From the Earth to the Moon (24 page)

For a month the greater part of that crowd had been camping around the enclosure and laying the foundations of a town that has since come to be known as Ardanville. The plain was bristling with huts, shanties, and cabins, and these ephemeral dwellings housed a population large enough to arouse the envy of the biggest cities in Europe.

Every nation on earth was represented there; all the world’s languages were spoken at once, as though the days of the Tower of Babel had returned. The various classes of American society were mingled in absolute equality. Bankers, farmers, sailors, buyers, brokers, cotton planters, merchants, boatmen, and magistrates rubbed elbows with primitive unceremoniousness. Louisiana Creoles fraternized with Indiana farmers; gentlemen from Kentucky or Tennessee and elegant, haughty Virginians conversed with half-savage trappers from the Great Lakes and cattle merchants from Cincinnati. Wearing broad-brimmed white beaver hats or classic Panamas, trousers made of blue cotton cloth from the factories at Poelousas, elegant unbleached linen jackets and brightly colored boots, they exhibited flamboyant batiste shirt fronts, and on their shirts, cuffs, ties, fingers, and ears glittered a wide assortment of rings, pins, diamonds, chains, earrings, and trinkets whose expensiveness was equaled only by their bad taste. Women, children, and servants, dressed with equal opulence, accompanied, followed, preceded, and surrounded those husbands, fathers, and masters who were like tribal chieftains in the midst of their abundant families.

At mealtimes it was an impressive sight when all those people began devouring, with an appetite that threatened the food supply of Florida, various dishes that were peculiar to the southern states and would have been rather repugnant to a European stomach, such as fricasseed
frogs, braised monkey, fish chowder, roast opossum, and broiled raccoon.

And what a variety of liquors and other drinks came to the aid of that indigestible food! What exciting cries and inviting shouts rang out in barrooms and taverns adorned with glasses, mugs, flasks, decanters, incredibly shaped bottles, mortars for pounding sugar, and bundles of straws!

“Here’s a mint julep!” cried a bartender.

“One Burgundy sangaree!”

“A gin sling!”

“A brandy smash!”

“Who wants to taste a real mint julep, made in the latest style?” a bartender called out enticingly, tossing the ingredients—sugar, lemon, mint, crushed ice, water, brandy, and fresh pineapple—from one glass to another with the deftness of a sleight-of-hand artist.

These invitations to throats made thirsty by hot spices were usually repeated loudly and simultaneously, producing a deafening uproar. But on this first day of December such shouts were rare. The bartenders could have yelled themselves hoarse without attracting any customers. No one was thinking of eating or drinking. At four o’clock there were many people in the crowd who had not yet eaten lunch. There was an even more significant symptom: the Americans’ violent passion for games and gambling had been overcome by their excited anticipation. The sight of tenpins lying on their sides, dice sleeping in their cups, motionless roulette wheels, abandoned cribbage boards, and cards used for playing whist, blackjack, monte, and faro enclosed in their unopened boxes, showed clearly that the great event of the day overshadowed everything else and left no room for diversions.

Until evening an almost silent agitation, of the kind
that precedes great catastrophes, ran through that anxious crowd. Each mind was in the grip of an indescribable uneasiness, a painful torpor, an indefinable feeling that clutched the heart. Everyone wished it were already over.

At about seven o’clock, however, this heavy silence was suddenly dissipated. The moon rose above the horizon. Several million hurrahs greeted its appearance. It had come on time. Cheers rose up to the heavens and applause broke out on all sides while the blonde Phoebe shone placidly in a beautiful sky and caressed that feverish crowd with her most affectionate beams.

Just then the three dauntless explorers appeared. The cheering redoubled. Unanimously, instantaneously, the American national anthem burst from every heaving chest, and
Yankee Doodle,
sung in a chorus of five million, rose like a tempest of sound to the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere.

Then, after that irresistible surge of feeling, the anthem died away, the last voices gradually fell silent, the noises were dissipated and a quiet murmur floated above the deeply moved crowd. Meanwhile the Frenchman and the two Americans had entered the enclosure around which the crowd was gathered. They were accompanied by members of the Gun Club and delegations from European observatories. Barbicane, cool and calm, unhurriedly gave his final orders. Captain Nicholl, with his lips pressed tightly together and his hands behind his back, walked with firm, measured steps. Michel Ardan, still nonchalant, dressed like a typical traveler, with leather gaiters on his feet, a satchel slung over his shoulder, brown velvet clothes hanging loosely from his body, and a cigar held jauntily between his teeth, was distributing warm handshakes with princely prodigality as he walked along. His gaiety and high spirits were irrepressible;
he laughed, joked, and played childish tricks on the dignified J. T. Maston; in short, he was French and, even worse, Parisian to the end.

It was ten o’clock, time for the explorers to take their places in the projectile. It would take a certain amount of time to lower them to it, bolt the steel plate over the opening when they were inside, and remove the cranes and scaffolding from the mouth of the cannon.

Murchison, who was going to ignite the guncotton by means of an electric spark, had synchronized his chronometer to within a tenth of a second of Barbicane’s. The explorers in the projectile would thus be able to watch the impassive moving hand that would mark the instant of their departure.

The time for farewells had come. It was a touching scene. Despite his feverish gaiety, Michel Ardan felt moved. J. T. Maston had found under his dry lids an old tear which he had no doubt reserved for this occasion. He shed it on the forehead of his brave and beloved friend Barbicane.

“Why don’t I come with you?” he said. “There’s still time!”

“Impossible, my friend,” replied Barbicane.

A few moments later, the three explorers had climbed into the projectile and bolted it shut behind them. The mouth of the cannon, entirely cleared, was open to the sky.

