第68章

"He is no doubt the author of the papers, and we must hope that he will be able to give us some valuable information.""Beyond a question the documents have originated with him,"assented the lieutenant. "Gallia was the word written at the top of every one of them, and Gallia was the first word uttered by him in our hearing."The astronomer slept on. Meanwhile, the three together had no hesitation in examining his papers, and scrutinizing the figures on his extemporized blackboard. The handwriting corresponded with that of the papers already received; the blackboard was covered with algebraical symbols traced in chalk, which they were careful not to obliterate;and the papers, which consisted for the most part of detached scraps, presented a perfect wilderness of geometrical figures, conic sections of every variety being repeated in countless profusion.

Lieutenant Procope pointed out that these curves evidently had reference to the orbits of comets, which are variously parabolic, hyperbolic, or elliptic.

If either of the first two, the comet, after once appearing within the range of terrestrial vision, would vanish forever in the outlying regions of space;if the last, it would be sure, sooner or later, after some periodic interval, to return.

From the _prima facie_ appearance of his papers, then, it seemed probable that the astronomer, during his sojourn at Formentera, had been devoting himself to the study of cometary orbits; and as calculations of this kind are ordinarily based upon the assumption that the orbit is a parabola, it was not unlikely that he had been endeavoring to trace the path of some particular comet.

"I wonder whether these calculations were made before or after the 1st of January; it makes all the difference," said Lieutenant Procope.

"We must bide our time and hear," replied the count.

Servadac paced restlessly up and down. "I would give a month of my life,"he cried, impetuously, "for every hour that the old fellow goes sleeping on.""You might be making a bad bargain," said Procope, smiling.

"Perhaps after all the comet has had nothing to do with the convulsion that we have experienced.""Nonsense!" exclaimed the captain; "I know better than that, and so do you.

Is it not as clear as daylight that the earth and this comet have been in collision, and the result has been that our little world has been split off and sent flying far into space?"Count Timascheff and the lieutenant looked at each other in silence.

"I do not deny your theory," said Procope after a while.

"If it be correct, I suppose we must conclude that the enormous disc we observed on the night of the catastrophe was the comet itself;and the velocity with which it was traveling must have been so great that it was hardly arrested at all by the attraction of the earth.""Plausible enough," answered Count Timascheff; "and it is to this comet that our scientific friend here has given the name of Gallia."It still remained a puzzle to them all why the astronomer should apparently be interested in the comet so much more than in the new little world in which their strange lot was cast.

"Can you explain this?" asked the count.

"There is no accounting for the freaks of philosophers, you know,"said Servadac; "and have I not told you that this philosopher in particular is one of the most eccentric beings in creation?""Besides," added the lieutenant, "it is exceedingly likely that his observations had been going on for some considerable period before the convulsion happened."Thus, the general conclusion arrived at by the Gallian Academy of Science was this: That on the night of the 31st of December, a comet, crossing the ecliptic, had come into collision with the earth, and that the violence of the shock had separated a huge fragment from the globe, which fragment from that date had been traversing the remote inter-planetary regions.

Palmyrin Rosette would doubtless confirm their solution of the phenomenon.