A SEQUEL TO FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON PRELIMINARY CHAPTER THE FIRST PART OF THIS WORK, AND SERVING A PREFACE TO THE SECOND During the year 186-, the whole world was greatly excited by a scientific experiment unprecedented in the annals of science. The members of the Gun Club, a circle of artillerymen formed at Baltimore after the American war, conceived the idea of putting themselves in communication with the moon!—yes, with the moon—by sending to her a projectile. Their president, Barbicane, the promoter of the enterprise, having consulted the astronomers of the Cambridge Observatory upon the subject, ...Read More

CHAPTER II. THE FIRST HALF-HOUR What had happened? What effect had this frightful shock produced? Had the ingenuity of constructors of the projectile obtained any happy result? Had the shock been deadened, thanks to the springs, the four plugs, the water-cushions, and the partition-breaks? Had they been able to subdue the frightful pressure of the initiatory speed of more than 11,000 yards, which was enough to traverse Paris or New York in a second? This was evidently the question suggested to the thousand spectators of this moving scene. They forgot the aim of the journey, and thought only of ...Read More

CHAPTER III. THEIR PLACE OF SHELTER This curious but certainly correct explanation once given, the three friends returned to slumbers. Could they have found a calmer or more peaceful spot to sleep in? On the earth, houses, towns, cottages, and country feel every shock given to the exterior of the globe. On sea, the vessels rocked by the waves are still in motion; in the air, the balloon oscillates incessantly on the fluid strata of divers densities. This projectile alone, floating in perfect space, in the midst of perfect silence, offered perfect repose. Thus the sleep of our adventurous ...Read More

CHAPTER IV. A LITTLE ALGEBRA The night passed without incident. The word “night,” however, is scarcely applicable. The position the projectile with regard to the sun did not change. Astronomically, it was daylight on the lower part, and night on the upper; so when during this narrative these words are used, they represent the lapse of time between rising and setting of the sun upon the earth. The travelers’ sleep was rendered more peaceful by the projectile’s excessive speed, for it seemed absolutely motionless. Not a motion betrayed its onward course through space. The rate of progress, however rapid ...Read More

CHAPTER V. THE COLD OF SPACE This revelation came like a thunderbolt. Who could have expected such an error calculation? Barbicane would not believe it. Nicholl revised his figures: they were exact. As to the formula which had determined them, they could not suspect its truth; it was evident that an initiatory velocity of seventeen thousand yards in the first second was necessary to enable them to reach the neutral point. The three friends looked at each other silently. There was no thought of breakfast. Barbicane, with clenched teeth, knitted brows, and hands clasped convulsively, was watching through the ...Read More

CHAPTER VI. QUESTION AND ANSWER On the 4th of December, when the travelers awoke after fifty-four hours’ journey, the marked five o’clock of the terrestrial morning. In time it was just over five hours and forty minutes, half of that assigned to their sojourn in the projectile; but they had already accomplished nearly seven-tenths of the way. This peculiarity was due to their regularly decreasing speed. Now when they observed the earth through the lower window, it looked like nothing more than a dark spot, drowned in the solar rays. No more crescent, no more cloudy light! The next ...Read More

CHAPTER VII. A MOMENT OF INTOXICATION Thus a phenomenon, curious but explicable, was happening under these strange conditions. Every thrown from the projectile would follow the same course and never stop until it did. There was a subject for conversation which the whole evening could not exhaust. Besides, the excitement of the three travelers increased as they drew near the end of their journey. They expected unforseen incidents, and new phenomena; and nothing would have astonished them in the frame of mind they then were in. Their overexcited imagination went faster than the projectile, whose speed was evidently diminishing, ...Read More

