elapsed since Ardan had
caught the first glimpse of it--three ages of agony! Now it was on them!
In a second--in less than a second, the terrible fireball had burst like
a shell! Thousands of glittering fragments were flying around them in
all directions--but with no more noise than is made by so many light
flakes of thistle-down floating about some warm afternoon in summer. The
blinding, blasting steely white glare of the explosion almost bereft the
travellers of the use of their eyesight forever, but no more report
reached their ears than if it had taken place at the bottom of the Gulf
of Mexico. In an atmosphere like ours, such a crash would have burst the
ear-membranes of ten thousand elephants!

In the middle of the commotion another loud cry was suddenly heard. It
was the Captain who called this time. His companions rushed to his
window and all looked out together in the same direction.

What a sight met their eyes! What pen can describe it? What pencil can
reproduce the magnificence of its coloring? It was a Vesuvius at his
best and wildest, at the moment just after the old cone has fallen in.
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. They had many hairbreadth escapes, but fortunately the
cracking of the glass proved