What palette is rich enough in colors to reproduce so magnificent
a spectacle?

It was like the opening of a crater, like the scattering of an
immense conflagration. Thousands of luminous fragments lit up
and irradiated space with their fires. Every size, every color,
was there intermingled. There were rays of yellow and pale
yellow, red, green, gray-- a crown of fireworks of all colors.
Of the enormous and much-dreaded globe there remained nothing
but these fragments carried in all directions, now become
asteroids in their turn, some flaming like a sword, some
surrounded by a whitish cloud, and others leaving behind them
trains of brilliant cosmical dust.

These incandescent blocks crossed and struck each other,
scattering still smaller fragments, some of which struck
the projectile. Its left scuttle was even cracked by a
violent shock. It seemed to be floating amid a hail of
howitzer shells, the smallest of which might destroy
it instantly.

The light which saturated the ether was so wonderfully intense,
that Michel, drawing Barbicane and Nicholl to his window,
exclaimed, "The invisible moon, visible at last!"

And through a luminous emanation, which lasted some seconds, the
whole three caught a glimpse of that mysterious disc which the eye
of man now saw for the first time. What could they distinguish
at a distance which they could not estimate? Some lengthened
bands along the disc, real clouds formed in the midst of a very