CHAPTER VIII. AT SEVENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN LEAGUES What had happened? Whence the cause of this singular the consequences of which might have been very disastrous? A simple blunder of Michel’s, which, fortunately, Nicholl was able to correct in time. After a perfect swoon, which lasted some minutes, the captain, recovering first, soon collected his scattered senses. Although he had breakfasted only two hours before, he felt a gnawing hunger, as if he had not eaten anything for several days. Everything about him, stomach and brain, were overexcited to the highest degree. He got up and demanded ...Read More

CHAPTER IX. THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DEVIATION Barbicane had now no fear of the issue of the journey, at as far as the projectile’s impulsive force was concerned; its own speed would carry it beyond the neutral line; it would certainly not return to earth; it would certainly not remain motionless on the line of attraction. One single hypothesis remained to be realized, the arrival of the projectile at its destination by the action of the lunar attraction. It was in reality a fall of 8,296 leagues on an orb, it is true, where weight could only be reckoned ...Read More

CHAPTER X. THE OBSERVERS OF THE MOON Barbicane had evidently hit upon the only plausible reason of this deviation. slight it might have been, it had sufficed to modify the course of the projectile. It was a fatality. The bold attempt had miscarried by a fortuitous circumstance; and unless by some exceptional event, they could now never reach the moon’s disc. Would they pass near enough to be able to solve certain physical and geological questions until then insoluble? This was the question, and the only one, which occupied the minds of these bold travelers. As to the fate ...Read More

CHAPTER XI. FANCY AND REALITY “Have you ever seen the moon?” asked a professor, ironically, of one of his “No, sir!” replied the pupil, still more ironically, “but I must say I have heard it spoken of.” In one sense, the pupil’s witty answer might be given by a large majority of sublunary beings. How many people have heard speak of the moon who have never seen it—at least through a glass or a telescope! How many have never examined the map of their satellite! In looking at a selenographic map, one peculiarity strikes us. Contrary to the arrangement ...Read More

CHAPTER XII. OROGRAPHIC DETAILS The course taken by the projectile, as we have before remarked, was bearing it toward moon’s northern hemisphere. The travelers were far from the central point which they would have struck, had their course not been subject to an irremediable deviation. It was past midnight; and Barbicane then estimated the distance at seven hundred and fifty miles, which was a little greater than the length of the lunar radius, and which would diminish as it advanced nearer to the North Pole. The projectile was then not at the altitude of the equator; but across the ...Read More

CHAPTER XIII. LUNAR LANDSCAPES At half-past two in the morning, the projectile was over the thirteenth lunar parallel and the effective distance of five hundred miles, reduced by the glasses to five. It still seemed impossible, however, that it could ever touch any part of the disc. Its motive speed, comparatively so moderate, was inexplicable to President Barbicane. At that distance from the moon it must have been considerable, to enable it to bear up against her attraction. Here was a phenomenon the cause of which escaped them again. Besides, time failed them to investigate the cause. All lunar ...Read More

CHAPTER XIV. THE NIGHT OF THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FOUR HOURS AND A HALF At the moment when this phenomenon place so rapidly, the projectile was skirting the moon’s north pole at less than twenty-five miles distance. Some seconds had sufficed to plunge it into the absolute darkness of space. The transition was so sudden, without shade, without gradation of light, without attenuation of the luminous waves, that the orb seemed to have been extinguished by a powerful blow. “Melted, disappeared!” Michel Ardan exclaimed, aghast. Indeed, there was neither reflection nor shadow. Nothing more was to be seen of that ...Read More

CHAPTER XV. HYPERBOLA OR PARABOLA We may, perhaps, be astonished to find Barbicane and his companions so little occupied the future reserved for them in their metal prison which was bearing them through the infinity of space. Instead of asking where they were going, they passed their time making experiments, as if they had been quietly installed in their own study. We might answer that men so strong-minded were above such anxieties—that they did not trouble themselves about such trifles—and that they had something else to do than to occupy their minds with the future. The truth was that ...Read More

