequences of this curious phenomenon.

“Curious it certainly is,” said he, “for if each hemisphere of the moon is deprived of solar light for fifteen days, the one over which we are moving at this moment does not even enjoy, during its long night, a sight of the brilliantly-lighted earth.  In a word, there is no moon, applying that qualification to our spheroid, except for one side of the disc.  Now, if it was the same upon earth—­if, for example, Europe never saw the moon, and she was only visible at the antipodes—­you can figure to yourselves the astonishment of a European on arriving in Australia.”

“They would make the voyage for nothing but to go and see the moon,” answered Michel.

“Well,” resumed Barbicane, “that astonishment is reserved to the Selenite who inhabits the opposite side of the moon to the earth, a side for ever invisible to our fellow-beings of the terrestrial globe.”

“And which we should have seen,” added Nicholl, “if we had arrived here at the epoch when the moon is new—­that is to say, a fortnight later.”

“To make amends,” resumed Barbicane, “an inhabitant of the visible face is singularly favoured by Nature to the detriment on the invisible face.  The latter, as you see, has dark nights of 354 hours long, without a ray of light to penetrate the obscurity.  The other, on the contrary, when the sun, which has lighted him for a fortnight, sets under the horizon, sees on the opposite horizon a splendid orb rise.  It is the earth, thirteen times larger than that moon which we know—­the earth, which is developed to a diameter of two degrees, and which sheds a light thirteen times greater, which no atmosphere qualifies; the earth, which only disappears when the sun reappears.”