Jules Verne - All Around the Moon

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M'Nicholl's discovery, a luminous gleam flickering on the distant verge
of the black disc, at once engrossed the complete attention of our
travellers and set them to divining its course. It could not possibly be
confounded with a star. Its glare was reddish, like that of a distant
furnace on a dark night; it kept steadily increasing in size and
brightness, thus showing beyond a doubt how the Projectile was
moving--in the direction of the luminous point, and _not_ vertically
falling towards the Moon's surface.

"It's a volcano!" cried the Captain, in great excitement; "a volcano in
full blast! An outlet of the Moon's internal fires! Therefore she can't
be a burnt out cinder!"

"It certainly looks like a volcano," replied Barbican, carefully
investigating this new and puzzling phenomenon with his night-glass. "If
it is not one, in fact, what can it be?"

"To maintain combustion," commenced Ardan syllogistically and
sententiously, "air is necessary. An undoubted case of combustion lies
before us. Therefore, this part of the Moon _must_ have an atmosphere!"

"Perhaps so," observed Barbican, "but not necessarily so. The volcano,
by decomposing certain substances, gunpowder for instance, may be able
to furnish its own oxygen, and thus explode in a vacuum. That blaze, in
fact, seems to me to possess the intensity and the blinding glare of
objects burning in pure oxygen. Let us therefore be not over hasty in
jumping at the conclusion of the existence of a lunar atmosphere."

This fire mountain was situated, according to the most plausible
conjecture, somewhere in the neighborhood of the 45th degree, south
latitude, of the Moon's invisible side. For a little while the
travellers indulged the fond hope that they were directly approaching
it, but, to their great disappointment, the path described by the
Projectile lay in a different direction. Its nature therefore they had
no opportunity of ascertaining. It began to disappear behind the dark
horizon within less than half an hour after the time that M'Nicholl had
signalled it. Still, the fact of the uncontested existence of such a
phenomenon was a grand one, and of considerable importance in
selenographic investigations. It proved that heat had not altogether
disappeared from the lunar world; and the existence of heat once
settled, who can say positively that the vegetable kingdom and even the
animal kingdom have not likewise resisted so far every influence tending
to destroy them? If terrestrial astronomers could only be convinced, by
undoubted evidence, of the existence of this active volcano on the
Moon's surface, they would certainly admit of very considerable
modifications in the present doubts regarding her inhabitability.

Thoughts of this kind continued to occupy the minds of our travellers
even for some time after the little spark of light had been extinguished
in the black gloom. But they said very little; even Ardan was silent,
and continued to look out of the window. Barbican surrendered himself up
to a reverie regarding the mysterious destinies of the lunar world. Was
its present condition a foreshadowing of what our Earth is to become?
M'Nicholl, too, was lost in speculation. Was the Moon older or younger
than the Earth in the order of Creation? Had she ever been a beautiful
world of life, and color, and magnificent variety? If so, had her
inhabitants--

Great Mercy, what a cry from Ardan! It sounded human, so seldom do we
hear a shriek so expressive at once of surprise and horror and even
terror! It brought back his startled companions to their senses in a
second. Nor did they ask him for the cause of his alarm. It was only too
clear. Right in their very path, a blazing ball of fire had suddenly
risen up before their eyes, the pitchy darkness all round it rendering
its glare still more blinding. Its phosphoric coruscation filled the
Projectile with white streams of lurid light, tinging the contents with
a pallor indescribably ghastly. The travellers' faces in particular,
gleamed with that peculiar livid and cadaverous tinge, blue and yellow,
which magicians so readily produce by burning table salt in alcohol.

"_Sacre!_" cried Ardan who always spoke his own language when much
excited. "What a pair of beauties you are! Say, Barbican! What
thundering thing is coming at us now?"

"Another bolide," answered Barbican, his eye as calm as ever, though a
faint tremor was quite perceptible in his voice.

"A bolide? Burning _in vacuo_? You are joking!"

"I was never more in earnest," was the President's quiet reply, as he
looked through his closed fingers.

