They looked at each other, speechless, breathless, for about as long as it would take you to count five: the silence so intense that they could easily hear the pulsation of their hearts. Ardan was the first to break it. "Are we falling or are we not?" he asked in a loud whisper. "We're not!" answered M'Nicholl, also hardly speaking above his breath. "The base of the Projectile is still turned away as far as ever from the Moon!" Barbican, who had been looking out of the window, now turned hastily towards his companions. His face frightened them. He was deadly pale; his eyes stared, and his lips were painfully contracted. "We _are_ falling!" he shrieked huskily. "Towards the Moon?" exclaimed his companions. "No!" was the terrible reply. "Towards the Earth!" "_Sacre!_" cried Ardan, as usually letting off his excitement in French. "Fire and fury!" cried M'Nicholl, completely startled out of his habitual _sang froid_. "Thunder and lightning!" swore the usually serene Barbican, now completely stunned by the blow. "I had never expected this!" Ardan was the first to recover from the deadening shock: his levity came to his relief. "First impressions are always right," he muttered philosophically. "The moment I set eyes on the confounded thing, it reminded me of the Bastille; it is now proving its likeness to a worse place: easy enough to get into, but no redemption out of it!" There was no longer any doubt possible on the subject. The terrible fall had begun. The Projectile had retained velocity enough not only to carry it beyond the dead point, but it was even able to completely overcome the feeble resistance offered by the rockets. It was all clear now. The same velocity that had carried the Projectile beyond the neutral point on its way to the Moon, was still swaying it on its return to the Earth. A well known law of motion required that, in the path which it was now about to describe, _it should repass, on its return through all the points through which it had already passed during its departure_. No wonder that our friends were struck almost senseless when the fearful fall they were now about to encounter, flashed upon them in all its horror. They were to fall a clear distance of nearly 200 thousand miles! To lighten or counteract such a descent, the most powerful springs, checks, rockets, screens, deadeners, even if the whole Earth were engaged in their construction--would produce no more effect than so many spiderwebs. According to a simple law in Ballistics, _the Projectile was to strike the Earth with a velocity equal to that by which it had been animated when issuing from the mouth of the Columbiad_--a velocity of at least seven miles a second!