This descent, though--thanks to the respective volumes of the attracting bodies--six times less rapid than it would have been on the surface of the Earth, would still be violent enough to dash the Projectile into a thousand pieces.

But Barbican confidently expected by means of his powerful rockets to offer very considerable obstruction to the violence of this fall, if not to counteract its terrible effects altogether.
The inspection having thus given general satisfaction, the travellers once more set themselves to watching external space through the lights in the sides and the floor of the Projectile.
Everything still appeared to be in the same state as before.

Nothing was changed.

The vast arch of the celestial dome glittered with stars, and constellations blazed with a light clear and pure enough to throw an astronomer into an ecstasy of admiration.

Below them shone the Sun, like the mouth of a white-hot furnace, his dazzling disc defined sharply on the pitch-black back-ground of the sky.