The Argosy, Vol. XXIV No. 2 — page 135: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A MONTH IN ‘THE MOON. 327 On a sudden, Norbert darted to the door and ran on to the esplanade, as if a new idea uad struck him. But he had taken only a few steps when he felt himself evenly oppressed. The blood mounted to his brain, he gasped for breath, staggered, and had but just time to Set back to the observatory. He was on the point of suffo- cation. As soon as he got indoors he felt relieved at once. His lungs resumed their function, and he breathed freely again. To the general surprise, he rushed to the half open door, and slammed it » violently ; then, hurrying to the two windows, he carefully stopped up every crevice with all the bits of rag he could lay hands on. ‘What are you doing?’’ asked the baronet. ‘‘ Are you afraid of a draft?” | 3 ‘‘T am hoarding up the little amount of air that we have,’’ answered Nor- bert. ‘‘ When we have used up what we have now, we shall have no more !’’ They looked at one another with curiosity. Had the catastrophe, perchance, turned even his well balanced brain? Was he under some temporary hallucination ? He read the thought in the doctor’s eyes, and could not repress a smile. ‘‘Oh, make yourselves easy,’’ he said. ‘‘Iam not mad. But I have something to tell you which is of much greater importance, and of which you are far from having the least suspicion! Mademoiselle,’’ he continued, turn- ing to Gertrude, ‘‘ are you strong enough to beara great surprise, and, I fear, a painful one ?”’ : Gertrude grew pale; but she looked at the young astronomer bravely. ‘* Speak on,’’ she replied, with her usual calm dignity. ‘‘ I promise to be courageous, whatever it is. Anything is preferable to suspense.”’ ‘‘Listen, then. A while ago you were remarking upon the extraordinary changes in our surroundings ; you attributed them, and doubtless you still attribute them, to the catastrophe that had nigh been the death of us all. Well, it is no such thing! Nothing has changed around us; of that Iam certain. /¢ zs we who have changed place. We are no longer in a state of siege, we are castaways! We are no longer in the Soudan, we are no longer in Africa, nor even on the terrestrial globe! We- have been transported—/o the moon /”* ‘“’To the moon!’ cried Sir Bucephalus. ‘‘ Do you mean to say that the rocks and craters around us are part of the lunar landscape ?”’ ‘Precisely so,’’ replied Norbert. ‘‘I have not yet studied the question sufficiently to be able to tell you how it has happened that the disaster has transported us and all our belongings from the plateau of Tehbali to a lunar plateau, but there can be no doubt that we were blown into the air, and then drawn up by the attraction of the moon.”’ ‘This is only an hypothesis of yours.”’ -“ But the fact remains that we are actually transplanted to a new world, separated from our own by an immense distance, and there is every proof that this new«world can be no other than the moon! You see for yourselves that everything now before your eyes is quite different from an earthly land- COPNieClooOol<S, ee)