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have surpassed.

But long before either song was ended, all three broke out into a
dance, wild, insensate, furious, delirious, paroxysmatical. No Orphic
festivals on Mount Cithaeron ever raged more wildly. No Bacchic revels
on Mount Parnassus were ever more corybantic. Diana, demented by the
maddening example, joined in the orgie, howling and barking frantically
in her turn, and wildly jumping as high as the ceiling of the
Projectile. Then came new accessions to the infernal din. Wings suddenly
began to flutter, cocks to crow, hens to cluck; and five or six
chickens, managing to escape out of their coop, flew backwards and
forwards blindly, with frightened screams, dashing against each other
and against the walls of the Projectile, and altogether getting up as
demoniacal a hullabaloo as could be made by ten thousand bats that you
suddenly disturbed in a cavern where they had slept through the winter.

Then the three companions, no longer able to withstand the overpowering
influence of the mysterious force that mastered them, intoxicated, more
than drunk, burned by the air that scorched their organs of respiration,
dropped at last, and lay flat, motionless, senseless as dabs of clay, on
the floor of the Projectile.

[Illustration: A DEMONIACAL HULLABALOO.]




CHAPTER VIII.

THE NEUTRAL POINT.


What had taken place? Whence proceeded this strange intoxication whose
consequences might have proved so disastrous? A little forgetfulness on
Ardan's part had done the whole mischief, but fortunately M'Nicholl was
able to remedy it in time.

After a regular fainting spell several minutes long, the Captain was the
first man to return to consciousness and the full recovery of his
intellectual faculties. His first feelings were far from pleasant. His
stomach gnawed him as if he had not eaten for a week, though he had
taken breakfast only a few hours before; his eyes were dim, his brain
throbbing, and his limbs shaking. In short, he presented every symptom
usually seen in a man dying of starvation. Picking himself up with much
care and difficulty, he roared out to Ardan for something to eat. Seeing
that the Frenchman was unable or unwilling to respond, he concluded to
help himself, by beginning first of all to prepare a little tea. To do
this, fire was necessary; so, to light his lamp, he struck a match.

But what was his surprise at seeing the sulphur tip of the match blazing
with a light so bright and dazzling that his eyes could hardly bear it!
Touching it to the gas burner, a stream of light flashed forth equal in
its intensity to the flame of an electric lamp. Then he understood it
all in an instant. The dazzling glare, his maddened brain, his gnawing
stomach--all were now clear as the noon-day Sun.

"The oxygen!" he cried, and, suddenly stooping down and examining the
tap of the air apparatus, he saw that it had been only half turned off.
Consequently the air was gradually getting more and more impregnated

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