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.