This shooting globe suddenly appearing in shadow at a distance
of at most 200 miles, ought, according to Barbicane, to have a
diameter of 2,000 yards. It advanced at a speed of about one
mile and a half per second. It cut the projectile's path and
must reach it in some minutes. As it approached it grew to
enormous proportions.

Imagine, if possible, the situation of the travelers! It is
impossible to describe it. In spite of their courage, their
_sang-froid_, their carelessness of danger, they were mute,
motionless with stiffened limbs, a prey to frightful terror.
Their projectile, the course of which they could not alter, was
rushing straight on this ignited mass, more intense than the
open mouth of an oven. It seemed as though they were being
precipitated toward an abyss of fire.

Barbicane had seized the hands of his two companions, and all
three looked through their half-open eyelids upon that asteroid
heated to a white heat. If thought was not destroyed within
them, if their brains still worked amid all this awe, they must
have given themselves up for lost.

Two minutes after the sudden appearance of the meteor (to them
two centuries of anguish) the projectile seemed almost about to
strike it, when the globe of fire burst like a bomb, but without
making any noise in that void where sound, which is but the
agitation of the layers of air, could not be generated.

Nicholl uttered a cry, and he and his companions rushed to
the scuttle. What a sight! What pen can describe it?