By dint of inventing machinery,
men will end in being eaten up by it! I have always
fancied that the end of the earth will be when some enormous
boiler, heated to three thousand millions of atmospheric
pressure, shall explode and blow up our Globe!"
"And I add that the Americans," said Joe, "will not
have been the last to work at the machine!"
"In fact," assented the doctor, "they are great boiler-makers!
But, without allowing ourselves to be carried away by such
speculations, let us rest content with enjoying the
beauties of this country of the Moon, since we have
been permitted to see it."
The sun, darting his last rays beneath the masses of
heaped-up cloud, adorned with a crest of gold the slightest
inequalities of the ground below; gigantic trees, arborescent
bushes, mosses on the even surface--all had their
share of this luminous effulgence. The soil, slightly undulating,
here and there rose into little conical hills; there
were no mountains visible on the horizon; immense brambly
palisades, impenetrable hedges of thorny jungle, separated
the clearings dotted with numerous villages, and
immense euphorbiae surrounded them with natural
fortifications, interlacing their trunks with the coral-shaped
branches of the shrubbery and undergrowth.
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