So saying he offered some water to the wounded animal, who drank it greedily.
These attentions bestowed, the travellers attentively watched the earth and the moon. The earth only appeared like a pale disc terminated by a crescent smaller than that of the previous evening, but its volume compared with that of the moon, which was gradually forming a perfect circle, remained enormous.
"Parbleu!" then said Michel Ardan; "I am really sorry we did not start when the earth was at her full—that is to say, when our globe was in opposition to the sun!"
"Why?" asked Nicholl.
"Because we should have seen our continents and seas under a new aspect—the continents shining under the solar rays, the seas darker, like they figure upon certain maps of the world! I should like to have seen those poles of the earth upon which the eye of man has never yet rested!"
"I daresay," answered Barbicane, "but if the earth had been full the moon would have been new—that is to say, invisible amidst the irradiation of the sun. It is better for us to see the goal we want to reach than the place we started from."
"You are right, Barbicane," answered Captain Nicholl; "and besides, when we have reached the moon we shall have plenty of time during the long lunar nights to consider at leisure the globe that harbours men like us."
"Men like us!" cried Michel Ardan. "But now they are not more like us than the Selenites. We are inhabitants of a new world peopled by us alone—the projectile! I am a man like Barbicane, and Barbicane is a man like Nicholl. Beyond us and outside of us humanity ends, and we are the only population of this microcosm until the moment we become simple Selenites."
"In about eighty-eight hours," replied the captain.
"Which means?" asked Michel Ardan.