Chapter 17

TYCHO.

It was now exactly six o'clock in the evening. The Sun, completely clear
of all contact with the lunar disc, steeped the whole Projectile in his
golden rays. The travellers, vertically over the Moon's south pole,
were, as Barbican soon ascertained, about 30 miles distant from it, the
exact distance they had been from the north pole--a proof that the
elliptic curve still maintained itself with mathematical rigor.

For some time, the travellers' whole attention was concentrated on the
glorious Sun. His light was inexpressibly cheering; and his heat, soon
penetrating the walls of the Projectile, infused a new and sweet life
into their chilled and exhausted frames. The ice rapidly disappeared,
and the windows soon resumed their former perfect transparency.

"Oh! how good the pleasant sunlight is!" cried the Captain, sinking on a
seat in a quiet ecstasy of enjoyment. "How I pity Ardan's poor friends
the Selenites during that night so long and so icy! How impatient they
must be to see the Sun back again!"

"Yes," said Ardan, also sitting down the better to bask in the vivifying
rays, "his light no doubt brings them to life and keeps them alive.
Without light or heat during all that dreary winter, they must freeze
stiff like the frogs or become torpid like the bears. I can't imagine
how they could get through it otherwise."

"I'm glad _we're_ through it anyhow," observed M'Nicholl. "I may at once
acknowledge that I felt perfectly miserable as long as it lasted. I can
now easily understand how the combined cold and darkness killed Doctor
Kane's Esquimaux dogs. It was near killing me. I was so miserable that
at last I could neither talk myself nor bear to hear others talk."

"My own case exactly," said Barbican--"that is," he added hastily,
correcting himself, "I tried to talk because I found Ardan so
interested, but in spite of all we said, and saw, and had to think of,
Byron's terrible dream would continually rise up before me:

"The bright Sun was extinguished, and the Stars
Wandered all darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless and pathless, and the icy Earth
Swung blind and blackening in the Moonless air.
Morn came and went, and came and brought no day!
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation, and all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for _light_!"

As he pronounced these words in accents at once monotonous and
melancholy, Ardan, fully appreciative, quietly gesticulated in perfect
cadence with the rhythm. Then the three men remained completely silent
for several minutes. Buried in recollection, or lost in thought, or
magnetized by the