CHAPTER VIII
THE FIRST DAY OF THE VOYAGE
(Continued)
At half past eight o’clock p. m. I Was aroused from sleep, partly by a sensation of cold from which I was suffering and in part by sharp, snapping sounds all about over the ship as if the walls and the dome were being pounded on the outside by small, scattering hail stones.
I glanced my eyes about the room and discovered that everybody had retired for sleep and repose except the captain, the electrician, our “family physician,” and the colored man. Capt. Ewald was faithfully holding his position at the helm; Prof. Purnell was getting ready to start one of the large electric storage batteries for the purpose of furnishing heat for the physical comfort of the passengers and the crew, for preparing the evening meal, and with the further design of purifying and vitalizing the air pent up in the ship; Dr. Wharton was sitting near the helm, in a quiet conversation with the captain; and Dick Prouty was standing at one of the observation windows laughing and talking pretty loud, and comparing the sun to a large flower, and the comets near their perihelion distances to a swarm of bees gathering honey from it.
As soon as I was up and dressed, Dick called me to his side. I found his comparison to be a very apt one. The sun’s great corona had arranged itself about this luminary in bands and cones of light in such manner to give him the fancied appearance of a large, magnolia flower; and just at this time there were in the vicinity of the sun a great many small comets which had from one to three moderately long, bright, well-defined trains, and bore a considerable resemblance to bees. The nuclei or bodies of the comets represented the bodies of the bees, and the trains, their wings; and as the trains of comets always extend off in a direction opposite to that of the sun, these fancied bees seemed to be in the act of approaching the flower.
I was with Dick only a few seconds,–just long enough to get a glimpse of the sun and the comets on which he was exercising his fancy and to enter into his sympathy sufficiently to appreciate the comparison.
Shivering with cold and wondering where we were, I then hesitatingly approached Capt. Ewald and engaged him in a brief conversation.
“Captain, I am well clothed,” said I, “but in spite of this fact I feel like I am freezing.”
“I am not at all surprised,” answered he, “for it has turned several degrees colder since we left St. Louis this morning.”
“Captain, what makes the ship pop this way?” I inquired. “It seems to be in a rack all over.”
“The maximum density, at which all substances naturally occupy the smallest amount of space possible,” said he in reply, “is 39, Fahrenheit; and the sharp, snapping sounds which you hear are due to the expansive force of the material in the walls and the floor of the ship, caused by the intense cold on the outside.”
“Captain, where are we now ?” I then asked.
“In longitude 145 east of Greenwich,” he replied “and in latitude 37 north.”
“Your reply is not altogether satisfactory,” said I in response, “for I do not know yet where we are.”
“Why do you not examine the registers and look all about you,” inquired he very impatiently, “and try to determine the outside conditions and to locate yourself?”
I at once inspected the thermometer and found the record there 273, Centigrade, below the freezing point of water. I then examined the barograph and discovered that we were soaring at an altitude of three thousand two hundred and fifty miles. I directed my eyes to earth again and observed that we were above a great expanse of water thickly studded with islands. After the lapse of a few minutes I discovered that our ship was almost directly above the meridian of Melbourne, Australia, and directly over Japan.
At this time I saw distinctly the whole continent of Australia and all the larger islands of the Philippine and Malaysian groups,–Borneo, Luzon, New Guinea, etc.,–sharply outlined by a .lighter hue and readily recognized them all by their shapes and by their relative sizes and positions.
Their delineations correspond very closely with those of their maps found in our geographies, except that Australia and the large islands lying adjacent thereto seemed drawn-out from east to west, an appearance, the captain informed me, due to oblique and aerial perspective. I was able also to follow easily with my eyes the trend of the whole eastern coast of Asia and to see inland almost to the Ural Mountains.
At three o’clock on the following morning we were directly over the Caspian Sea, were five thousand three hundred and eighty miles above the earth, and had an excellent view of all Eurasia, including Japan and the British Isles, of the whole of Africa, and of the island of Madagascar.
During the hour beginning with six o’clock in the morning the Iberian Peninsula went sweeping under us. At seven o’clock we sat down to breakfast. Just at this time our craft was seven thousand five hundred and thirty miles directly above Lisbon, Portugal, and was just launching itself out over the broad waters of the Atlantic. Except by the hour of the day as indicated by the faces of our clocks and watches we never knew whether to call a meal breakfast, dinner, or supper; for when one is wholly from under the rotary influence of the earth, his surroundings are the same at every hour of the day. That is to say there is no sunrise nor sunset, no night, but perpetual day with the sun constantly at the zenith.
At eleven o’clock we were almost on the border of the Western Continent. In the short space of four hours we had passed with almost absolute safety from the shores of Spain and Portugal to that of the United States. At any moment of this time I was able to view from limit to limit the same broad expanse of water which Columbus more than four hundred years ago was ten weeks in crossing at the peril of his life, and of which, in a sense, he saw comparatively little.
Almost before we were aware, it was twelve o’clock, noon. At this time we had been out on our voyage just twenty-four hours and had seen the earth, as a world foreign to us, make one complete rotation upon her axis. Our distance from the earth was eight thousand six hundred and ninety-five miles; and in spite of this immense stretch of distance I was able, by the aid of a small telescope, to trace faintly the courses of the larger streams of the Mississippi system.
And according to the best means we had at hand for determining latitude and longitude, we were directly above a point on the earth’s surface sixty-two miles almost due east of the city of St. Louis.
The earth, as a whole, no longer seemed to me merely as a great convex circle with a constantly dilating circumference, but appeared as a great globe lying in high relief, out in the heavens. I could see the whole of the American Continent in its full length and breadth– from Maine to California and from the Arctic Archipelago and the northern coast of Greenland to No Man’s Land of Patagonia.
The earth truly presented a magnificent appearance, and was by far the most conspicuous and beautiful of all the planets.
It would be difficult to convey to the mind of anyone by means of words anything like a very correct idea of her size as she appeared to me. The members of our party differed widely in their opinions as to her dimensions. Some imagined her diameter to be somewhat less than one thousand feet, while others thought it to be anywhere from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred feet, and still others who gave it as their opinion that her diameter was no less than a half mile.
Perhaps Profs. Monahan and Galvan’s reckoning on this point would be a more satisfactory presentation of the facts in the case. From our point of observation these learned men by means of mathematical and astronomical instruments drew imaginary tangents to the circumference of one of the earth’s great circles, and the divergence of these lines showed 36, or one-tenth of a circle. In other words, the test exhibited that ten such disks as the earth presented, placed edge to edge, would form a belt around the celestial sphere, or that two and a half such disks so arranged with respect to one another would reach from a point in the horizon to the zenith.
As an object of beauty and intense interest the earth, as she presented herself to me at this time, would be a very difficult task for even the most imaginative mind to approach in the way of description.
Her atmosphere was almost entirely free from moisture; and although I was viewing this beautiful old world from a distance of approximately nine thousand miles, it was not difficult under such a condition for the unaided eye to easily observe in pretty sharp outline the contour of the continents, and by the aid of a small telescope to detect pretty easily the relief in the mountain chains and even in the chains of hills.
The face of the earth in general was almost the color of a bright-skinned orange and surrounded by a pale-blue border about eight feet broad.
At other times, when the atmosphere was pretty generally laden with moisture, the earth appeared to be enveloped in a mantle of mist or vapor varying in hue from a deep gold color to that of almost a fleecy whiteness. And in spite of the fact that the earth shrank away in size as we steadily approached the moon, I was able, under the most favorable atmospheric conditions, at any time during our transits, to trace with my eyes the delineations or the outlines of the continents and of the larger islands, without the aid of the telescope.