The moment for saying farewell had come. The scene was touching; in spite of his gaiety Michel Ardan felt touched. J.T. Maston had found under his dry eyelids an ancient tear that he had, doubtless, kept for the occasion. He shed it upon the forehead of his dear president.
"Suppose I go too?" said he. "There is still time!"
"Impossible, old fellow," answered Barbicane.
A few moments later the three travelling companions were installed in the projectile, and had screwed down the door-plate, and the mouth of the Columbiad, entirely liberated, rose freely towards the sky.
Nicholl, Barbicane, and Michel Ardan were definitively walled up in their metal vehicle.
Who could predict the universal emotion then at its paroxysm?
The moon was rising in a firmament of limpid purity, outshining on her passage the twinkling fire of the stars; she passed over the constellation of the Twins, and was now nearly halfway between the horizon and the zenith.
A frightful silence hung over all that scene. There was not a breath of wind on the earth! Not a sound of breathing from the crowd! Hearts dared not beat. Every eye was fixed on the gaping mouth of the Columbiad.
Murchison watched the needle of his chronometer. Hardly forty seconds had to elapse before the moment of departure struck, and each one lasted a century!
At the twentieth there was a universal shudder, and the thought occurred to all the crowd that the audacious travellers shut up in the vehicle were likewise counting these terrible seconds! Some isolated cries were heard.
"Thirty-five!--thirty-six!--thirty-seven!--thirty--eight!--thirty-nine! --forty! Fire!!!"
Murchison immediately pressed his finger upon the electric knob and hurled the electric spark into the depths of the Columbiad.
A fearful, unheard-of, superhuman report, of which nothing could give an idea, not even thunder or the eruption of volcanoes, was immediately produced. An immense spout of fire sprang up from the bowels of the earth as if from a crater. The soil heaved and very few persons caught a glimpse of the projectile victoriously cleaving the air amidst the flaming smoke.
At the moment when the pyramid of flame rose to a prodigious height in the air it lighted up the whole of Florida, and for an incalculable moment day was substituted for night over a considerable extent of country. This immense column of fire was perceived for a hundred miles out at sea, from the Gulf and from the Atlantic, and more than one ship's captain noted the apparition of this gigantic meteor in his log-book.