"Jules Verne. Off on a Comet. WORKS" - читать интересную книгу автора

to Gourbi Island was seven degrees or but little more.
What was it altogether? Was it not less than thirty degrees?
In that latitude, the degree of longitude represents eight
and forty miles. What, then, did it all amount to?
Indubitably, to less than 1,400 miles. So brief a voyage would bring
the _Dobryna_ once again to her starting-point, or, in other words,
would enable her to complete the circumnavigation of the globe.
How changed the condition of things! Previously, to sail from
Malta to Gibraltar by an eastward course would have involved
the passage of the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean,
the Pacific, the Atlantic; but what had happened now?
Why, Gibraltar had been reached as if it had been just at Corfu,
and some three hundred and thirty degrees of the earth's circuit
had vanished utterly.

After allowing for a certain margin of miscalculation, the main fact
remained undeniable; and the necessary inference that Lieutenant Procope
drew from the round of the earth being completed in 1 ,400 miles,
was that the earth's diameter had been reduced by about fifteen
sixteenths of its length.

"If that be so," observed the count, "it accounts for some
of the strange phenomena we witness. If our world has become
so insignificant a spheroid, not only has its gravity diminished,
but its rotary speed has been accelerated; and this affords an
adequate explanation of our days and nights being thus curtailed.
But how about the new orbit in which we are moving?"

He paused and pondered, and then looked at Procope as though
awaiting from him some further elucidation of the difficulty.
The lieutenant hesitated. When, in a few moments, he began
to speak, Servadac smiled intelligently, anticipating the answer
he was about to hear.

"My conjecture is," said Procope, "that a fragment of considerable magnitude
has been detached from the earth; that it has carried with it an envelope
of the earth's atmosphere, and that it is now traveling through the solar
system in an orbit that does not correspond at all with the proper orbit
of the earth."

The hypothesis was plausible; but what a multitude of bewildering
speculations it entailed! If, in truth, a certain mass had been broken
off from the terrestrial sphere, whither would it wend its way?
What would be the measure of the eccentricity of its path?
What would be its period round the sun? Might it not, like a comet,
be carried away into the vast infinity of space? or, on the other hand,
might it not be attracted to the great central source of light and heat,
and be absorbed in it? Did its orbit correspond with the orbit
of the ecliptic? and was there no chance of its ever uniting again
with the globe, from which it had been torn off by so sudden and