for some time after the little spark of light had been extinguished
in the black gloom. But they said very little; even Ardan was silent,
and continued to look out of the window. Barbican surrendered himself up
to a reverie regarding the mysterious destinies of the lunar world. Was
its present condition a foreshadowing of what our Earth is to become?
M'Nicholl, too, was lost in speculation. Was the Moon older or younger
than the Earth in the order of Creation? Had she ever been a beautiful
world of life, and color, and magnificent variety? If so, had her
inhabitants--

Great Mercy, what a cry from Ardan! It sounded human, so seldom do we
hear a shriek so expressive at once of surprise and horror and even
terror! It brought back his startled companions to their senses in a
second. Nor did they ask him for the cause of his alarm. It was only too
clear. Right in their very path, a blazing ball of fire had suddenly
risen up before their eyes, the pitchy darkness all round it rendering
its glare still more blinding. Its phosphoric coruscation filled the
Projectile with white streams of lurid light, tinging the contents with
a pallor indescribably ghastly. The travellers' faces in particular,
gleamed with that peculiar livid and cadaverous tinge, blue and yellow,
which magicians so readily produce by burning table salt in alcohol.

"_Sacre!_" cried Ardan who always spoke his own language when much
excited. "What a pair of beauties you are! Say, Barbican! What
thundering thing is coming at us now?"

"Another bolide," answered Barbican, his eye as calm as ever, though a
faint tremor was quite perceptible in his voice.

"A bolide? Burning _in vacuo_? You are joking!"

"I was never more in earnest," was the President's quiet reply, as he
looked through his closed fingers.

He knew exactly what he was saying. The dazzling glitter did not deceive
_him_. Such a meteor seen from the Earth could not appear much brighter
than the Full Moon, but here in the midst of the black ether and
unsoftened by the veil of the atmosphere, it was absolutely blinding.
These wandering bodies carry in themselves the principle of their
incandescence. Oxygen is by no means necessary for their combustion.
Some of them indeed often take fire as they rush through the layers of
our atmosphere, and generally burn out before they strike the Earth. But
others, on the contrary, and the greater number too, follow a track
through space far more distant from