At midnight the moon was full.
At that precise moment the travellers should have alighted upon it, it the mischievous meteor had not diverted their course. The orb was exactly in the position determined by the Cambridge Observatory. It was mathematically at its perigee, and at the zenith of the twenty-eighth parallel. An observer placed at the bottom of the enormous Columbiad, pointed perpendicularly to the horizon, would have framed the moon in the mouth of the gun. A straight line drawn through the axis of the piece would have passed through the centre of the orb of night. it is needless to say that during the night of the 5th-6th of December, the travellers took not an instant's rest. Could they close their eyes when so near this new world? No! All their feelings were concentrated in one single thought:- See! Representatives of the earth, of humanity, past and present, all centred in them! It is through their eyes that the human race look at these lunar regions, and penetrate the secrets of their satellite! A strange emotion filled their hearts as they went from one window to the other.
Their observations, reproduced by Barbicane, were rigidly determined. To take them, they had glasses; to correct them, maps.
As regards the optical instruments at their disposal, they had excellent marine glasses specially constructed for this journey. They possessed magnifying powers of 100. They would thus have brought the moon to within a distance (apparent) of less than 2,000 leagues from the earth. But then, at a distance which for three hours in the morning did not exceed sixty-five miles, and in a medium free from all atmospheric disturbances, these instruments could reduce the lunar surface to within less than 1,500 yards!
Among the equipment in the Columbiad were maps of the moon, drawn by astronomers from observations made through giant telescopes. These the travellers had before them as they circled the moon and studied its mountains, craters and plains. No clear sign of life did they observe among the lunar landscapes, but suddenly Michel Ardan exclaimed: "Look there! cultivated fields!" "Cultivated fields!" replied Nicholl, shrugging his shoulders. "Ploughed, at all events," retorted Michel Ardan; "but what labourers those Selenites must be, and what giant oxen they must harness to their plough to cut such furrows!"
"They are not furrows," said Barbicane; "they are rifts."
The Frenchman was always fanciful, whereas Barbicane and Nicholl were never anything but strictly, seriously scientific. Barbicane insisted that the lunar rifts were natural, although anyone more imaginative might have believed them to be fortifications thrown up by the inhabitants of the moon. He would not even accept Michel Ardan's suggestion that the reason for the disappearance of the rifts from earthly view at certain seasons was that the dark lines were rows of trees, which lost their leaves with the coming of winter and consequently became invisible.
"There are no seasons on the moon's surface," was Barbicane's conclusive argument.
Floating in the void, with no atmosphere to obscure their view, the three space-travellers were beholding the surface of the moon as not even the most powerful telescope on earth had been able to present it to the human eye. They were four hundred miles distant from it, but their glasses brought its physical features to within four miles. Eagerly they searched the lunar landscape for signs of man's handiwork, but "not a work betrayed the hand of man; not a ruin marked his course; not a group of animals was to be seen indicating life, even in an inferior degree. In no part was there life, in no part was there an appearance of vegetation."
"Ah, indeed!" said Michel Ardan, a little out of countenance; "then you see no one?"
"No," answered Nicholl; "up to this time not a man, not an animal, not a tree! After all, whether the atmosphere has taken refuge at the bottom of cavities, in the midst of the circles, or even on the opposite face of the moon, we cannot decide."
"Besides," added Barbicane, "even to the most piercing eye a man cannot be distinguished farther than three mile and a half off; so that, if there are any Selenites, they can see our projectile, but we cannot see them."
The absence of atmosphere on the moon brought strange and novel experiences to the men from earth. There was no gradual fading of daylight into dusk and dusk into night. The change from light to darkness came with the suddenness of and electric light switched off. Nor did the heat give place to cold in stages. The temperature fell "in an instant from boiling point to the cold of space."
Another consequence of this want of air is that absolute darkness reigns where the sun's rays do no penetrate. That which on earth is called diffusion of light, that luminous matter which the air holds in suspension, which creates the twilight and the daybreak. . . does not exist on the moon. Hence the harshness of contrasts, which only admit of two colours, black and white. If a Selenite were to shade his eyes from the sun's rays, the sky would seem absolutely black, and the stars would shine as on the darkest night. Judge of the impression produced on Barbicane and his two friends by this strange scene!
At five o'clock in the morning, the explorers passed only twenty-five miles from the top of the mountains of the moon.
It seemed as if the moon might be touched by the hand! It seemed impossible that before long the projectile would strike her, if only at the north pole, the brilliant arch of which was so distinctly visible on the black sky.
Michel Ardan wanted to open one of the scuttles and throw himself on to the moon's surface! A very useless attempt; for if the projectile could not attain any point whatever of the satellite, Michel, carried along by it's motion, could not attain it either.