He knew exactly what he was saying. The dazzling glitter did not deceive
_him_. Such a meteor seen from the Earth could not appear much brighter
than the Full Moon, but here in the midst of the black ether and
unsoftened by the veil of the atmosphere, it was absolutely blinding.
These wandering bodies carry in themselves the principle of their
incandescence. Oxygen is by no means necessary for their combustion.
Some of them indeed often take fire as they rush through the layers of
our atmosphere, and generally burn out before they strike the Earth. But
others, on the contrary, and the greater number too, follow a track
through space far more distant from the Earth than the fifty miles
supposed to limit our atmosphere. In October, 1844, one of these meteors
had appeared in the sky at an altitude calculated to be at least 320
miles; and in August, 1841, another had vanished when it had reached the
height of 450 miles. A few even of those seen from the Earth must have
been several miles in diameter. The velocity with which some of them
have been calculated to move, from east to west, in a direction contrary
to that of the Earth, is astounding enough to exceed belief--about fifty
miles in a second. Our Earth does not move quite 20 miles in a second,
though it goes a thousand times quicker than the fastest locomotive.

[Illustration: THEY COULD UTTER NO WORD.]

Barbican calculated like lightning that the present object of their
alarm was only about 250 miles distant from them, and could not be
less than a mile and a quarter in diameter. It was coming on at the rate
of more than a mile a second or about 75 miles a minute. It lay right in
the path of the Projectile, and in a very few seconds indeed a terrible
collision was inevitable. The enormous rate at which it grew in size,
showed the terrible velocity at which it was approaching.

You can hardly imagine the situation of our poor travellers at the sight
of this frightful apparition. I shall certainly not attempt to describe
it. In spite of their singular courage, wonderful coolness,
extraordinary fortitude, they were now breathless, motionless, almost
helpless; their muscles were tightened to their utmost tension; their
eyes stared out of their sockets; their faces were petrified with
horror. No wonder. Their Projectile, whose course they were powerless as
children to guide, was making straight for this fiery mass, whose glare
in a few seconds had become more blinding than the open vent of a
reverberating furnace. Their own Projectile was carrying them headlong
into a bottomless abyss of fire!

Still, even in this moment of horror, their presence of mind, or at
least their consciousness, never abandoned them. Barbican had grasped
each of his friends by the hand, and all three tried as well as they
could to watch through half-closed eyelids the white-hot asteroid's
rapid approach. They could utter no word, they could breathe no prayer.
They gave themselves up for lost--in the agony of terror that partially
interrupted the ordinary functions of their brains, this was absolutely
all they could do! Hardly three minutes had elapsed since Ardan had
caught the first glimpse of it--three ages of agony! Now it was on them!
In a second--in less than a second, the terrible fireball had burst like
a shell! Thousands of glittering fragments were flying around them in
all directions--but with no more noise than is made by so many light
flakes of thistle-down floating about some warm afternoon in summer. The
blinding, blasting steely white glare of the explosion almost bereft the
travellers of the use of their eyesight forever, but no more report
reached their ears than if it had taken place at the bottom of the Gulf
of Mexico. In an atmosphere like ours, such a crash would have burst the
ear-membranes of ten thousand elephants!

In the middle of the commotion another loud cry was suddenly heard. It
was the Captain who called this time. His companions rushed to his
window and all looked out together in the same direction.

What a sight met their eyes! What pen can describe it? What pencil can
reproduce the magnificence of its coloring? It was a Vesuvius at his
best and wildest, at the moment just after the old cone has fallen in.
Millions of luminous fragments streaked the sky with their blazing
fires. All sizes and shapes of light, all colors and shades of colors,
were inextricably mingled together. Irradiations in gold, scintillations
in crimson, splendors in emerald, lucidities in ultramarine--a dazzling
girandola of every tint and of every hue. Of the enormous fireball, an
instant ago such an object of dread, nothing now remained but these
glittering pieces, shooting about in all directions, each one an
asteroid in its turn. Some flew out straight and gleaming like a steel
sword; others rushed here and there irregularly like chips struck off a
red-hot rock; and others left long trails of glittering cosmical dust
behind them like the nebulous tail of Donati's comet.

These incandescent blocks crossed each other, struck each other, crushed
each other into still smaller fragments, one of which, grazing the
Projectile, jarred it so violently that the very window at which the
travellers were standing, was cracked by the shock. Our friends felt, in
fact, as if they were the objective point at which endless volleys of
blazing shells were aimed, any of them powerful enough, if it only hit
them fair, to make as short work of the Projectile as you could of an
egg-shell. They had many hairbreadth escapes, but fortunately the
cracking of the glass proved to be the only serious damage of which they
could complain.

