At the moment when this phenomenon took place so rapidly, the projectile was skirting the moon’s north pole at less than twenty-five miles distance. Some seconds had sufficed to plunge it into the absolute darkness of space.
The transition was so sudden, without shade, without gradation of light, without attenuation of the luminous waves, that the orb seemed to have been extinguished by a powerful blow. 'Melted, disappeared! ' Michel Ardan exclaimed, aghast. Indeed, there was neither reflection nor shadow.
Nothing more was to be seen of that disc, formerly so dazzling. The darkness was complete. and rendered even more so by the rays from the stars.
It was 'that blackness' in which the lunar nights are insteeped, which last three hundred and fifty-four hours and a half at each point of the disc, a long night resulting from the equality of the translatory and rotary movements of the moon.
The projectile, immerged in the conical shadow of the satellite, experienced the action of the solar rays no more than any of its invisible points. In the interior, the obscurity was complete. They could not see each other. Hence the necessity of dispelling the darkness.
However desirous Barbicane might be to husband the gas, the reserve of which was small, he was obliged to ask from it a fictitious light, an expensive brilliancy which the sun then refused. 'Devil take the radiant orb!
' exclaimed Michel Ardan, 'which forces us to expend gas, instead of giving us his rays gratuitously. ' 'Do not let us accuse the sun,' said Nicholl, 'it is not his fault, but that of the moon, which has come and placed herself like a screen between us and it.
' 'It is the sun! ' continued Michel. 'It is the moon! ' retorted Nicholl. An idle dispute, which Barbicane put an end