darkness reigns where the sun’s rays do not penetrate.
That which on earth is called diffusion of light, that luminous
matter which the air holds in suspension, which creates the
twilight and the daybreak, which produces the _umbrae_ and
_penumbrae_, and all the magic of _chiaro-oscuro_, does not
exist on the moon. Hence the harshness of contrasts, which
only admit of two colors, black and white. If a Selenite
were to shade his eyes from the sun’s rays, the sky would seem
absolutely black, and the stars would shine to him as on the
darkest night. Judge of the impression produced on Barbicane
and his three friends by this strange scene! Their eyes
were confused. They could no longer grasp the respective
distances of the different plains. A lunar landscape without
the softening of the phenomena of _chiaro-oscuro_ could not be
rendered by an earthly landscape painter; it would be spots of
ink on a white page– nothing more.
This aspect was not altered even when the projectile, at the
height of 80@, was only separated from the moon by a distance
of fifty miles; nor even when, at five in the morning, it
passed at less than twenty-five miles from the mountain of
Gioja, a distance reduced by the glasses to a quarter of a mile.
It seemed as if the moon might be touched by the hand!
It seemed impossible that, before long, the projectile would
not strike her, if only at the north pole, the brilliant arch
of which was so distinctly visible on the black sky.
Michel Ardan wanted to open one of the scuttles and throw
himself on to the moon’s surface! A very useless attempt; for
if the projectile could not attain any point whatever of the
satellite, Michel, carried along by its motion, could not attain
it either.
At that moment, at six o’clock, the lunar pole appeared. The disc
only presented to the travelers’ gaze one half brilliantly lit up,
while the other disappeared in the darkness. Suddenly the
projectile passed the line of demarcation between intense light
and absolute darkness, and was plunged in profound night!
CHAPTER XIV
THE NIGHT OF THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FOUR HOURS AND A HALF
At the moment when this phenomenon took place so rapidly, the
projectile was skirting the moon’s north pole at less than
twenty-five miles distance. Some seconds had sufficed to plunge
it into the absolute darkness of space. The transition was so
sudden, without shade, without gradation of light, without
attenuation of the luminous waves, that the orb seemed to have
been extinguished by a powerful blow.
“Melted, disappeared!” Michel Ardan exclaimed, aghast.
Indeed, there was neither reflection nor shadow. Nothing more
was to be seen of that disc, formerly so dazzling. The darkness
was complete. and rendered even more so by the rays from the stars.
It was “that blackness” in which the lunar nights are insteeped,
which last three hundred and fifty-four hours and a half at each
point of the disc, a long night resulting from the equality of
the translatory and rotary movements of the moon. The projectile,
immerged in the conical shadow of the satellite, experienced the
action of the solar rays no more than any of its invisible points.
In the interior, the obscurity was complete. They could not see
each other. Hence the necessity of dispelling the darkness.
However desirous Barbicane might be to husband the gas, the
reserve of which was small, he was obliged to ask from it a
fictitious light, an expensive brilliancy which the sun then refused.
“Devil take the radiant orb!” exclaimed Michel Ardan, “which
forces us to expend gas, instead of giving us his rays gratuitously.”
“Do not let us accuse the sun,” said Nicholl, “it is not his
fault, but that of the moon, which has come and placed herself
like a screen between us and it.”
“It is the sun!” continued Michel.
“It is the moon!” retorted Nicholl.
An idle dispute, which Barbicane put an end to by saying:
“My friends, it is neither the fault of the sun nor of the moon;
it is the fault of the _projectile_, which, instead of rigidly
following its course, has awkwardly missed it. To be more just,