Michel Ardan examined everything, and declared himself satisfied with his installation.
"It is a prison," said he, "but a travelling prison; and, with the right of putting my nose to the window, I could well stand a lease of a hundred years. You smile, Barbicane. Have you any arrière-pensée? Do you say to yourself, 'This prison may be our tomb?' Tomb, perhaps; still I would not change it for Mahomet's, which floats in space but never advances an inch!"
Whilst Michel Ardan was speaking, Barbicane and Nicholl were making their last preparations.
Nicholl's chronometer marked twenty minutes past ten p.m. when the three travellers were finally enclosed in their projectile. This chronometer was set within the tenth of a second by that of Murchison the engineer. Barbicane consulted it.
"My friends," said he, "it is twenty minutes past ten. At forty-seven minutes past ten Murchison will launch the electric spark on the wire which communicates with the charge of the Columbiad. At that precise moment we shall leave our spheroid. Thus we have still twenty-seven minutes to remain on the earth."
"Twenty-six minutes thirteen seconds," replied the methodical Nicholl.
"Well!" exclaimed Michel Ardan, in a good-humoured tone, "much may be done in twenty-six minutes. The gravest questions of morals and politics may be discussed, and even solved."
THE GAS CAUGHT FIRE.
Twenty-six minutes well employed are worth more than twenty-six years in which nothing is done. Some seconds of a Pascal or a Newton are more precious than the whole existence of a crowd of raw simpletons—"