Morn came and went, and came and brought no day!
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation, and all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for _light_!"
As he pronounced these words in accents at once monotonous and
melancholy, Ardan, fully appreciative, quietly gesticulated in perfect
cadence with the rhythm. Then the three men remained completely silent
for several minutes. Buried in recollection, or lost in thought, or
magnetized by the bright Sun, they seemed to be half asleep while
steeping their limbs in his vitalizing beams.
Barbican was the first to dissolve the reverie by jumping up. His sharp
eye had noticed that the base of the Projectile, instead of keeping
rigidly perpendicular to the lunar surface, turned away a little, so as
to render the elliptical orbit somewhat elongated. This he made his
companions immediately observe, and also called their attention to the
fact that from this point they could easily have seen the Earth had it
been Full, but that now, drowned in the Sun's beams, it was quite
invisible. A more attractive spectacle, however, soon engaged their
undivided attention--that of the Moon's southern regions, now brought
within about the third of a mile by their telescopes.
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