Captain Nicholl, Barbicane, and Michel Ardan were definitively enclosed in their metal vehicle.

Who could depict the universal excitement that now reached its peak?

The moon was moving across a clear sky, extinguishing the glittering stars on its path. It was now crossing the constellation Gemini and was nearly halfway between the
horizon and the zenith. It was easy for everyone to understand that the projectile was going to be aimed ahead of its target, as a hunter aims in front of a running hare in order to hit it.

An awesome silence hung over the whole scene. There was not a breath of wind on the earth! Not a breath of air in any chest! Hearts no longer dared to beat. All fearful eyes were fixed on the gaping mouth of the cannon.

Murchison was watching the hand of his chronometer. Only forty more seconds, and each one of them was like a century.

At the twentieth second a quiver ran through the crowd and everyone realized that the daring explorers inside the projectile were also counting the terrible seconds. Isolated cries broke out:

“Thirty-five! … Thirty-six! … Thirty-seven! … Thirty eight! … Thirty-nine! … Forty! … 
Fire
!!!”

Murchison pressed the switch and sent an electric spark into the depths of the cannon.

Instantly there was a terrifying, fantastic, superhuman detonation which could not be compared to thunder or any previously known sound, not even the eruption of a volcano. An immense spout of flame shot from the bowels of the earth as from a crater. The ground heaved, and only a few people caught a brief glimpse of the projectile victoriously cleaving the air amid clouds of glowing vapor.

W
HEN THE
incandescent spout rose into the sky to a prodigious height, the blossoming flames lit up the whole Florida peninsula, and for an incalculable instant day was substituted for night over a considerable expanse of the country. The immense plume of fire was seen from a hundred miles at sea, in the Atlantic as well as in the Gulf of Mexico, and more than one ship’s captain noted the appearance of that gigantic meteor in his log.

The firing of the cannon was accompanied by a veritable earthquake. Florida was shaken to its entrails. The gases released by the guncotton, expanded by heat, pushed back the layers of the atmosphere with incomparable violence, and this artificial hurricane, a hundred times swifter than any natural one, passed through the air like a monstrous whirlwind.

Not one spectator had remained standing: men, women, and children were all flattened like grain stalks before a storm. There was an indescribable tumult and many people were seriously injured. J. T. Maston, who, against all prudence, had stood too far forward, was thrown back fifty feet and his fellow citizens saw him pass overhead like a cannon ball. Three hundred thousand people were temporarily deafened and stupefied.

The violent wind blew down huts and cabins, uprooted
trees within a radius of twenty miles, drove trains all the way back to Tampa, struck the city like an avalanche, and destroyed over a hundred buildings, including Saint Mary’s Church and the new stock exchange building, which was cracked from one end to the other. Several ships in the harbor were thrown against each other and sank. Others were tossed up on shore after having snapped their anchor chains as though they were threads.

But the area of destruction extended still further, beyond the borders of the United States. The effect of the concussion, aided by the west wind, was felt far out in the Atlantic, over three hundred miles from the American coast.

An artificial storm, which Admiral FitzRoy had been unable to foresee, struck his ships with incredible violence. Several vessels, including the
Childe Harold
of Liverpool, were caught in those frightful cyclones before they had time to lower their sails, and sank under full canvas, a regrettable disaster which became the subject of vehement recriminations on the part of England.

Finally, to state everything, although the report is guaranteed by nothing more than the affirmations of several natives, half an hour after the departure of the projectile a number of people in Goree and Sierra Leone claimed to have heard a muffled boom, the last remnant of sound waves which had crossed the Atlantic and come to die on the coast of Africa.

But we must return to Florida. When the first movement of tumult had passed, the whole crowd, including even the injured and deafened, shook off its torpor, and frenzied shouts of “Hurrah for Ardan! Hurrah for Barbicane! Hurrah for Nicholl!” rose up to the skies. Several million people, forgetting their contusions and consternation and thinking only of the projectile, looked
up into space through telescopes and binoculars. But they looked in vain: the projectile was no longer in sight. They had to resign themselves to waiting for telegrams from Longs Peak. Mr. Belfast, the director of the Cambridge Observatory, was at his post in the Rocky Mountains. This skilled and persevering astronomer had been given the task of observing the projectile.

But an unforeseen, though easily foreseeable phenomenon, about which nothing could be done, soon put the public’s patience to a harsh test.

The clear weather suddenly changed: the sky darkened and became covered with clouds. How could it have been otherwise, after the terrible displacement of atmospheric layers, and the dispersion of the enormous quantity of vapor that came from the explosion of 400,000 pounds of guncotton. The whole natural order had been disturbed. There is nothing surprising about this, since it has often been observed that the weather can be abruptly modified by the firing of big guns in a naval battle.

The next day the sun rose above a horizon laden with thick clouds, a heavy, impenetrable curtain between the sky and the earth. Unfortunately it extended all the way to the Rocky Mountains. It was a disaster. A chorus of protests arose from all over the globe. But nature paid no heed to it; since men had troubled the atmosphere with their detonation, they would have to take the consequences.

During this first day, everyone tried to see through the thick clouds, but to no avail. Furthermore, everyone was mistaken in looking up, for as a result of the earth’s rotation the projectile was now moving away from the antipodes.

When deep, impenetrable darkness enveloped the earth and the moon rose above the horizon, it could not be
seen; it seemed to be deliberately hiding from the audacious men who had shot at it. No observations were possible, and telegrams from Longs Peak confirmed this regrettable fact.

The explorers had left at forty-six minutes and forty seconds past ten o’clock on the evening of December 1; if the experiment was successful, they would arrive on December 4 at midnight. The world resigned itself to waiting till then, especially since it would have been quite difficult to observe an object as small as the projectile under those conditions.