“That is just like these scientific men: they never do anything else. I would give twenty pistoles if we could fall upon the Cambridge Observatory and crush it, together with the whole lot of dabblers in figures which it contains.”
Suddenly a thought struck the captain, which he at once communicated to Barbicane.
“Ah!” said he; “it is seven o’clock in the morning; we have already been gone thirty-two hours; more than half our passage is over, and we are not falling that I am aware of.”
Barbicane did not answer, but after a rapid glance at the captain, took a pair of compasses wherewith to measure the angular distance of the terrestrial globe; then from the lower window he took an exact observation, and noticed that the projectile was apparently stationary. Then rising and wiping his forehead, on which large drops of perspiration were standing, he put some figures on paper. Nicholl understood that the president was deducting from the terrestrial diameter the projectile’s distance from the earth. He watched him anxiously.
“No,” exclaimed Barbicane, after some moments, “no, we are not falling! no, we are already more than 50,000 leagues from the earth. We have passed the point at which the projectile would have stopped if its speed had only been 12,000 yards at starting. We are still going up.”
“That is evident,” replied Nicholl; “and we must conclude that our initial speed, under the power of the 400,000 pounds of gun-cotton, must have exceeded the required 12,000 yards. Now I can understand how, after thirteen minutes only, we met the second satellite, which gravitates round the earth at more than 2,000 leagues’ distance.”
“And this explanation is the more probable,” added Barbicane, “Because, in throwing off the water enclosed between its partition-breaks, the projectile found itself lightened of a considerable weight.”
“Just so,” said Nicholl.
“Ah, my brave Nicholl, we are saved!”
“Very well then,” said Michel Ardan quietly; “as we are safe, let us have breakfast.”