This extraordinary illumination lasted altogether only a few seconds;
every one of its details was of a most singular and exciting nature--but
one of its greatest wonders was yet to come. The ether, saturated with
luminous matter, developed an intensity of blazing brightness unequalled
by the lime light, the magnesium light, the electric light, or any other
dazzling source of illumination with which we are acquainted on earth.
It flashed out of these asteroids in all directions, and downwards, of
course, as well as elsewhere. At one particular instant, it was so very
vivid that Ardan, who happened to be looking downwards, cried out, as if
in transport:

"Oh!! The Moon! Visible at last!"

And the three companions, thrilling with indescribable emotion, shot a
hasty glance through the openings of the coruscating field beneath them.
Did they really catch a glimpse of the mysterious invisible disc that
the eye of man had never before lit upon? For a second or so they gazed
with enraptured fascination at all they could see. What did they see,
what could they see at a distance so uncertain that Barbican has never
been able even to guess at it? Not much. Ardan was reminded of the night
he had stood on the battlements of Dover Castle, a few years before,
when the fitful flashes of a thunder storm gave him occasional and very
uncertain glimpses of the French coast at the opposite side of the
strait. Misty strips long and narrow, extending over one portion of the
disc--probably cloud-scuds sustained by a highly rarefied
atmosphere--permitted only a very dreamy idea of lofty mountains
stretching beneath them in shapeless proportions, of smaller reliefs,
circuses, yawning craters, and the other capricious, sponge-like
formations so common on the visible side. Elsewhere the watchers became
aware for an instant of immense spaces, certainly not arid plains, but
seas, real oceans, vast and calm, reflecting from their placid depths
the dazzling fireworks of the weird and wildly flashing meteors.
Farther on, but very darkly as if behind a screen, shadowy continents
revealed themselves, their surfaces flecked with black cloudy masses,
probably great forests, with here and there a--

Nothing more! In less than a second the illumination had come to an end,
involving everything in the Moon's direction once more in pitchy
darkness.

But had the impression made on the travellers' eyes been a mere vision
or the result of a reality? an optical delusion or the shadow of a solid
fact? Could an observation so rapid, so fleeting, so superficial, be
really regarded as a genuine scientific affirmation? Could such a feeble
glimmer of the invisible disc justify them in pronouncing a decided
opinion on the inhabitability of the Moon? To such questions as these,
rising spontaneously and simultaneously in the minds of our travellers,
they could not reply at the moment; they could not reply to them long
afterwards; even to this day they can give them no satisfactory answer.
All they could do at the moment, they did. To every sight and sound they
kept their eyes and ears open, and, by observing the most perfect
silence, they sought to render their impressions too vivid to admit of
deception.

There was now, however, nothing to be heard, and very little more to be
seen. The few coruscations that flashed over the sky, gradually became
fewer and dimmer; the asteroids sought paths further and further apart,
and finally disappeared altogether. The ether resumed its original
blackness. The stars, eclipsed for a moment, blazed out again on the
firmament, and the invisible disc, that had flashed into view for an
instant, once more relapsed forever into the impenetrable depths of
night.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE.

Exceedingly narrow and exceedingly fortunate had been the escape of the
Projectile. And from a danger too the most unlikely and the most
unexpected. Who would have ever dreamed of even the possibility of such
an encounter? And was all danger over? The sight of one of these erratic
bolides certainly justified the gravest apprehensions of our travellers
regarding the existence of others. Worse than the sunken reefs of the
Southern Seas or the snags of the Mississippi, how could the Projectile
be expected to avoid them? Drifting along blindly through the boundless
ethereal ocean, _her_ inmates, even if they saw the danger, were totally
powerless to turn her aside. Like a ship without a rudder, like a
runaway horse, like a collapsed balloon, like an iceberg in an Atlantic
storm, like a boat in the Niagara rapids, she moved on sullenly,
recklessly, mechanically, mayhap into the very jaws of the most
frightful danger, the bright intelligences within no more able to modify
her motions even by a finger's breadth than they were able to affect
Mercury's movements around the Sun.

