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 bright Sun, they seemed to be half asleep while steeping their limbs in his vitalizing beams.
Barbican was the first to dissolve the reverie by jumping up.

His sharp eye had noticed that the base of the Projectile, instead of keeping rigidly perpendicular to the lunar surface, turned away a little, so as to render the elliptical orbit somewhat elongated.

This he made his companions immediately observe, and also called their attention to the fact that from this point they could easily have seen the Earth had it been Full, but that now, drowned in the Sun's beams, it was quite invisible.