"Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" and "A Trip Around It"" - читать интересную книгу автора

"There is no one among you, my brave colleagues, who has not
seen the Moon, or, at least, heard speak of it. Don't be
surprised if I am about to discourse to you regarding the Queen
of the Night. It is perhaps reserved for us to become the
Columbuses of this unknown world. Only enter into my plans, and
second me with all your power, and I will lead you to its
conquest, and its name shall be added to those of the thirty-six
states which compose this Great Union."

"Three cheers for the Moon!" roared the Gun Club, with one voice.

"The moon, gentlemen, has been carefully studied," continued
Barbicane; "her mass, density, and weight; her constitution,
motions, distance, as well as her place in the solar system,
have all been exactly determined. Selenographic charts have
been constructed with a perfection which equals, if it does not
even surpass, that of our terrestrial maps. Photography has
given us proofs of the incomparable beauty of our satellite; all
is known regarding the moon which mathematical science,
astronomy, geology, and optics can learn about her. But up to
the present moment no direct communication has been established
with her."

A violent movement of interest and surprise here greeted this
remark of the speaker.

"Permit me," he continued, "to recount to you briefly how
certain ardent spirits, starting on imaginary journeys, have
penetrated the secrets of our satellite. In the seventeenth
century a certain David Fabricius boasted of having seen with
his own eyes the inhabitants of the moon. In 1649 a Frenchman,
one Jean Baudoin, published a `Journey performed from the Earth
to the Moon by Domingo Gonzalez,' a Spanish adventurer. At the
same period Cyrano de Bergerac published that celebrated
`Journeys in the Moon' which met with such success in France.
Somewhat later another Frenchman, named Fontenelle, wrote `The
Plurality of Worlds,' a chef-d'oeuvre of its time. About 1835
a small treatise, translated from the New York American, related
how Sir John Herschel, having been despatched to the Cape of
Good Hope for the purpose of making there some astronomical
calculations, had, by means of a telescope brought to perfection
by means of internal lighting, reduced the apparent distance of
the moon to eighty yards! He then distinctly perceived caverns
frequented by hippopotami, green mountains bordered by golden
lace-work, sheep with horns of ivory, a white species of deer
and inhabitants with membranous wings, like bats. This brochure,
the work of an American named Locke, had a great sale. But, to
bring this rapid sketch to a close, I will only add that a
certain Hans Pfaal, of Rotterdam, launching himself in a balloon
filled with a gas extracted from nitrogen, thirty-seven times