But did our friends complain of the new perils now looming up before
them? They never thought of such a thing. On the contrary, they only
considered themselves (after the lapse of a few minutes to calm their
nerves) extremely lucky in having witnessed this fresh glory of
exuberant nature, this transcendent display of fireworks which not only
cast into absolute insignificance anything of the kind they had ever
seen on Earth, but had actually enabled them by its dazzling
illumination to gaze for a second or two at the Moon's mysterious
invisible disc. This glorious momentary glance, worth a whole lifetime
of ordinary existence, had revealed to mortal ken her continents, her
oceans, her forests. But did it also convince them of the existence of
an atmosphere on her surface whose vivifying molecules would render
_life_ possible? This question they had again to leave unanswered--it
will hardly ever be answered in a way quite satisfactory to human
curiosity. Still, infinite was their satisfaction at having hovered even
for an instant on the very verge of such a great problem's solution.

It was now half-past three in the afternoon. The Projectile still
pursued its curving but otherwise unknown path over the Moon's invisible
face. Had this path been disturbed by that dangerous meteor? There was
every reason to fear so--though, disturbance or no disturbance, the
curve it described should still be one strictly in accordance with the
laws of Mechanical Philosophy. Whether it was a parabola or a hyperbola,
however, or whether it was disturbed or not, made very little difference
as, in any case, the Projectile was bound to quit pretty soon the cone
of the shadow, at a point directly opposite to where it had entered it.
This cone could not possibly be of very great extent, considering the
very slight ratio borne by the Moon's diameter when compared with the
Sun's. Still, to all appearances, the Projectile seemed to be quite as
deeply immersed in the shadow as ever, and there was apparently not the
slightest sign of such a state of things coming soon to an end. At what
rate was the Projectile now moving? Hard to say, but certainly not
slowly, certainly rapidly enough to be out of the shadow by this time,
if describing a curve rigidly parabolic. Was the curve therefore _not_
parabolic? Another puzzling problem and sadly bewildering to poor
Barbican, who had now almost lost his reason by attempting to clear up
questions that were proving altogether too profound for his overworked
brains.

Not that he ever thought of taking rest. Not that his companions thought
of taking rest. Far from it. With senses as high-strung as ever, they
still watched carefully for every new fact, every unexpected incident
that might throw some light on the sidereal investigations. Even their
dinner, or what was called so, consisted of only a few bits of bread and
meat, distributed by Ardan at five o'clock, and swallowed mechanically.
They did not even turn on the gas full head to see what they were
eating; each man stood solidly at his window, the glass of which they
had enough to do in keeping free from the rapidly condensing moisture.

At about half-past five, however, M'Nicholl, who had been gazing for
some time with his telescope in a particular direction, called the
attention of his companions to some bright specks of light barely
discernible in that part of the horizon towards which the Projectile was
evidently moving. His words were hardly uttered when his companions
announced the same discovery. They could soon all see the glittering
specks not only becoming more and more numerous, but also gradually
assuming the shape of an extremely slender, but extremely brilliant
crescent. Rapidly more brilliant and more decided in shape the profile
gradually grew, till it soon resembled the first faint sketch of the New
Moon that we catch of evenings in the western sky, or rather the first
glimpse we get of her limb as it slowly moves out of eclipse. But it was
inconceivably brighter than either, and was furthermore strangely
relieved by the pitchy blackness both of sky and Moon. In fact, it soon
became so brilliant as to dispel in a moment all doubt as to its
particular nature. No meteor could present such a perfect shape; no
volcano, such dazzling splendor.

"The Sun!" cried Barbican.

"The Sun?" asked M'Nicholl and Ardan in some astonishment.

"Yes, dear friends; it is the Sun himself that you now see; these
summits that you behold him gilding are the mountains that lie on the
Moon's southern rim. We are rapidly nearing her south pole."

"After doubling her north pole!" cried Ardan; "why, we must be
circumnavigating her!"

"Exactly; sailing all around her."

"Hurrah! Then we're all right at last! There's nothing more to fear from
your hyperbolas or parabolas or any other of your open curves!"

"Nothing more, certainly, from an open curve, but every thing from a
closed one."

"A closed curve! What is it called? And what is the trouble?"

"An eclipse it is called; and the trouble is that, instead of flying off
into the boundless regions of space, our Projectile will probably
describe an elliptical orbit around the Moon--"

--"What!" cried M'Nicholl, in amazement, "and be her satellite for
ever!"