CHAPTER XVI. THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE The projectile had just escaped a terrible danger, and a very unforseen one. Who have thought of such an encounter with meteors? These erring bodies might create serious perils for the travelers. They were to them so many sandbanks upon that sea of ether which, less fortunate than sailors, they could not escape. But did these adventurers complain of space? No, not since nature had given them the splendid sight of a cosmical meteor bursting from expansion, since this inimitable firework, which no Ruggieri could imitate, had lit up for some seconds the invisible ...Read More

CHAPTER XVII. TYCHO At six in the evening the projectile passed the south pole at less than forty miles a distance equal to that already reached at the north pole. The elliptical curve was being rigidly carried out. At this moment the travelers once more entered the blessed rays of the sun. They saw once more those stars which move slowly from east to west. The radiant orb was saluted by a triple hurrah. With its light it also sent heat, which soon pierced the metal walls. The glass resumed its accustomed appearance. The layers of ice melted as ...Read More

CHAPTER XVIII. GRAVE QUESTIONS But the projectile had passed the enceinte of Tycho, and Barbicane and his two companions with scrupulous attention the brilliant rays which the celebrated mountain shed so curiously over the horizon. What was this radiant glory? What geological phenomenon had designed these ardent beams? This question occupied Barbicane’s mind. Under his eyes ran in all directions luminous furrows, raised at the edges and concave in the center, some twelve miles, others thirty miles broad. These brilliant trains extended in some places to within 600 miles of Tycho, and seemed to cover, particularly toward the east, ...Read More

CHAPTER XIX. A STRUGGLE AGAINST THE IMPOSSIBLE For a long time Barbicane and his companions looked silently and sadly that world which they had only seen from a distance, as Moses saw the land of Canaan, and which they were leaving without a possibility of ever returning to it. The projectile’s position with regard to the moon had altered, and the base was now turned to the earth. This change, which Barbicane verified, did not fail to surprise them. If the projectile was to gravitate round the satellite in an elliptical orbit, why was not its heaviest part turned ...Read More

CHAPTER XX. THE SOUNDINGS OF THE SUSQUEHANNA Well, lieutenant, and our soundings?” “I think, sir, that the operation is its completion,” replied Lieutenant Bronsfield. “But who would have thought of finding such a depth so near in shore, and only 200 miles from the American coast?” “Certainly, Bronsfield, there is a great depression,” said Captain Blomsberry. “In this spot there is a submarine valley worn by Humboldt’s current, which skirts the coast of America as far as the Straits of Magellan.” “These great depths,” continued the lieutenant, “are not favorable for laying telegraphic cables. A level bottom, like that ...Read More

CHAPTER XXI. J. T. MASTON RECALLED “It is ‘they’ come back again!” the young midshipman had said, and every had understood him. No one doubted but that the meteor was the projectile of the Gun Club. As to the travelers which it enclosed, opinions were divided regarding their fate. “They are dead!” said one. “They are alive!” said another; “the crater is deep, and the shock was deadened.” “But they must have wanted air,” continued a third speaker; “they must have died of suffocation.” “Burned!” replied a fourth; “the projectile was nothing but an incandescent mass as it crossed ...Read More

CHAPTER XXII. RECOVERED FROM THE SEA The spot where the projectile sank under the waves was exactly known; but machinery to grasp it and bring it to the surface of the ocean was still wanting. It must first be invented, then made. American engineers could not be troubled with such trifles. The grappling-irons once fixed, by their help they were sure to raise it in spite of its weight, which was lessened by the density of the liquid in which it was plunged. But fishing-up the projectile was not the only thing to be thought of. They must act ...Read More

CHAPTER XXIII. THE END We may remember the intense sympathy which had accompanied the travelers on their departure. If the beginning of the enterprise they had excited such emotion both in the old and new world, with what enthusiasm would they be received on their return! The millions of spectators which had beset the peninsula of Florida, would they not rush to meet these sublime adventurers? Those legions of strangers, hurrying from all parts of the globe toward the American shores, would they leave the Union without having seen Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Ardan? No! and the ardent passion ...Read More