“The devil!” cried Michel Ardan.  “How hideous we are!  Whatever is that wretched moon?”

“It is a bolis,” answered Barbicane.

“A bolis, on fire, in the void?”

“Yes.”

This globe of fire was indeed a bolis.  Barbicane was not mistaken.  But if these cosmic meteors, seen from the earth, present an inferior light to that of the moon, here, in the dark ether, they shone magnificently.  These wandering bodies carry in themselves the principle of their own incandescence.  The surrounding air is not necessary to the deflagration.  And, indeed, if certain of these bodies pass through our atmosphere at two or three leagues from the earth, others describe their trajectory at a distance the atmosphere cannot reach.  Some of these meteors are from one to two miles wide, and move at a speed of forty miles a second, following an inverse direction from the movement of the earth.

This shooting star suddenly appeared in the darkness at a distance of at least 100 leagues, and measured, according to Barbicane’s estimate, a diameter of 2,000 metres.  It moved with the speed of about thirty leagues a minute.  It cut across the route of the projectile, and would reach it in a few minutes.  As it approached it grew larger in an enormous proportion.

If possible, let the situation of the travellers be imagined!  It is impossible to describe it.  In spite of their courage, their sang-froid, their carelessness of danger, they were mute, motionless, with stiffened limbs, a prey to fearful terror.  Their projectile, the course of which they could not alter, was running straight on to this burning mass, more intense than the open mouth of a furnace.  They seemed to be rushing towards an abyss of fire.

Barbicane seized the hands of his two companions, and all three looked through their half-closed eyelids at the red-hot asteroid.  If they still thought at all, they must have given themselves up as lost!

Two minutes after the sudden appearance of the bolis, two centuries of agony, the projectile seemed about to strike against it, when the ball of fire burst like a bomb, but without making any noise in the void, where sound, which is only the agitation of the strata of air, could not be made.

Nicholl uttered a cry.  His companions and he rushed to the port-lights.

What a spectacle!  What pen could describe it, what palette would be rich enough in colours to reproduce its magnificence?

It was like the opening of a crater, or the spreading of an immense fire.  Thousands of luminous fragments lit up space with their fires.  Every size, colour, and shade were there.  There were yellow, red, green, grey, a crown of multi-coloured fireworks.  There only remained of the enormous and terrible globe pieces carried in all directions, each an asteroid in its turn, some shining like swords, some surrounded by white vapour, others leaving behind them a trail of cosmic dust.