"All right and proper," said Ardan; "why shouldn't she have one of her
own?"

"Only, my dear friend," said Barbican to Ardan, "this change of curve
involves no change in the doom of the Projectile. We are as infallibly
lost by an ellipse as by a parabola."

"Well, there was one thing I never could reconcile myself to in the
whole arrangement," replied Ardan cheerfully; "and that was destruction
by an open curve. Safe from that, I could say, 'Fate, do your worst!'
Besides, I don't believe in the infallibility of your ellipsic. It may
prove just as unreliable as the hyperbola. And it is no harm to hope
that it may!"

From present appearances there was very little to justify Ardan's hope.
Barbican's theory of the elliptic orbit was unfortunately too well
grounded to allow a single reasonable doubt to be expressed regarding
the Projectile's fate. It was to gravitate for ever around the Moon--a
sub-satellite. It was a new born individual in the astral universe, a
microcosm, a little world in itself, containing, however, only three
inhabitants and even these destined to perish pretty soon for want of
air. Our travellers, therefore, had no particular reason for rejoicing
over the new destiny reserved for the Projectile in obedience to the
inexorable laws of the centripetal and centrifugal forces. They were
soon, it is true, to have the opportunity of beholding once more the
illuminated face of the Moon. They might even live long enough to catch
a last glimpse of the distant Earth bathed in the glory of the solar
rays. They might even have strength enough left to be able to chant one
solemn final eternal adieu to their dear old Mother World, upon whose
features their mortal eyes should never again rest in love and longing!
Then, what was their Projectile to become? An inert, lifeless, extinct
mass, not a particle better than the most defunct asteroid that wanders
blindly through the fields of ether. A gloomy fate to look forward to.
Yet, instead of grieving over the inevitable, our bold travellers
actually felt thrilled with delight at the prospect of even a momentary
deliverance from those gloomy depths of darkness and of once more
finding themselves, even if only for a few hours, in the cheerful
precincts illuminated by the genial light of the blessed Sun!

The ring of light, in the meantime, becoming brighter and brighter,
Barbican was not long in discovering and pointing out to his companions
the different mountains that lay around the Moon's south pole.

"There is _Leibnitz_ on your right," said he, "and on your left you can
easily see the peaks of _Doerfel_. Belonging rather to the Moon's dark
side than to her Earth side, they are visible to terrestrial astronomers
only when she is in her highest northern latitudes. Those faint peaks
beyond them that you can catch with such difficulty must be those of
_Newton_ and _Curtius_."

"How in the world can you tell?" asked Ardan.

"They are the highest mountains in the circumpolar regions," replied
Barbican. "They have been measured with the greatest care; _Newton_ is
23,000 feet high."

"More or less!" laughed Ardan. "What Delphic oracle says so?"

"Dear friend," replied Barbican quietly, "the visible mountains of the
Moon have been measured so carefully and so accurately that I should
hardly hesitate in affirming their altitude to be as well known as that
of Mont Blanc, or, at least, as those of the chief peaks in the
Himalayahs or the Rocky Mountain Range."

"I should like to know how people set about it," observed Ardan
incredulously.

"There are several well known methods of approaching this problem,"
replied Barbican; "and as these methods, though founded on different
principles, bring us constantly to the same result, we may pretty
safely conclude that our calculations are right. We have no time, just
now to draw diagrams, but, if I express myself clearly, you will no
doubt easily catch the general principle."

"Go ahead!" answered Ardan. "Anything but Algebra."

"We want no Algebra now," said Barbican, "It can't enable us to find
principles, though it certainly enables us to apply them. Well. The Sun
at a certain altitude shines on one side of a mountain and flings a
shadow on the other. The length of this shadow is easily found by means
of a telescope, whose object glass is provided with a micrometer. This
consists simply of two parallel spider threads, one of which is
stationary and the other movable. The Moon's real diameter being known
and occupying a certain space on the object glass, the exact space
occupied by the shadow can be easily ascertained by means of the movable
thread. This space, compared with the Moon's space, will give us the
length of the shadow. Now, as under the same circumstances a certain
height can cast only a certain shadow, of course a knowledge of the one
must give you that of the other, and _vice versa_. This method, stated
roughly, was that followed by Galileo, and, in our own day, by Beer and
Maedler, with extraordinary success."

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