Off on a Comet, Jules Verne [10 ebook reader .txt] 📗

half an hour, the astronomer heaved a

faint sigh, which ere long was followed by another and another.

He half opened his eyes, closed them again, then opened them completely,

but without exhibiting any consciousness whatever of his situation.

A few words seemed to escape his lips, but they were quite unintelligible.

Presently he raised his right hand to his forehead as though instinctively

feeling for something that was missing; then, all of a sudden,

his features became contracted, his face flushed with apparent irritation,

and he exclaimed fretfully, “My spectacles!—where are my spectacles?”

 

In order to facilitate his operations, Ben Zoof had removed the spectacles

in spite of the tenacity with which they seemed to adhere to the temples of

his patient; but he now rapidly brought them back and readjusted them as best

he could to what seemed to be their natural position on the aquiline nose.

The professor heaved a long sigh of relief, and once more closed his eyes.

 

Before long the astronomer roused himself a little more, and glanced

inquiringly about him, but soon relapsed into his comatose condition.

When next he opened his eyes, Captain Servadac happened to be bending

down closely over him, examining his features with curious scrutiny.

The old man darted an angry look at him through the spectacles,

and said sharply, “Servadac, five hundred lines to-morrow!”

 

It was an echo of days of old. The words were few, but they were enough

to recall the identity which Servadac was trying to make out.

 

“Is it possible?” he exclaimed. “Here is my old tutor, Mr. Rosette,

in very flesh and blood.”

 

“Can’t say much for the flesh,” muttered Ben Zoof.

 

The old man had again fallen back into a torpid slumber.

Ben Zoof continued, “His sleep is getting more composed.

Let him alone; he will come round yet. Haven’t I heard of men

more dried up than he is, being brought all the way from Egypt

in cases covered with pictures?”

 

“You idiot!—those were mummies; they had been dead for ages.”

 

Ben Zoof did not answer a word. He went on preparing a warm bed,

into which he managed to remove his patient, who soon fell into a calm

and natural sleep.

 

Too impatient to await the awakening of the astronomer and to hear what

representations he had to make, Servadac, the count, and the lieutenant,

constituting themselves what might be designated “the Academy of Sciences”

of the colony, spent the whole of the remainder of the day in starting

and discussing the wildest conjectures about their situation.

The hypothesis, to which they had now accustomed themselves for so long,

that a new asteroid had been formed by a fracture of the earth’s surface,

seemed to fall to the ground when they found that Professor Palmyrin Rosette

had associated the name of Gallia, not with their present home,

but with what he called “my comet”; and that theory being abandoned,

they were driven to make the most improbable speculations to replace it.

 

Alluding to Rosette, Servadac took care to inform his companions that,

although the professor was always eccentric, and at times very irascible,

yet he was really exceedingly good-hearted; his bark was worse than his bite;

and if suffered to take their course without observation, his outbreaks

of ill-temper seldom lasted long.

 

“We will certainly do our best to get on with him,” said the count.

“He is no doubt the author of the papers, and we must hope that he will

be able to give us some valuable information.”

 

“Beyond a question the documents have originated with him,”

assented the lieutenant. “Gallia was the word written at the top

of every one of them, and Gallia was the first word uttered

by him in our hearing.”

 

The astronomer slept on. Meanwhile, the three together had no

hesitation in examining his papers, and scrutinizing the figures on his

extemporized blackboard. The handwriting corresponded with that of

the papers already received; the blackboard was covered with algebraical

symbols traced in chalk, which they were careful not to obliterate;

and the papers, which consisted for the most part of detached scraps,

presented a perfect wilderness of geometrical figures, conic sections

of every variety being repeated in countless profusion.

 

Lieutenant Procope pointed out that these curves evidently had reference to

the orbits of comets, which are variously parabolic, hyperbolic, or elliptic.

If either of the first two, the comet, after once appearing within the range

of terrestrial vision, would vanish forever in the outlying regions of space;

if the last, it would be sure, sooner or later, after some periodic interval,

to return.

 

From the prima facie appearance of his papers, then, it seemed probable

that the astronomer, during his sojourn at Formentera, had been devoting

himself to the study of cometary orbits; and as calculations of this kind

are ordinarily based upon the assumption that the orbit is a parabola,

it was not unlikely that he had been endeavoring to trace the path

of some particular comet.

 

“I wonder whether these calculations were made before or after the 1st

of January; it makes all the difference,” said Lieutenant Procope.

 

“We must bide our time and hear,” replied the count.

 

Servadac paced restlessly up and down. “I would give a month of my life,”

he cried, impetuously, “for every hour that the old fellow goes sleeping on.”

 

“You might be making a bad bargain,” said Procope, smiling.

“Perhaps after all the comet has had nothing to do with the convulsion

that we have experienced.”

 

“Nonsense!” exclaimed the captain; “I know better than that, and so do you.

Is it not as clear as daylight that the earth and this comet have been

in collision, and the result has been that our little world has been split

off and sent flying far into space?”

 

Count Timascheff and the lieutenant looked at each other in silence.

“I do not deny your theory,” said Procope after a while.

“If it be correct, I suppose we must conclude that the enormous disc

we observed on the night of the catastrophe was the comet itself;

and the velocity with which it was traveling must have been

so great that it was hardly arrested at all by the attraction

of the earth.”

 

“Plausible enough,” answered Count Timascheff; “and it is to this comet

that our scientific friend here has given the name of Gallia.”

 

It still remained a puzzle to them all why the astronomer should apparently

be interested in the comet so much more than in the new little world

in which their strange lot was cast.

 

“Can you explain this?” asked the count.

 

“There is no accounting for the freaks of philosophers, you know,”

said Servadac; “and have I not told you that this philosopher

in particular is one of the most eccentric beings in creation?”

 

“Besides,” added the lieutenant, “it is exceedingly likely

that his observations had been going on for some considerable

period before the convulsion happened.”

 

Thus, the general conclusion arrived at by the Gallian Academy

of Science was this: That on the night of the 31st of December,

a comet, crossing the ecliptic, had come into collision with

the earth, and that the violence of the shock had separated

a huge fragment from the globe, which fragment from that date

had been traversing the remote interplanetary regions.

Palmyrin Rosette would doubtless confirm their solution

of the phenomenon.