Millions of luminous fragments streaked the sky with their blazing
fires. All sizes and shapes of light, all colors and shades of colors,
were inextricably mingled together. Irradiations in gold, scintillations
in crimson, splendors in emerald, lucidities in ultramarine--a dazzling
girandola of every tint and of every hue. Of the enormous fireball, an
instant ago such an object of dread, nothing now remained but these
glittering pieces, shooting about in all directions, each one an
asteroid in its turn. Some flew out straight and gleaming like a steel
sword; others rushed here and there irregularly like chips struck off a
red-hot rock; and others left long trails of glittering cosmical dust
behind them like the nebulous tail of Donati's comet.
These incandescent blocks crossed each other, struck each other, crushed
each other into still smaller fragments, one of which, grazing the
Projectile, jarred it so violently that the very window at which the
travellers were standing, was cracked by the shock. Our friends felt, in
fact, as if they were the objective point at which endless volleys of
blazing shells were aimed, any of them powerful enough, if it only hit
them fair, to make as short work of the Projectile as you could of an
egg-shell.
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