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Chapter XXIII. The End
We may remember the intense sympathy which had accompanied the
travelers on their departure. If at the beginning of the enterprise
they had excited such emotion both in the old and new world, with
what enthusiasm would they be received on their return! The
millions of spectators which had beset the peninsula of Florida,
would they not rush to meet these sublime adventurers? Those
legions of strangers, hurrying from all parts of the globe toward
the American shores, would they leave the Union without having seen
Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Ardan? No! and the ardent passion of
the public was bound to respond worthily to the greatness of the
enterprise. Human creatures who had left the terrestrial sphere,
and returned after this strange voyage into celestial space, could
not fail to be received as the prophet Elias would be if he came
back to earth. To see them first, and then to hear them, such was
the universal longing.
Barbicane, Michel Ardan, Nicholl, and the delegates of the Gun
Club, returning without delay to Baltimore, were received with
indescribable enthusiasm. The notes of President Barbicane’s
voyage were ready to be given to the public. The New York Herald
bought the manuscript at a price not yet known, but which must have
been very high. Indeed, during the publication of “A Journey
to the Moon,” the sale of this paper amounted to five
millions of copies. Three days after the return of the travelers to
the earth, the slightest detail of their expedition was known.
There remained nothing more but to see the heroes of this
superhuman enterprise.
The expedition of Barbicane and his friends round the moon had
enabled them to correct the many admitted theories regarding the
terrestrial satellite. These savants had observed de visu, and
under particular circumstances. They knew what systems should be
rejected, what retained with regard to the formation of that orb,
its origin, its habitability. Its past, present, and future had
even given up their last secrets. Who could advance objections
against conscientious observers, who at less than twenty-four miles
distance had marked that curious mountain of Tycho, the strangest
system of lunar orography? How answer those savants whose sight had
penetrated the abyss of Pluto’s circle? How contradict those
bold ones whom the chances of their enterprise had borne over that
invisible face of the disc, which no human eye until then had ever
seen? It was now their turn to impose some limit on that
selenographic science, which had reconstructed the lunar world as
Cuvier did the skeleton of a fossil, and say, “The moon was
this, a habitable world, inhabited before the earth. The moon is
that, a world uninhabitable, and now uninhabited.”
To celebrate the return of its most illustrious member and his
two companions, the Gun Club decided upon giving a banquet, but a
banquet worthy of the conquerors, worthy of the American people,
and under such conditions that all the inhabitants of the Union
could directly take part in it.
All the head lines of railroads in the States were joined by
flying rails; and on all the platforms, lined with the same flags,
and decorated with the same ornaments, were tables laid and all
served alike. At certain hours, successively calculated, marked by
electric clocks which beat the seconds at the same time, the
population were invited to take their places at the banquet tables.
For four days, from the 5th to the 9th of January, the trains were
stopped as they are on Sundays on the railways of the United
States, and every road was open. One engine only at full speed,
drawing a triumphal carriage, had the right of traveling for those
four days on the railroads of the United States.
The engine was manned by a driver and a stoker, and bore, by
special favor, the Hon. J. T. Maston, secretary of the Gun Club.
The carriage was reserved for President Barbicane, Colonel Nicholl,
and Michel Ardan. At the whistle of the driver, amid the hurrahs,
and all the admiring vociferations of the American language, the
train left the platform of Baltimore. It traveled at a speed of one
hundred and sixty miles in the hour. But what was this speed
compared with that which had carried the three heroes from the
mouth of the Columbiad?
Thus they sped from one town to the other, finding whole
populations at table on their road, saluting them with the same
acclamations, lavishing the same bravos! They traveled in this way
through the east of the Union, Pennsylvania, Connecticut,
Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire; the north and
west by New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin; returning to the
south by Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana; they
went to the southeast by Alabama and Florida, going up by Georgia
and the Carolinas, visiting the center by Tennessee, Kentucky,
Virginia, and Indiana, and, after quitting the Washington station,
re-entered Baltimore, where for four days one would have thought
that the United States of America were seated at one immense
banquet, saluting them simultaneously with the same hurrahs! The
apotheosis was worthy of these three heroes whom fable would have
placed in the rank of demigods.
And now will this attempt, unprecedented in the annals of
travels, lead to any practical result? Will direct communication
with the moon ever be established? Will they ever lay the
foundation of a traveling service through the solar world? Will
they go from one planet to another, from Jupiter to Mercury, and
after awhile from one star to another, from the Polar to Sirius?
Will this means of locomotion allow us to visit those suns which
swarm in the firmament?
To such questions no answer can be given. But knowing the bold
ingenuity of the Anglo-Saxon race, no one would be astonished if
the Americans seek to make some use of President Barbicane’s
attempt.
Thus, some time after the return of the travelers, the public
received with marked favor the announcement of a company, limited,
with a capital of a hundred million of dollars, divided into a
hundred thousand shares of a thousand dollars each, under the name
of the “National Company of Interstellary
Communication.” President, Barbicane; vice-president, Captain
Nicholl; secretary, J. T. Maston; director of movements, Michel
Ardan.
And as it is part of the American temperament to foresee
everything in business, even failure, the Honorable Harry
Trolloppe, judge commissioner, and Francis Drayton, magistrate,
were nominated beforehand!
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