Off on a Comet Book 1 Chapter 7

**Richard Kilmer** (0:01)
Book 1 Chapter 7 of Off on a Comet. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by Richard Kilmer. Off on a Comet by Jules Verne. Translated by Anonymous.
Book 1 Chapter 7 Ben Zoof Watches in Vain In a few minutes, the Governor General and his population were asleep. The GORBY being in ruins, they were obliged to put up with the best accommodations they could find in the adjacent erection. It must be owned that the captain's slumbers were by no means sound. He was agitated by the consciousness that he had hitherto been unable to account for his strange experiences by any reasonable theory.
Though far from being advanced in the knowledge of natural philosophy, he had been instructed, to a certain degree, in its elementary principles, and by an effort of memory, he managed to recall some general laws which he had almost forgotten. He could understand that an altered inclination of the earth's axis with regard to the elliptic would introduce a change of position in the cardinal points and bring about a displacement of the sea. But the hypotheses entirely failed to account either for the shortening of the days or for the diminution in the pressure of the atmosphere. He felt that his judgment was utterly baffled.
His only remaining hope was that the Chain of Marvels was not yet complete and that something farther might throw some light upon the mystery. Ben Zoof's first care on the following morning was to provide a good breakfast. To use his own phrase, he was as hungry as the whole population of three million Algerians, of whom he was the representative, and he must have enough to eat.
The catastrophe which had overwhelmed the country had left a dozen eggs uninjured, and upon these, with a good dish of his famous couscous, he hoped that he and his master might have a sufficiently substantial meal. The stove was ready for use, the copper skillet was as bright as hands could make it, and the beads of condensed steam upon the surface of a large stone, alcoraza, gave evidence that it was supplied with water. Ben Zoof at once lighted a fire, singing all the time, according to his want, a snatch of an old military refrain. Ever on the lookout for fresh phenomena, Captain Servadac watched the preparations with a curious eye. It struck him that perhaps the air, in its strangely modified condition, would fail to supply sufficient oxygen, and that the stove, in consequence, might not fulfill its function. But no, the fire was lighted, just as usual, and fanned into vigor by Ben Zoof applying his mouth in lieu of bellows, and a bright flame started up from the midst of the twigs and coal. The skillet was duly set upon the stove, and Ben Zoof was prepared to wait a while for the water to boil.
Taking up the eggs, he was surprised to notice that they hardly weighed more than they would if they had been mere shells. But he was still more surprised when he saw that before the water had been two minutes over the fire, it was at full boil. By jingo, he exclaimed, a precious hot fire. Servadac reflected. It cannot be that the fire is hotter, he said. The peculiar arity must be in the water. And, taking down a centigrade thermometer which hung upon the wall, he plunged it into the skillet. Instead of one hundred degrees, the instrument registered only sixty-six degrees. Take my advice, Ben Zoof he said. Leave your eggs in the saucepan a good quarter of an hour. Boil them hard? That will never do, objected the orderly. You will not find them hard, my good fellow. Trust me, we shall be able to dip our sippets into the yokes easily enough. The captain was quite right in his conjecture that this new phenomena was caused by a diminution in the pressure of the atmosphere. Water boiling at a temperature of sixty-six degrees was itself an evidence that the column of air above the earth's surface had become reduced by one-third of its altitude. The identical phenomena would have occurred at the summit of a mountain thirty-five thousand feet high, and had Servadac been in possession of a barometer, he would have immediately discovered the fact that only now for the first time, as a result of experiment, revealed itself to him, a fact moreover, which accounted for the compression of the blood vessels which both he and Ben Zoof had experienced, as well as for the attenuation of their voices and their accelerated breathing. And yet, he argued with himself, if our encampment has been projected to so great an elevation, how is it that the sea remains at its proper level?