It must be acknowledged that it was a magnificent piece of metal, a metallurgic production that did the greatest honour to the industrial genius of the Americans.  It was the first time that aluminium had been obtained in so large a mass, which result might be justly regarded as prodigious.  This precious projectile sparkled in the rays of the sun.  Seeing it in its imposing shape with its conical top, it might easily have been taken for one of those extinguisher-shaped towers that architects of the Middle Ages put at the angles of their castles.  It only wanted loopholes and a weathercock.

“I expect,” exclaimed Michel Ardan, “to see a man armed cap-a-pie come out of it.  We shall be like feudal lords in there; with a little artillery we could hold our own against a whole army of Selenites—­that is, if there are any in the moon!”

“Then the vehicle pleases you?” asked Barbicane.

“Yes, yes! certainly,” answered Michel Ardan, who was examining it as an artist.  “I only regret that its form is not a little more slender, its cone more graceful; it ought to be terminated by a metal group, some Gothic ornament, a salamander escaping from it with outspread wings and open beak.”

“What would be the use?” said Barbicane, whose positive mind was little sensitive to the beauties of art.

“Ah, friend Barbicane, I am afraid you will never understand the use, or you would not ask!”

“Well, tell me, at all events, my brave companion.”

“Well, my friend, I think we ought always to put a little art in all we do.  Do you know an Indian play called The Child’s Chariot?”

“Not even by name,” answered Barbicane.

“I am not surprised at that,” continued Michel Ardan.  “Learn, then, that in that play there is a robber who, when in the act of piercing the wall of a house, stops to consider whether he shall make his hole in the shape of a lyre, a flower, or a bird.  Well, tell me, friend Barbicane, if at that epoch you had been his judge would you have condemned that robber?”

“Without hesitation,” answered the president of the Gun Club, “and as a burglar too.”

“Well, I should have acquitted him, friend Barbicane.  That is why you could never understand me.”

“I will not even try, my valiant artist.”

“But, at least,” continued Michel Ardan, “as the exterior of our projectile compartment leaves much to be desired, I shall be allowed to furnish the inside as I choose, and with all luxury suitable to ambassadors from the earth.”

“About that, my brave Michel,” answered Barbicane, “you can do entirely as you please.”

But before passing to the agreeable the president of the Gun Club had thought of the useful, and the means he had invented for lessening the effects of the shock were applied with perfect intelligence.

Barbicane had said to himself, not unreasonably, that no spring would be sufficiently powerful to deaden the shock, and during his famous promenade in Skersnaw Wood he had ended by solving this great difficulty in an ingenious fashion.  He depended upon water to render him this signal service.  This is how:—­