There was not the suspicion of a shake in the hand of the impassible Captain Nicholl. He and his friend were no more excited than when, shut up in the projectile, they waited for the Columbiad to despatch them to the Moon.
Five seconds!
One!
“Fire!” said Barbicane.
And Nicholl’s finger pressed the button.
The noise was truly awful. The echoes rolled in thunders far beyond the realm of the Wamasai. There was a shrill shriek of the projectile which traversed the air under the impetus from milliards of milliards of litres of gas developed by the instantaneous deflagration of two thousand tons of meli-melonite. It seemed as though there had passed over the surface of the Earth one of those storms in which are gathered all the fury of Nature.
And the effect would have been no less terrible if all the guns of all the artilleries of the world had been joined to the thunders of the sky to give one long continuous roar together.
CHAPTER XIX.
J. T. MASTON REGRETS HE WAS NOT LYNCHED.
The capitals of the globe—and also the less important towns, and even the humbler villages—were, as a rule, waiting for the result in a paroxysm of terror. The newspapers took care that the exact moment corresponding to midnight at Kilimanjaro should be thoroughly well known.
The Sun travels a degree in four minutes, and the times given by the newspapers for some of the cities was as follows:—