t and darkness! O brilliant sister of the radiant Apollo!
enshrined in the enchanting strains of Virgil and Homer, which I only
half learned at college, and therefore unfortunately forget just now!
Otherwise what pleasure I should have had in hurling them at the heads
of Barbican, M'Nicholl, and every other barbarous iconoclast of the
nineteenth century!--"

Here he stopped short, for two reasons: first he was out of breath;
secondly, he saw that the irrepressible scientists had been too busy
making observations of their own to hear a single word of what he had
uttered, and were probably totally unconscious that he had spoken at
all. In a few seconds his breath came back in full blast, but the idea
of talking when only deaf men were listening was so disconcerting as to
leave him actually unable to get off another syllable.

CHAPTER XII.

A BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF THE LUNAR MOUNTAINS.

I am rather inclined to believe myself that not one word of Ardan's
rhapsody had been ever heard by Barbican or M'Nicholl. Long before he
had spoken his last words, they had once more become mute as statues,
and now were both eagerly watching, pencil in hand, spyglass to eye, the
northern lunar hemisphere towards which they were rapidly but indirectly
approaching. They had fully made up their minds by this time that they
were leaving far behind them the central point which they would have
probably reached half an hour ago if they had not been shunted off their
course by that inopportune bolide.

About half past twelve o'clock, Barbican broke the dead silence by
saying that after a careful calculation they were now only about 875
miles from the Moon's surface, a distance two hundred miles less in
length than the lunar radius, and which was still to be diminished as
they advanced further north. They were at that moment ten degrees north
of the equator, almost directly over the ridge lying between the _Mare
Serenitatis_ and the _Mare Tranquillitatis_. From this latitude all the
way up to the north pole the travellers enjoyed a most satisfactory view
of the Moon in all directions and under the most favorable conditions.
By means of their spyglasses, magnifying a hundred times, they cut down
this distance of 875 miles to about 9. The great telescope of the Rocky
Mountains, by its enormous magnifying power of 48,000, brought the Moon,
it is true, within a distance of 5 miles, or nearly twice as near; but
this advantage of nearness was co