It was only too clear.

Right in their very path, a blazing ball of fire had suddenly risen up before their eyes, the pitchy darkness all round it rendering its glare still more blinding.

Its phosphoric coruscation filled the Projectile with white streams of lurid light, tinging the contents with a pallor indescribably ghastly.

The travellers' faces in particular, gleamed with that peculiar livid and cadaverous tinge, blue and yellow, which magicians so readily produce by burning table salt in alcohol.
"_Sacre!_" cried Ardan who always spoke his own language when much excited.

"What a pair of beauties you are! Say, Barbican! What thundering thing is coming at us now ?" "Another bolide," answered Barbican, his eye as calm as ever, though a faint tremor was quite perceptible in his voice.
"A bolide?
Burning _in vacuo_?
You are joking!" "I was never more in earnest," was the President's quiet reply, as he looked through his closed fingers.
He knew exactly what he was saying.