What, therefore, must have been my
      amazement, on awakening from a brief and disturbed slumber, on
      the morning of this day, the seventeenth, at finding the surface
      beneath me so suddenly and wonderfully augmented in volume, as to
      subtend no less than thirty-nine degrees in apparent angular
      diameter! I was thunderstruck! No words can give any adequate
      idea of the extreme, the absolute horror and astonishment, with
      which I was seized possessed, and altogether overwhelmed. My
      knees tottered beneath me—my teeth chattered—my hair started up
      on end. ‘The balloon, then, had actually burst!’ These were the
      first tumultuous ideas that hurried through my mind: ‘The balloon
      had positively burst!—I was falling—falling with the most
      impetuous, the most unparalleled velocity! To judge by the
      immense distance already so quickly passed over, it could not be
      more than ten minutes, at the farthest, before I should meet the
      surface of the earth, and be hurled into annihilation!’ But at
      length reflection came to my relief. I paused; I considered; and
      I began to doubt. The matter was impossible. I could not in any
      reason have so rapidly come down. Besides, although I was
      evidently approaching the surface below me, it was with a speed
      by no means commensurate with the velocity I had at first so
      horribly conceived. This consideration served to calm the
      perturbation of my mind, and I finally succeeded in regarding the
      phenomenon in its proper point of view. In fact, amazement must
      have fairly deprived me of my senses, when I could not see the
      vast difference, in appearance, between the surface below me, and
      the surface of my mother earth. The latter was indeed over my
      head, and completely hidden by the balloon, while the moon—the
      moon itself in all its glory—lay beneath me, and at my feet. “The stupor and surprise produced in my mind by this
      extraordinary change in the posture of affairs was perhaps, after
      all, that part of the adventure least susceptible of explanation. For the bouleversement in itself was not only natural and
      inevitable, but had been long actually anticipated as a
      circumstance to be expected whenever I should arrive at that
      exact point of my voyage where the attraction of the planet
      should be superseded by the attraction of the satellite—or, more
      precisely, where the gravitation of the balloon toward the earth
      should be less powerful than its gravitation toward the moon. To
      be sure I arose from a sound slumber, with all my senses in
      confusion, to the contemplation of a very startling phenomenon,
      and one which, although expected, was not expected at the moment. The revolution itself must, of course, have taken place in an
      easy and gradual manner, and it is by no means clear that, had I
      even been awake at the time of the occurrence, I should have been
      made aware of it by any internal evidence of an inversion—that is
      to say, by any inconvenience or disarrangement, either about my
      person or about my apparatus. “It is almost needless to say that, upon coming to a due sense of
      my situation, and emerging from the terror which had absorbed
      every faculty of my soul, my attention was, in the first place,
      wholly directed to the contemplation of the general physical
      appearance of the moon. It lay beneath me like a chart—and
      although I judged it to be still at no inconsiderable distance,
      the indentures of its surface were defined to my vision with a
      most striking and altogether unaccountable distinctness. The
      entire absence of ocean or sea, and indeed of any lake or river,
      or body of water whatsoever, struck me, at first glance, as the
      most extraordinary feature in its geological condition. Yet,
      strange to say, I beheld vast level regions of a character
      decidedly alluvial, although by far the greater portion of the
      hemisphere in sight was covered with innumerable volcanic
      mountains, conical in shape, and having more the appearance of
      artificial than of natural protuberance. The highest among them
      does not exceed three and three-quarter miles in perpendicular
      elevation; but a map of the volcanic districts of the Campi
      Phlegraei would afford to your Excellencies a better idea of
      their general surface than any unworthy description I might think
      proper to attempt. The greater part of them were in a state of
      evident eruption, and gave me fearfully to understand their fury
      and their power, by the repeated thunders of the miscalled
      meteoric stones, which now rushed upward by the balloon with a
      frequency more and more appalling. “April 18th. To-day I found an enormous increase in the moon’s
      apparent bulk—and the evidently accelerated velocity of my
      descent began to fill me with alarm. It will be remembered, that,
      in the earliest stage of my speculations upon the possibility of
      a passage to the moon, the existence, in its vicinity, of an
      atmosphere, dense in proportion to the bulk of the planet, had
      entered largely into my calculations; this too in spite of many
      theories to the contrary, and, it may be added, in spite of a
      general disbelief in the existence of any lunar atmosphere at
      all. But, in addition to what I have already urged in regard to
      Encke’s comet and the zodiacal light, I had been strengthened in
      my opinion by certain observations of Mr. Schroeter, of
      Lilienthal. He observed the moon when two days and a half old, in
      the evening soon after sunset, before the dark part was visible,
      and continued to watch it until it became visible. The two cusps
      appeared tapering in a very sharp faint prolongation, each
      exhibiting its farthest extremity faintly illuminated by the
      solar rays, before any part of the dark hemisphere was visible. Soon afterward, the whole dark limb became illuminated. This
      prolongation of the cusps beyond the semicircle, I thought, must
      have arisen from the refraction of the sun’s rays by the moon’s
      atmosphere. I computed, also, the height of the atmosphere (which
      could refract light enough into its dark hemisphere to produce a
      twilight more luminous than the light reflected from the earth
      when the moon is about 32° from the new) to be 1,356 Paris feet;
      in this view, I supposed the greatest height capable of
      refracting the solar ray, to be 5,376 feet.