"Bah!" said Michel, always confident. "If there are any inhabitants they breathe. If there are no longer any they will surely have left enough oxygen for three people, if only at the bottom of those ravines where it will have accumulated by reason of its weight! Well, we shall not climb the mountains! That is all."
And Michel, getting up, went to look at the lunar disc, which was shining with intolerable brilliancy.
"Faith!" said he, "it must be hot up there."
"Without reckoning," answered Nicholl, "that daylight lasts 360 hours."
"And by way of compensation night has the same duration," said Barbicane, "and as heat is restored by radiation, their temperature must be that of planetary space."
"A fine country truly!" said Nicholl.
"Never mind! I should like to be there already! It will be comical to have the earth for a moon, to see it rise on the horizon, to recognise the configuration of its continents, to say to oneself, 'There's America and there's Europe;' then to follow it till it is lost in the rays of the sun! By-the-bye, Barbicane, have the Selenites any eclipses?"
"Yes, eclipses of the sun," answered Barbicane, "when the centres of the three stars are on the same line with the earth in the middle. But they are merely annular eclipses, during which the earth, thrown like a screen across the solar disc, allows the greater part to be seen."
"Why is there no total eclipse?" asked Nicholl. "Is it because the cone of shade thrown by the earth does not extend beyond the moon?"
"Yes, if you do not take into account the refraction produced by the terrestrial atmosphere, not if you do take that refraction into account. Thus, let delta be the horizontal parallax and p the apparent semidiameter—"