Robur the Conqueror | Page 6

were unable to determine, but who, there was no doubt,
was showering off from his body certain corpuscles which exploded
like bombs.
In Europe not a doubt was thrown on this observation of the stations in
Finmark and Spitzbergen. But what appeared the most phenomenal
about it was that the Swedes and Norwegians could find themselves in
agreement on any subject whatever.
There was a laugh at the asserted discovery in all the observatories of
South America, in Brazil, Peru, and La Plata, and in those of Australia
at Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne; and Australian laughter is very
catching.
To sum up, only one chief of a meteorological station ventured on a
decided answer to this question, notwithstanding the sarcasms that his
solution provoked. This was a Chinaman, the director of the
observatory at Zi-Ka-Wey which rises in the center of a vast plateau
less than thirty miles from the sea, having an immense horizon and
wonderfully pure atmosphere. "It is possible," said he, "that the object
was an aviform apparatus--a flying machine!"

What nonsense!
But if the controversy was keen in the old world, we can imagine what
it was like in that portion of the new of which the United States occupy
so vast an area.
A Yankee, we know, does not waste time on the road. He takes the
street that leads him straight to his end. And the observatories of the
American Federation did not hesitate to do their best. If they did not
hurl their objectives at each other's heads, it was because they would
have had to put them back just when they most wanted to use them. In
this much-disputed question the observatories of Washington in the
District of Columbia, and Cambridge in Massachusetts, found
themselves opposed by those of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire,
and Ann Arbor in Michigan. The subject of their dispute was not the
nature of the body observed, but the precise moment of its observation.
All of them claimed to have seen it the same night, the same hour, the
same minute, the same second, although the trajectory of the
mysterious voyager took it but a moderate height above the horizon.
Now from Massachusetts to Michigan, from New Hampshire to
Columbia, the distance is too great for this double observation, made at
the same moment, to be considered possible.
Dudley at Albany, in the state of New York, and West Point, the
military academy, showed that their colleagues were wrong by an
elaborate calculation of the right ascension and declination of the
aforesaid body.
But later on it was discovered that the observers had been deceived in
the body, and that what they had seen was an aerolite. This aerolite
could not be the object in question, for how could an aerolite blow a
trumpet?
It was in vain that they tried to get rid of this trumpet as an optical
illusion. The ears were no more deceived than the eyes. Something had
assuredly been seen, and something had assuredly been heard. In the
night of the 12th and 13th of May--a very dark night-- the observers at
Yale College, in the Sheffield Science School, had been able to take

down a few bars of a musical phrase in D major, common time, which
gave note for note, rhythm for rhythm, the chorus of the Chant du
Départ.
"Good," said the Yankee wags. "There is a French band well up in the
air."
"But to joke is not to answer." Thus said the observatory at Boston,
founded by the Atlantic Iron Works Society, whose opinions in matters
of astronomy and meteorology began to have much weight in the world
of science.
Then there intervened the observatory at Cincinnati, founded in 1870,
on Mount Lookout, thanks to the generosity of Mr. Kilgour, and known
for its micrometrical measurements of double stars. Its director
declared with the utmost good faith that there had certainly been
something, that a traveling body had shown itself at very short periods
at different points in the atmosphere, but what were the nature of this
body, its dimensions, its speed, and its trajectory, it was impossible to
say.
It was then a journal whose publicity is immense--the "New York
Herald"--received the anonymous contribution hereunder.
"There will be in the recollection of most people the rivalry which
existed a few years ago between the two heirs of the Begum of
Ragginahra, the French doctor Sarrasin, the city of Frankville, and the
German engineer Schultze, in the city of Steeltown, both in the south of
Oregon in the United States.
"It will not have been forgotten that, with the object of destroying
Frankville, Herr Schultze launched a formidable engine, intended to
beat down the town and annihilate it at a single blow.
"Still less will it be forgotten that