J. T. Maston, who, despite all dictates of
prudence, had kept in advance of the mass, was pitched back 120
feet, shooting like a projectile over the heads of his
fellow-citizens. Three hundred thousand persons remained deaf
for a time, and as though struck stupefied.
As soon as the first effects were over, the injured, the deaf,
and lastly, the crowd in general, woke up with frenzied cries.
"Hurrah for Ardan! Hurrah for Barbicane! Hurrah for Nicholl!"
rose to the skies. Thousands of persons, noses in air, armed
with telescopes and race-glasses, were questioning space,
forgetting all contusions and emotions in the one idea of
watching for the projectile. They looked in vain! It was no
longer to be seen, and they were obliged to wait for telegrams
from Long's Peak. The director of the Cambridge Observatory was
at his post on the Rocky Mountains; and to him, as a skillful
and persevering astronomer, all observations had been confided.
But an unforeseen phenomenon came in to subject the public
impatience to a severe trial.
The weather, hitherto so fine, suddenly changed; the sky became
heavy with clouds. It could not have been otherwise after the
terrible derangement of the atmospheric strata, and the dispersion
of the enormous quantity of vapor arising from the combustion of
200,000 pounds of pyroxyle!
On the morrow the horizon was covered with clouds-- a thick and
impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily
extended as far as the Rocky Mountains.
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