And that very evening, an hour or two only before the discharge was to take place, and while Barbicane and Nicholl were thus congratulating themselves, Alcide Pierdeux, shut up in his room at Baltimore, jumped to his feet and whooped like a Redskin.
“Whoooop! Mr. J. T. Maston! You brute, you shall swallow your problem, you shall! And why didn’t I see that before! In the name of a cosine! If I knew where you were I would ask you to supper, and we would have a glass of champagne together at the very moment your gun is to go off!”
And he capered round the room and whirled his arms about like a railway signal gone mad.
“Whoooop, you old plum-tree! You must have had a big bang when you calculated the cannon of Kilimanjaro! Hurrah for the cannon of Kilimanjaro; and how many more would you like? That is not only the sine quâ non, my boy, but the sine cannon! Whoooop!”
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE WAMASAI WAIT FOR THE WORD TO FIRE.
It was the evening of the 22nd of September—that memorable date to which public opinion assigned an influence as disastrous as that of the 1st of January, 1000.
Twelve hours after the sun passed the meridian of Kilimanjaro, that is to say, at midnight, the hand of Captain Nicholl would fire the terrible mine.
From Kilimanjaro to Baltimore is one hundred and fourteen degrees, or a difference in time of four hundred and fifty-six minutes. At the moment of discharge it would be twenty-four minutes past five in the afternoon in the great city of Maryland.
The weather was magnificent. The sun had just set on the plains of the Wamasai behind a perfectly clear horizon. Barbicane & Co. could not have wished for a better night, a calmer or a more star-lit one, in which to hurl their projectile into space. There was not a cloud to mingle with the artificial vapours developed by the deflagration of the meli-melonite.
Who knows? Perhaps Barbicane and Nicholl were regretting that they could not take their places inside the projectile? In the first second they could have travelled over seventeen hundred miles! After having penetrated the mysteries of the lunar world, they would have penetrated those of the solar world, and under conditions differently interesting from those of Hector Servadac on the comet Gallia!