To feel oneself soaring like a balloon must certainly be a curious sensation.
But these men expected all sorts of strange experiences, and so this did not frighten them, and the nearer they came to the moon, the more effect her gravity had upon them, and as the projectile gradually turned its heaviest end towards the moon its inmates gradually recovered their weight, and sat and stood like common people.
After journeying still further they had another very strange experience.
As they gradually neared the moon they found that they were also revolving around it. This was very unfortunate. If this motion continued, the result of their journey would be that their projectile would become a lunar satellite—a moon’s moon. They would go around and around forever, and never reach the moon or be able to get back to the earth.
After a while they got around to the shadow side of the moon, so that she was between them and the earth.
Then they were in total darkness excepting when they lighted their gas-burner, and they could not keep the gas burning all the time, as their supply was getting rather low.
But the darkness was not their chief trouble. It began to be very cold. And then it got colder and still colder, until they thought they should freeze into solid lumps. Their breath congealed so that it fell in the form of snow about them, and the poor dog, shivering under a cloak, lay upon the floor as cold as if he had been dropped into a deep hole in an ice-berg.
They thought it must be still colder outside, and so they lowered a thermometer through a small trap-door in the floor, and when they drew it in the mercury stood at 218 degrees below zero!
That was a very fine thermometer, and it is a Frenchman who tells this story.
