This proposal meeting with no contradiction, Michel prepared the repast in a few minutes. But they ate for eating's sake, they drank without toasts, without hurrahs. The bold travellers being borne away into gloomy space, without their accustomed cortège of rays, felt a vague uneasiness at their hearts. The "strange" shadow so dear to Victor Hugo's pen bound them on all sides. But they talked over the interminable night of three hundred and fifty-four hours and a half, nearly fifteen days, which the law of physics has imposed on the inhabitants of the moon. Barbicane gave his friends some explanation of the causes and the consequences of this curious phenomenon. "Curious indeed," said they; "for, if each hemisphere of the moon is deprived of solar light for fifteen days, that above which we now float does not even enjoy during its long night any view of the earth so beautifully lit up. In a word she has no moon (applying this designation to our globe) but on one side of her disc. Now if this were the case with the earth,—if, for example, Europe never saw the moon, and she was only visible at the Antipodes, imagine to yourself the astonishment of a European on arriving in Australia." Illustration: "IT IS THE FAULT OF THE MOON." "They would make the voyage for nothing but to see the moon!" replied Michel. "Very well!" continued Barbicane, "that astonishment is reserved for the Selenites who inhabit the face of the moon opposite to the earth, a face which is ever invisible to our countrymen of the terrestrial globe." "And which we should have seen," added Nicholl, "if we had arrived here when the moon was new, that is to say fifteen days later." "I will add, to make amends," continued Barbicane, "that the inhabitants of the visible face are singularly favoured by nature, to the detriment of their brethren on the invisible face. The latter, as you see, have dark nights of 354 hours, without one single ray to break the darkness. The other, on the contrary, when the sun which has given its light for fifteen days sinks below the horizon, see a splendid orb rise on the opposite horizon. It is the earth, which is thirteen times greater than that diminutive moon that we know;—the earth which develops itself at a diameter of two degrees, and which sheds a light thirteen times greater than that qualified by atmospheric strata—the earth which only disappears at the moment when the sun reappears in its turn!" "Nicely worded!" said Michel, "slightly academical perhaps." "It follows, then," continued Barbicane, without knitting his brows, "that the visible face of the disc must be very agreeable to inhabit, since it always looks on either the sun when the moon is full, or on the earth when the moon is new." "But," said Nicholl, "that advantage must be well compensated by the insupportable heat which the light brings with it."