“Yes, I agree with you, it would be an admirable way to see countries. To this spot where we are other peoples will come, brought by the rotation; seas, distant regions, snowy mountains will take our place; and to-morrow at the same hour we shall be here again. Where we are talking now, in the shade of the juniper-trees, first will pass the sea, the somber Atlantic, which will replace our conversation by the grand voice of its waves. In less than an hour the ocean will be here. Some large war-vessel, with its triple row of guns, will float perhaps, all sails set, over the spot we are occupying. The sea has passed. Now we have North America, the great Canadian lakes, and the interminable prairies where the red-skinned Indians hunt buffaloes. The sea begins again, much larger than the Atlantic; it takes nearly seven hours to pass. What line of islands is this where fishermen wrapped in furs are drying herrings? They are the Koorile Isles, south of Kamchatka. They pass quickly; we scarcely have time to give them a glance. Now it is the turn of the yellow-faces—the Mongolians and Chinese, with slanting eyes. Oh! what curious things we could see here! But the ball is always turning, and China is already in the distance. The sandy plateaus of Central Asia and mountains higher than the clouds come next. Here are the pastures of the Tartars, with neighing herds of mares; here are the grassy plains of the Caspian with the flat-nosed Cossacks; then southern Russia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and finally France. Let us descend quickly, get on to our feet; the earth has finished its rotation. “Do not for an instant, my little friends, think that this giddy spectacle of the earth passing with the rapidity of a cannon-ball would be visible to any but spiritual eyes. By rising into the upper air in a balloon, as Jules said, it does at first seem as if we ought to see the earth turning and lands and seas passing under our feet. Nothing of the kind takes place, for the atmosphere turns with the terrestrial globe and drags the balloon in the general rotation, instead of leaving it at rest, as would be necessary if the observer were to have successively under his eyes the different regions of the earth.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER LVI THE YEAR AND ITS SEASONS “YOU told us,” said Claire, “that at the same time the earth turns on its axis it travels round the sun.” “Yes. It takes three hundred and sixty-five days for that journey; it makes three hundred and sixty-five pirouettes on its axis in accomplishing a journey round the sun. The time spent in this journey makes just a year.” “The earth takes one day of twenty-four hours to turn on its axis; one year to turn round the sun,” said Jules.