toward the central well, unrolling their incandescent curves.
There, down they plunged with a terrific noise into a depth of
900 feet. It was an exciting and a magnificent spectacle.
The ground trembled, while these molten waves, launching into the
sky their wreaths of smoke, evaporated the moisture of the mould
and hurled it upward through the vent-holes of the stone lining
in the form of dense vapor-clouds. These artificial clouds
unrolled their thick spirals to a height of 1,000 yards into
the air. A savage, wandering somewhere beyond the limits of the
horizon, might have believed that some new crater was forming in
the bosom of Florida, although there was neither any eruption,
nor typhoon, nor storm, nor struggle of the elements, nor any of
those terrible phenomena which nature is capable of producing.
No, it was man alone who had produced these reddish vapors,
these gigantic flames worthy of a volcano itself, these
tremendous vibrations resembling the shock of an earthquake,
these reverberations rivaling those of hurricanes and storms;
and it was his hand which precipitated into an abyss, dug by
himself, a whole Niagara of molten metal!
CHAPTER XVI
THE COLUMBIAD
Had the casting succeeded? They were reduced to mere conjecture.
There was indeed every reason to expect success, since the mould
has absorbed the entire mass of the molten metal; still some
considerable time must elapse before they could arrive at any
certainty upon the matter.
The patience of the members of the Gun Club was sorely tried during
this period of time. But they could do nothing. J. T. Maston
escaped roasting by a miracle. Fifteen days after the casting
an immense column of smoke was still rising in the open sky and
the ground burned the soles of the feet within a radius of two
hundred feet round the summit of Stones Hill. It was impossible
to approach nearer. All they could do was to wait with what
patience they might.
“Here we are at the 10th of August,” exclaimed J. T. Maston one
morning, “only four months to the 1st of December! We shall
never be ready in time!” Barbicane said nothing, but his
silence covered serious irritation.
However, daily observations revealed a certain change going on
in the state of the ground. About the 15th of August the vapors
ejected had sensibly diminished in intensity and thickness.
Some days afterward the earth exhaled only a slight puff of
smoke, the last breath of the monster enclosed within its circle
of stone. Little by little the belt of heat contracted, until
on the 22nd of August, Barbicane, his colleagues, and the
engineer were enabled to set foot on the iron sheet which lay
level upon the summit of Stones Hill.
“At last!” exclaimed the president of the Gun Club, with an
immense sigh of relief.
The work was resumed the same day. They proceeded at once to
extract the interior mould, for the purpose of clearing out the
boring of the piece. Pickaxes and boring irons were set to work
without intermission. The clayey and sandy soils had acquired
extreme hardness under the action of the heat; but, by the aid
of the machines, the rubbish on being dug out was rapidly carted
away on railway wagons; and such was the ardor of the work, so
persuasive the arguments of Barbicane’s dollars, that by the 3rd
of September all traces of the mould had entirely disappeared.
Immediately the operation of boring was commenced; and by the
aid of powerful machines, a few weeks later, the inner surface
of the immense tube had been rendered perfectly cylindrical, and
the bore of the piece had acquired a thorough polish.
At length, on the 22d of September, less than a twelvemonth
after Barbicane’s original proposition, the enormous weapon,
accurately bored, and exactly vertically pointed, was ready
for work. There was only the moon now to wait for; and they
were pretty sure that she would not fail in the rendezvous.
The ecstasy of J. T. Maston knew no bounds, and he narrowly
escaped a frightful fall while staring down the tube. But for
the strong hand of Colonel Blomsberry, the worthy secretary,
like a modern Erostratus, would have found his death in the