The most daring imagination could not suppose that a period of 12,000 years had been crowded into the space of a fortnight; and therefore the captain came, as to an easier conclusion, to the opinion that the earth's axis had been suddenly and immensely shifted; and from the fact that the axis, if produced, would pass through a point so little removed above the horizon, he deduced the inference that the Mediterranean must have been transported to the equator.
Lost in bewildering maze of thought, he gazed long and intently upon the heavens.

His eyes wandered from where the tail of the Great Bear, now a zodiacal constellation, was scarcely visible above the waters, to where the stars of the southern hemisphere were just breaking on his view.

A cry from Ben Zoof recalled him to himself.
"The moon!" shouted the orderly, as though overjoyed at once again beholding what the poet has called: "The kind companion of terrestrial night;" and he pointed to a disc that was rising at a spot precisely opposite the place where they would have expected to see the sun.

"The moon!" again he cried.
But Captain Servadac could not altogether enter into his servant's enthusiasm.

If this were actually the moon, her distance from the earth must have been increased by some millions of miles.